“The highly mechanized and artificial confines of a typical broiler chicken barn hold between 20,000 and 30,000 meat birds, raised for just seven weeks before going to slaughter. No sunlight, grass, fresh air, or places to dust-bathe—just feed, water, chemicals, and lots of waste: a modern recipe for misery….
“With 30 million beef cattle and 100 million hogs slaughtered each year in the United States, it might come as a surprise that chickens dominate the modern industrial food chain…On average, Americans consume 87 pounds of chicken per year—three times the amount of poultry eaten in the 1960’s (per capita beef consumption is at 66 pounds and pork at 51 pounds). But as former slaughterhouse worker Steven Striffler explains, it’s not just the chickens themselves that suffer intolerably. The sheer speed and monotony of the task requires almost unimaginable mental and physical endurance just to survive a single shift on the disassembly line.”
—CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Facotories, Daniel Imhoff, Editor
