No thanks, not under those conditions
Yes, a chicken is just a chicken
I am a vegetarian
Neely I've removed the link to the Live Fast Die Young You Tube video you had in your original post. It could be especially disturbing to some of the younger members here at LitNet, which is an all-ages site. If anybody really needs to see it they can just search You Tube.
Although there may be rare exceptions, as there are to every rule, it is unlikely that anyone in the US knows what real hunger is. What is evident, is that there is far too much food being eaten as the amount of obesity testifies. This is true also of the UK and the rest of Europe.Originally Posted by altheskeptic
One of the things that particularly annoys me is when people say " Thank God it's lunchtime, I'm starving." I would never say that and I have never been hungry. I don't make an issue of eating except to eat what is necessary.
Last edited by Emil Miller; 11-15-2010 at 04:10 AM.
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
Yes that’s true you can’t kill them yourself, but you can send them of or get a licence or whatever. Anyway, I think if I was to raise chickens (which doesn’t look likely) then I would raise them to lay – much more value I think in getting a bird that can lay eggs for you for up to 8 years than the one meal.Neely I meant you can't slaughter the bird in your house, or on your property without special licence, (well I think farms can??) but I know you can't do it in a normal house.
Good point, vegetarians have a good argument, which is why I feel it is important to at least make sure the animal has had as much of a natural life as possible before it is killed. That and I just don’t fancy ill-bred, scraggy food.That is a point scher, just how humane, is it really to eat the animal no matter how it is killed? or has lived...
Well OK I suppose. I’ve shown the video to my 7 year old but that’s just me. It does raise the point that if people can’t even look at the farming methods whether they should go out and buy the chicken/meat which feeds those very methods – see no evil and all that. However, as you say, the links are readily available everywhere and it is up to individuals to seek out and make their own decisions if they can be bothered that is. But OK, thanks for letting me know.Neely I've removed the link to the Live Fast Die Young You Tube video you had in your original post. It could be especially disturbing to some of the younger members here at LitNet, which is an all-ages site. If anybody really needs to see it they can just search You Tube.
Interesting story, great stuff. You make a good point actually about farmers wanting to do the best they can, this is certainly true. The power of the supermarkets is often the problem in forcing the price down, even to the point of putting farmers out of business. I work with an ex-cattle farmer who was likewise driven out of business because the profit is just not there. As was pointed out, the big move in the 60s to supermarkets has affected our landscape and eating habits greatly.I raise my own chicken and the conditions are much different that those of industrial chicken farms. I know, I used to be a poultry farmer. But, I ate those birds when I raised them. Something to remember is that at times conditions on a farm can get quiet bad. During bad weather or times of illness living conditions are not optimal. That's also true with free range birds, just on a much smaller scale. Industrial farmers want happy, healthy birds because they get fatter and bring more money.
I'm probably more grossed out by what happens to the chicken after it's killed. Chicken purchased from the grocery store has water added and it makes it gross. The poultry plant can add up to 8% water weight (unless that has recently changed). That's why when you buy chicken it's all juicy and you can squeeze water out of it when it's raw. When you cook in in a pan you end up with chicken swimming in a lot of water. Real chicken that you've killed yourself doesn't feel at all like that. It feels clean, like game meat. It also has a better flavor, in my opinion. Additionally, my chickens lay eggs with dark orange yolks with a rich flavor. Market eggs have a light yellow yolk and no flavor.
I agree with Brian. The market for chicken in this country and the US is not bred for the starving populous. Chicken is produced so cheaply now that it is a throwaway product and I think this is wrong.I can tell by reading these posts that most people on this forum have never been hungry. I mean really hungry, as in not knowing where the next meal is coming from and not having eaten for a while. I am sure this would change your mind about foods. Now, I am no defending the way some livestock is treated in some commercial farms, but it does make it affordable to people who could not afford it otherwise. To think that someone that has less money has no concern for the ethical treatment of animals is just wrong. If it comes between giving a chicken a good life or my children not eating, the chicken is going to lose.
Certainly, it is more expensive to buy meat from animals that have been raised properly and the problem is just there – you can’t meet an ethical decision with a financial one head on, there’s going to be a difference in price. The way around this for me is to not to eat cheap meat every day or every other day, instead, I treat it as a once a week, once every two weeks affair and pay more for the better stuff. You also need to get as much from what you kill as you can. Actually, I will have managed to make about 7 individual meals from the chicken I had yesterday, so that works out at less than a pound (£1) per portion, which I don't think is too bad. I agree, just because someone has less money that it doesn’t mean they have no ethical conscious (though you should tell that to the stores around my end of town, see original post) but there are ways, like the one above, around this for sure.
At the end of the day people must make their own decisions and that is perfectly fine, but this is a lot harder if people don’t have a clue where food comes from or under what circumstances they might have been raised in.
I was veggie from age 14 to 25, then vegan for a month, then a meat-eater for the past few years! Recently i've decided to cut back to just free range chicken and no other meat - just veggie the rest of time. I buy 1 or 2 chickens a week and use them to make soup so i get at least 6 meals out of each chicken, which is well worth the £7/£8 cost for the bird.
I don't think this argument is valid at all. You don't have to eat chicken (or any meat) to live! In fact, fruit, veg, pulses, rice, pasta etc. are way cheaper than even the cheapest meat so you could feed you kids that instead.
T for Tea.
Thanks for voting folks, interesting reading. With this and my Free Range vs "standard" Egg poll, at the moment Litnet is officially a chicken friendly site with 70% of people voting for free range/organic produce, over the other method. Keep voting if you have not done, thank you.
For me, it just comes down to the fact that I straight-up can't afford a fancy organic chicken that had a nice childhood. I'm a student. I eat what costs the least.
__________________
"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
I can understand your thinking and at first glance it appears you have a solid argument, however there are ways around this which makes buying organic, not only what I strongly consider the only acceptable option, but also to make it definitely affordable and great value for money.
If, instead of buying chicken from fast food outlets, buying chicken breasts from supermarkets, paying the extra mark-up on chicken from a range of outlets such as bars/pubs/cafes, chicken in readymade pasta pots or a range of other ready meals, you buy the whole free range chicken you can see yourself right in chicken for the entire week! If you buy a whole free range chicken, you will have enough meat for about 6 or 7 individual meals and you can use the leftovers for the best chicken stock which can be made into bucket load of great tasting soup.
Costs of chicken are obviously going to vary from place to place, but I paid £6.75 for a good size organic bird at Sainsbury’s Sunday (and I’m still got chicken pasta for lunch today). This works out at around 80-90p per delicious chicken potion, not even considering the soup I can make with what is left, which can see the whole family right in lovely homemade soup for several meals. (I think that this is pretty good value even for rip-off Britain, you could probably get it at a cheaper price.)
Not only will all this save you money, but you will be eating better quality chicken from a bird that has been reared in good, healthy conditions.
Article in today's Independent on how to make the most from a full chicken.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...k-2136930.html
Last edited by LitNetIsGreat; 11-18-2010 at 06:23 PM.
You don't want to give life or better living conditions to something and then kill it. That's ironic.....maybe you want to feel less guilty of eating a dead animal.
I don't fully understand your meaning. I'm reading that you don't think it is necessary to give animals which you are going to eat good living conditions. People, like me, who want good (normal) living conditions for animals are therefore possibly doing so in order to feel less guilty about eating them. If this is your meaning (it could be read the other way) then I can assure you that it is not my thinking.
Certainly however, I do think that it is a big thing to have an animal killed for food which is why I eat meat sparingly. My belief that animals raised for food should be given good (normal) living conditions (the same as any animal) does not arise out of guilt, merely it arises out of not wanting to further animal abuse.
I don't understand the argument that just because you are going to eat an animal it is OK to mentally and physically abuse them beforehand. This is the difference. Anybody who doesn't think that mass produced factory farming of animals and/or in caged egg production is abuse, should seek out the relevant information and videos (conditions which are deemed too horrible to view on this forum by the moderators).
As it happens, my wife would probably agree with you. She says that "a chicken is just a chicken" and we shouldn't care about the conditions that they are kept in. I ask her if it is OK to abuse pets; dogs, cats etc, and she says "no". So, for information, I ask her to draw me a list of animals that are suitable to be abused, and a list of animals that are not suitable to be abused, and she walks away uninterested and avoids the question...
The real joke is that I am not even an "animal lover" or any sort of "activist" at all (even if I am sounding like one). Simply, I believe in the notion that we as human beings should respect each other, animals and the things around us. Plain and simple. Intense factory farming and caged egg production does not live up to this notion, far from it.
Last edited by LitNetIsGreat; 11-20-2010 at 07:07 PM.
My point was similar to what Scher said.
I was referring to the act of wanting to give life and then taking it away. That is ironic. Killing is also a form of cruelty.
I wasn't trying to say that it's ok to abuse or it doesn't matter what living conditions animals live in...but, if I want something to live, I wouldn't want to kill it....
Yes, OK sorry, I did think you could have meant that, your post could have been read both ways.
See, what is annoying about this country (or at least one of the things from a very, very long list) is the way people can be ridiculously two-faced and, well, quite utterly stupid. Mrs Neely told me this morning in conversation, that an advertisement for a department store has been banned following thousands of complaints. I haven't seen it because I don't watch adverts, but apparently the complaints were directed against one particular scene where a boy puts a Christmas stocking on a dog kennel which is outside. So thousands of these morons have phoned in to complain that it is cruel to keep dogs outside in winter in a kennel (despite the fact that it is a damn advert) and they were worried about the dog (for god's sake) so the department chain have been forced to drop the advert.
All of this just leaves me shaking my head and re-newed in my ambitions to try and avoid all such stories like this, adverts, TV, the papers, the general public - but it also leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth because no doubt many of these are the same people who are furthering animal abuse, knowingly or unknowingly, by purchasing caged eggs or eating chickens/other meat which have been raised in torturous conditions. Welcome to the UK.
Oh, I've just stumbled across this article about chickens that might be of interest to folk. I was just quickly Googling looking for a bit of information about the chicken brain and I thought it made interesting reading.
Incidentally, I looked at the Litnet votes for this thread and the free range egg one and, although you can't make much of an assessment based on just a few votes, it did indicate that more people buy, or are willing to buy, free range eggs than free range chickens. I forget the stats (I make a lousy scientist I think) but I thought that was interesting - it was nearly double in number. Anyway, the article below via the link suggests that chickens have some sort of advanced cognitive ability. I could tell you a story my grandad told me about a chicken once but I'll leave that for another day...keep 'em curious...(besides I'm really tired).
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/s...05/1415178.htmChickens worry about the future
Jennifer Viegas
Chickens don't just live in the present, but can anticipate the future and demonstrate self-control, something previously attributed only to humans and other primates, according to a recent study.
The finding, published in the current issue of the journal Animal Behaviour, suggests that domestic fowl (Gallus gallus domesticus) are intelligent creatures that might worry.
"An animal with no awareness of 'later' may not be able to predict the end of an unpleasant experience, such as pain, rendering [the pain] all-encompassing," says lead author Dr Siobhan Abeyesinghe.
"On the other hand, an animal that can anticipate an event might benefit from cues to aid prediction, but may also be capable of expectations rendering it vulnerable to thwarting, frustration and pre-emptive anxiety.
"The types of mental ability the animal possesses therefore dictate how they should best be managed and what we might be able to do to minimise psychological stress."
Neely,
I went ahead and voted for a chicken is a chicken, though I have nothing against free range "yard bird" (that's what we called it growing up on the southside of Dallas).
I'm just another one among the oblivious millions, who run up to the nearest store and pick up a package of "Pilgrims Pride" without giving it a second thought.
You may relish in a small victory though; I will at least give it a second thought next time I head to the market.
Gilliatt
Interesting article. They can also be trained to do tricks, much like a dog. It's amazing what a chicken will do for a hotdog.
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