youre not going to let me walk away are you Clansman- clearly the use of some amusing emoticons hasn't done the trick
No not at all! I like a good debate!
ok, we're changing direction slightly in that now we're questioning the ethics of the process rather than how its done and the welfare issues around it.
I agree with you 100%, I would love to see table chickens reared more naturally.
we could give them a lot more space, use a slower growing bird which lives longer, allow them outside etc etc
All of these improvements we make to the system would massively increase the cost of the finished bird though.
We're in a catch 22, we currently produce huge amounts of chicken to feed ourselves at a cheap price.
If we reared these birds as we'd all like to then they would become unaffordable to all but the rich.
At that point we just move to another cheaper food source, it can't be done.
I rear Scots Greys, the excess males are eaten, they aren't huge even at a year old but they do for a meal.
I'd hate to sit down and work out exactly what the meal would have cost me, a chicken eats a lot of food in a year.
At a rough guess lets be very conservative and say at least 100g per day thats almost 40Kg in a year so in food alone its cost me at least £18ish for a bird that'll be just over 3-3.5Kg live weight
Thats me doing it at home, by the time you added commercial overheads that bird becomes unaffordable, you can buy a lot of food for what it would cost you.
I do it because I can afford to take the hit on that financially but if I were unable to pay for that food then purely from a nutritional return point of view i'd be miles better off just using the food I give to these birds to make bread etc.
Maybe thats what we need to do, go back to the days when our diet was mainly vegetarian based and any meat, even chicken was a rare treat.
I rear my own turkeys, at Christmas my family all get a large turkey each.
a fresh 20lb+ 'free range' turkey for Christmas will cost you over £100, now I'm not sure many of my family would justify paying that amount of money for a turkey, I'm pretty sure most would just go without.
We're rearing birds commercially as well as we can just now to satisfy the market/price and demand, the moral dilemma of whether we should be doing it is a whole other issue.
The Campylobacter issue is a handling problem not a farm welfare issue, its a gut bacteria which somewhere along the process is being transferred to the carcass.
Campylobacter, same as Salmonella is found everywhere, your dog/cat/budgie/shoes/garden path all have it, I'm quite sure my and everybody else birds probably have it.
We looked for it and we found it, now its a problem, Salmonella was largely ignored until Mrs. Currie proclaimed all eggs were riddled with it!
If we prepare and cook our food properly its not an issue