Broken apples? Cruel to animals, rotten orchards. Sean Gifford, chief executive of The Humane League UK, explains why he thinks animal abuse is an ongoing problem in the UK’s food industry and why it is necessary there is a ‘strong movement’.
I believe most people want animals to be treated with kindness and respect.
Unfortunately, our good intentions are far from good in reality. In fact, our relationship with animals is one of the most shameful in modern society. More than 90% of chickens raised for meat in the UK are fast-growing ‘broilers’. Also selectively bred to be unusually large, unusually agile, and housed in densely populated coops. That’s more than a billion people thinking, and feeling animals every year. Their rapid and abnormal growth (from birth to discharge in just 35 days) causes them numerous serious health problems such as organ failure. Also lameness, bone deformities, and ammonia burns. , myopathy, and premature death.
The scale of the suffering is astounding. I’ve seen how chickens raised for meat are raised – a sea of sick chickens. Also tens of thousands in a coop, their white plumage tinged brown or scorched by their own droppings. If you line up those billions of chickens, it will circumnavigate the planet 12 times.
Who is responsible for this cruelty?
Part of the answer must be supermarkets, where the Humane League UK estimates more than half of the UK’s chickens are sold. But are the supermarkets themselves or their suppliers to blame? Or are they farmers? Or even individual workers? Broken apples Cruel to animals rotten orchards.
The Frankenchicken family has suffering encoded in their DNA. Their lives were destined to be very scary, long before any laborer or farmer intervened. Therefore, while it may seem that the suppliers are responsible, the people who buy the birds, raise them. Also, send them to slaughter and sell, it is not quite right to say that the responsibility stops with them. When it comes to money, supermarkets have money to spare and supermarkets set the agenda. The major chicken suppliers have been completely transparent that their selection is on demand.
Sisters Food Group
Last year, leading chicken supplier 2 Sisters Food Group welcomed M&S’s transition to the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC). Also, an animal welfare policy that eliminates fast-growing chicken breeds. Providing giving animals with more comfortable space, more light, and less painful treatments.
Later, 2 Sisters Food Group also announced that they are now storing 20% of their total herd according to the BCC standard. In other words, the providers will do what they are told. It is the supermarkets that require the chicken, and the supermarkets are able to defy the cruelty by accepting BCC. That’s not to say the vendors aren’t important. Persons who directly care for animals have an obligation not to intentionally cruelly treat them.
In cases of malice or negligence, as seen in investigations of Lidl suppliers in the UK and Austria, where chickens were crushed by vehicles, no excuses were made. However, supermarkets are often the first to sever ties with their suppliers. Blaming workers and brushing their hands off such incidents.
Supermarkets shouldn’t easily evade blame. Animal abuse incidents are not isolated outbreaks of malice but exist in contexts where animals are not given any value beyond what their carcasses can be sold in the aisles.
Agricultural cruelty is not caused by a few bad apples: garden rot.
Supermarkets are at the helm of this ruthless system, using every power to change it while jealously guarding their bank accounts. Not only is the supermarket’s relationship with its suppliers fractured – but also with the natural world; With animals; the general public and its values. If we are to live up to the label of an “animal-loving nation,” we must fundamentally change the way animals are mistreated in agriculture. It means realizing that farm animals are sentient beings that can feel both pleasure and pain and that their suffering is important. What they face in the warehouses and slaughterhouses of industrial farms goes beyond discomfort and inconvenience; it was pure and simple cruelty and violence.
To combat that, we need a strong, united movement with the unwavering belief that animals deserve better. But to change things, you have to pressure supermarkets to stop selling suffering. They can change the system from a profit-based system to an animal welfare-based system. If supermarkets reform their animal welfare, dominoes that support cruelty could begin to crumble; 바카라사이트as long as animal activists and their supporters are there to promote them.