Always feels like someone is trying to spin reality on me. "What? The birds love it! Instead of living in nature in a part of Africa, they are suffering worldwide to the tune of billions!" Their hard work paid off!
Instead of being painlessly gassed to death like farmed chickens they'll be eaten alive by some predator, or instead of being provided with antibiotics as hatchlings perhaps worms will eat most of their siblings alive before they leave the nest.
Romanticizing factory farming is ridiculous, but so is romanticizing the lives of wild animals.
From a species interaction perspective the farming of animals could be described as mutualism, but humans tend to break all the rules in traditional species interaction models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_interaction#Mutuali...
We're not unique though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%E2%80%93fungus_mutualism
At least wild birds get to make a go of it, the factory birds never had a chance. Some of them are too fat to even walk and never even get to leave their cage.
If I was given the choice I’d choose the life of the wild bird over the caged one any day.
Edit: I personally eat free-range chicken, but this is for aesthetic reasons. I cannot justify why free-range chickens have a better life than those in enclosures, any more than I can justify why a human farmer has a better life than a software developer.
> Some of them are too fat to even walk and never even get to leave their cage.
Would you rather live in a tiny cage stuffed with other people, doing nothing during your short life except eating, or living with a tribe in a jungle/savannah (more or less our natural habitat) ? Remeber you'd not be teached anything, learn no language and wouldn't experience much about the world (its richness) -- the cage is your entire reality. I'd very much prefer the jungle. For the free animal the gruesome death is just an episode to a rich life of hunting, fleeing, nurturing, seeing nature, communcating with others; for the caged one the painless death is just an end to a joyless existence.
That said, I think there are kinds of acceptable compromises... not extremely intensive farming seems reasonable to me. Again, dependent on their ability to experience the world. Chicken seem to have less cognitive experience then cows, for example, so it should be acceptable to not spend as much per individual in controlling their environemnt.
And this line of reasoning suggests a (ethically delicate, but interesting) solution: Should we select (breed) animals for lower cognition, thus making factoring farming acceptable? (or equivalently making acceptable farming practices more efficient) It seems logical. If the animal ultimately has no brain (as weird as that sounds), in principle there doesn't seem to be much difference from lab-growing meat.
So the question if you're going to pose an ethical conundrum isn't to suppose that all 23 billion would otherwise be living happily in the wild, but rather the antinatalists argument that chickens would be happier as a species if they were all dead instead (well, except maybe some low number of millions who'd make it in the wild).
Of course it's rather hard to have that conversation with a chicken. Assigning human motivations to animals of that intelligence doesn't make any sense. Would you rather spend your life as a bird eating trash from a landfill, or take your chances in the open skies?
We know what most humans would pick in that scenario, but we can also see that there's wild seagulls that voluntarily choose to live their whole lives doing not much of anything except eating trash in the same small place, and they're pretty intelligent compared to chickens.
As ethical trolley problems go comparing the intelligence of a single chicken v.s. a single cow doesn't make sense either, as you need a lot more chickens to produce the same amount of meat.
If we're going to suppose some linear no-threshold model of cognition for farm animals we'd thus be better off if we killed 100 human-level intelligence animals if they were so large as to give us the same amount of food as those 23 billion chickens. After all we're killing a lot more humans than that yearly just from exposure to a chicken population that large, nevermind the ethical calculus.
> The majority of poultry (chickens, hens and turkeys) in the UK s are now killed using gas. > UK law states that animals must be killed, not just stunned, using this method.
From the same source, here is the method used most widely due to cut costs:
> Birds are hung upside down by their legs on metal shackles along a moving conveyor belt. > They move along the production line to a stunning water bath; when the bird's head makes contact with the water, an electrical circuit between the water bath and shackle is completed, which stuns the bird. > The conveyor belt then moves the birds to a mechanical neck cutter, which cuts the major blood vessels in the neck. > Live bird shackling causes pain, and hanging birds by their legs is stressful for them.
I was able to find many sources that confirm this just by googling "how are chickens slaughtered." I'm skeptical of PETA and other radical-seeming groups, but I found a source that seems to be pro-chicken that acknowledges this, as well[2]. It says:
> Birds are stunned (rendered unconscious and unaware of pain) and then slaughtered with a quick, single cut to the throat.
However, researching this process reveals many articles about it's ineffectiveness - particularly in the stunning of the birds.
> Brain activity indicates that these animals may be capable of experiencing pain first when they receive a paralyzing electric shock that induces tonic muscle seizures, then when their throats are forced against a sharpened blade. [3]
Furthermore, sometimes the throat-slitting process, too, fails. The next step in the production line is the boiling of the bird carcasses to remove feathers, which means that many birds are boiled alive, hanging upside down from their legs. The Washington post reports the number to be around a million a year in 2013[4].
I always hope that animals are treated humanely, and until very recently I had few qualms with animal products. However, I personally have found that every time I investigate these matters, I am faced with a bleak truth - animals are being tortured constantly, in the millions.
I know you never claimed that all chickens were painlessly gassed, but I feel that dismissing the issue as being more humane than nature (and I agree that nature is brutal) will only deepen the problem.
[1]: https://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/farm/slaughter/fac... [2]: https://www.chickencheck.in/faq/how-chickens-slaughtered-pro... [3]: https://m.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/chickens-slaughtered-consc... (my apologies for a mobile link) [4]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/usda-plan-to-speed-u...