The rotisserie chicken at Costco is legend. For $5, you get a delicious bird. To eat, I mean. Not to give to the kids as a beloved pet. Not to cuddle. Not to take on long walks in the park. To eat. We eat the chickens. And they are delicious. Want to know about their life before they get put on a spit?
But an animal rights group called Mercy for Animals recently sent an investigator under cover to work on a farm in Nebraska that produces millions of these chickens for Costco, and customers might lose their appetite if they saw inside a chicken barn.
“It’s dimly lit, with chicken poop all over,” said the worker, who also secretly shot video there. “It’s like a hot humid cloud of ammonia and poop mixed together.”
And if that’s not horrifying enough, these aren’t chickens as god made them, but chickens as a lab made them.
Scientists have created what are sometimes called “exploding chickens” that put on weight at a monstrous clip, about six times as fast as chickens in 1925. The journal Poultry Science once calculated that if humans grew at the same rate as these chickens, a 2-month-old baby would weigh 660 pounds.
The chickens grow enormous breasts, because that’s the meat consumers want, so the birds’ legs sometimes splay or collapse. Some topple onto their backs and then can’t get up. Others spend so much time on their bellies that they sometimes suffer angry, bloody rashes called ammonia burns; these are a poultry version of bed sores.
“They’re living on their own feces, with no fresh air and no natural light,” said Leah Garcés, the president of Mercy for Animals. “I don’t think it’s what a Costco customer expects.”
I don’t think this is what Costco customers expect either. Or think about. Or want to think about. I know I don’t. That’s why I don’t think about it and won’t the next time I eat a delicious rotisserie chicken from Costco.
Like most people, I abhor cruelty to animals. I don’t know the fiscal logistics of chicken selling, but I suspect there will be additional costs associated with giving millions of chickens more humane (note that word, not chickane, but humane) living conditions, but the human part of me projects the sense that the birds are living creatures and can feel joy and pain, and that it’s wrong to inflict needless pain on anything, even a chicken.
Torture a single chicken in your backyard, and you risk arrest. Abuse tens of millions of them? Why, that’s agribusiness.
For a long time now, it’s been clear that the raising of animals for food, for human consumption, is ugly. Whether it’s uglier than it needs to be is a fair question, and the possibility that chickens, not to mention cows, lamb and pigs, could be raised with a less suffering suggests that the business side of agriculture has become so callous, so mindlessly cruel, that it could be done without significant financial consequences with a little effort.
But then, after you’ve slaughtered your first million animals, it kinda sucks the empathy out of you. If you view critters as living, suffering entities, it’s hard to kill them en masse and then ship them off to the rotisserie ovens. At that point, can you still muster any feeling about their living conditions when their dying conditions are pretty much mandatory or they won’t be available on the supermarket shelves?
Garcés wants Costco to sign up for the “Better Chicken Commitment,” an industry promise to work toward slightly better standards for industrial agriculture. For example, each adult chicken would get at least one square foot of space, there would be some natural light and the company would avoid breeds that put on weight that the legs can’t support.
Burger King, Popeyes, Chipotle, Denny’s and some 200 other food companies have embraced the Better Chicken Commitment, but grocery chains generally have not, with the exception of Whole Foods.
Will this make the lives of chickens better? It would if chickens were people, because this is how people would feel if they lived like chickens. It would certainly seem far less cruel than what now happens in massive agribusiness chicken production facilities. What would the chickens think about it? Not being a chicken, that’s not for me to say. We have a tendency to personify creatures, to impute human thought and feelings, emotions and understanding, to animals. But they’re not us, just as we’re not them.
And not to get all nihilist about chickens, but the point of birthing and raising them isn’t to give them a happy, fulfilling life.
In one respect, Costco has shown real leadership. The most barbaric part of the chicken industry is the traditional slaughtering process, which results in some birds being boiled alive. To its credit, Costco has moved toward a far more humane approach called controlled atmosphere stunning, so that birds are stunned before being shackled to the conveyor belt that takes them to their deaths.
For anyone who has cooked lobsters, bottom-feeding crustaceans that were once considered such garbage that they were fed to prisoners rather than dipped in clarified butter, you drop them live into boiling water. In that instant before going into the pot, the otherwise docile lobsters start to flap, to flail. They seem to know the end is nigh and fight. A few minutes later, they’re bright red and delicious.
If you can’t deal with any of this, you can always go vegan, or whatever other flavor of artisanal eater you prefer. But people are carnivores, and Costco chickens are delicious and astoundingly inexpensive, so that pretty much anyone can afford and enjoy one. You know who doesn’t care?
Many birds died, and being eaten by a coyote wasn’t such a pleasant way to go, either.
Nature is cruel and has no feelings about it either way. That doesn’t make needless suffering any more palatable, but in the end, we’re going to eat the chickens anyway.
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This is superbly random.
I’m trying to expand my brand from typos to random.
Such chickanery.
Not to be pedantic, (ok, I am) but people are omnivores. Cats are carnivores.
I’m a humanitarian, LY.
Never argue with a humanitarian.
Freezing the lobster for 15-30 mins should painlessly kill them or at least sedate them. The meat shouldn’t be affected by the quick freeze. Otherwise you can shove a knife through its noggin before tossing it in the pot.
It’s too early for me to be hungry.
As any civilized person knows, you hold lobster races to see which one goes in the pot first. If they’re stunned by freezing, they don’t stand a chance.
As for putting a knife through their heads, do you think that makes the lobsters happier?
I’ll get one Friday and ask him.
Friday? Will he go quietly or will he Wigle?
Someday, I hope we move beyond such things.
Why do you hate rotisserie chicken?
It’s most likely not the reaction you were hoping for, but this made me wish (albeit not for the first time) that we had a Costco around here.
I also try not to think about where the chicken comes from. I don’t understand the restaurants that actually name their chickens “Alfredo” and so forth. If I’m going to eat the chicken, or even portions of it, I really don’t care to know its name.
Pops, I don’t come here to have to think about slaughterhouses. Last time I thought deeply about this shit I went vegetarian for years. Please don’t do this to me again. And I still haven’t forgiven you for taking me to a damn hog farm as a “learning experience”. Pigs screaming still appear in my nightmares. And that smell. Thanks.
I’d like to hear the chicken I’m about to eat wasn’t packed in a lightless facility and genetically modified so that it spends its short life clawing about in its own shit getting lovely sores from it. It’s not about the chickens, really, it’s about my feelings. If you aren’t going to lie to me and tell me the chicken was happy, just don’t say anything.
PK, that was not what we meant when we tried to teach you not to tell anyone to “squeal like a pig.”
What’s so special about chicken torture? Everyone knows cows get killed with poison blow darts. Pigs get done in with arrows at a distance. Most fish get dropped from a height. If they want it to be humane, do it the human way: heart attacks and roadkill.
And knock it off with Costco. Everyone knows Publix makes the best chicken and those are killed by cooking.
At least you didn’t say Piggly Wiggly.
I am going to relate personal observations. I will also diverge slightly from the host’s main point. I am prepared for the inevitable lashing.
There is a distinction to be made between humane slaughter and humane husbandry. The issues are frequently conflated. Our host and several commenters have already done this. Most states address the slaughter aspect, via statute, fairly well. Husbandry is what’s at issue. The statutes in existence are concerned with minimizing disease transmission and taint to the meat. Disease and taint is managed mostly via vitamins and anti-biotics during the animals existence. To a lesser extent, it is managed, via industry best practices in husbandry. The statutes and the best practices don’t address the psychological welfare of the animal and its impact on the meat. This is the practical consideration, and it runs hand in hand with the ethical consideration.
It is generally accepted by large animal zoologists and animal behaviorists that animals have a psyche, even chickens. I raise egg laying chickens in my garden(for eleven years running). They have personalities, feelings, friendships and even exhibit empathy. People who aren’t around chickens or study them wouldn’t know or appreciate this. I have a friend who raises “meat chickens” or “broilers” in his backyard. He slaughters them at seven to eight weeks. His backyard chickens are slimmer than the factory chickens on slaughter day. As chicken existence goes, these meat chickens have a brief but pleasant life in his backyard. The meat tastes does taste different. How much is diet and how much is habitat, I don’t know. Better or worse flavor is a matter of personal judgement. But I have no qualms, ethically, about eating his dead chickens. I never eat a broiler at the grocery store. Humane captivity, in the style my friend engages, would raise the cost of chicken. I don’t know how much.
Reframing the issue slightly, are you willing to believe that chickens have feelings(or cows or pigs for that matter)? If you don’t, fine, that’s the end of the conversation. If you do, how much more are you willing to pay for an animal that had a better existence before it was slaughtered. Personally, I would be willing to pay a lot more, probably three to five times more for meat that had a better existence whilst it lived.
I appreciate your distinction between humane slaughter and humane husbandry, but I call bullshit. You can’t have it both ways by a rhetorical distinction. If you’re being humane (that word, again), be humane. If not, then don’t try to hide behind a distinction without a difference.
As for your willingness to pay “probably three to five times more for meat that had a better existence whilst it lived,” how many poor humans would you be willing to go hungry for your warm and fuzzy chickie feelz?
Calling bullshit doesn’t make it bullshit. The distinction is not rhetorical. Husbandry and slaughter are distinct occupations by any definition, legal, cultural, or lexical. Your second paragraph is a non-sequitur since I am not advocating a policy prescription, merely posing a question and expressing a preference. Even if your second paragraph followed, meat consumption is not a necessary precondition to good nutrition or long life. About a billion and half people live perfectly healthy lives with no meat consumption whatsoever.
If you think those frankenbirds taste good, you have been eating too much bad food. Try eating real food for a few weeks; you will never go back. There’s a reason why free range chicken is more expensive, and it’s not because people care so much about the chicken’s happiness.
I’ve had free range. They’re fine, but I don’t taste any difference. Have you ever had a Costco rotisserie chicken?
I used to eat bad food, and back then I thought that Costco chickens were excellent. Not only did they taste perfectly fine, they are so much bigger than those scrawny little free range chickens! And so much cheaper! What’s not to like?
It was only after eating real food for a few weeks that I started to notice a difference.
You shop at Costo? Ew.
We can’t all fit into Whole Food at once, Jake.
I know it’s a bit late in the day, but…
We don’t have to give chickens a lux life like that of a french poodle residing on the gold coast of L.I., however we could stop torturing them. They are sentient beings. Being humane toward animals is an ancient concept. Acc’g to kashruth chicken are to be slaughtered in a way so they do not run around decapitated which is considered cruel. Animals were also to be given the sabbath as a day of rest. FL is overrun with wild boar. They should be hunted and killed for food.
I’m not sure that referring to kosher dicta is likely to be persuasive.
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