The chicken conundrum
The glare of publicity has been shone on the chicken industry this week and what it has exposed has not been pretty. Farming does not get more industrial than this: 40,000 chickens cooped up in a shed for five weeks, doubling their weight every week – a hatch, catch and dispatch operation that raises questions about everything from animal welfare to food safety.
Chicken is now ubiquitous in people’s diets. The rise in consumption has been dramatic, from 28.6 million animals raised in 1981, to 120, today, including more than 20m exported. As prices have plunged, it has become New Zealanders’ protein of choice. Each of us eats about 20 a year, and that’s tipped to increase. But at what cost?
Chickens are becoming increasingly lame as they become so top-heavy they cannot support their own weight. A British study showed that by the time of slaughter 27.6 per cent of birds showed poor locomotion, and 3.3 per cent were almost unable to walk.
The antibiotic zinc bacitracin is mixed into the daily feed of most meat chickens to stop them picking up the gut disease necrotic enteritis, which is spread through overcrowding. While not regarded as critical to human health, zinc bacitracin is nevertheless seen as important.
The World Health Organisation has slated the use of antibiotics to promote growth and prevent disease in healthy animals because the practice fuels dangerous drug-resistant superbug infections in people. Modern food production methods have led to the proliferation of gastro-intestinal infections such as campylobacter, with New Zealand claiming some of the highest rates in the world.
In New Zealand, poultry feed contains meat and bone meal (MBM) that has been banned in some other countries, because MBM fed to cattle is thought to have been responsible for the spread of mad cow disease.
The consequences of factory farming are coming home to roost, but there’s a lot that can be done to create a more sustainable industry.
At the least, farmers could be nudged to improve the lot of their animals. They could voluntarily sign up to a scheme that adds to basic requirements: better natural light in sheds, a lower stocking density, provision of straw for chickens to scratch around in, or the use of alternative chicken breeds if and when they become available.
Even better, a rigorous certification process could be set up for free range systems. At present companies can make all sorts of claims that are never properly tested with regular audits.
An early test will be the findings of the Advertising Standards Authority over a complaint from animal welfare group Safe regarding a Tegel advertisement promoting its free-range chicken. Safe says the advertisement is ‘‘grossly misleading’’ because in reality only a third of chickens in free-range systems go outdoors.
But change to a more sustainable model will not come cheap. Genuine free-range, organic chicken is much more expensive than that produced by the big companies. Conscious consumers may be able to afford it, but what of the less well off? The counter argument is that the advent of cheap protein has helped fuel the obesity epidemic, especially for devotees of fastfood outlets.
It’s a conundrum that won’t be easily resolved, but that does not mean we should shirk from confronting the issue.