Undercover audio of a Tyson employee reveals “freerange” chicken is meaningless | Hacker News Reader

Undercover audio of a Tyson employee reveals “freerange” chicken is meaningless

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62 pointspaulpauper32 comments

I’ve raised and “processed” [read slaughtered] my own a couple of times. As far as I can tell, there really isn’t anyway for a chicken to have a “happy death”. It’s all pretty gruesome. Lots of potential for blood splatter, I feel like a horror movie.

For vegans and animal rights people, not sure there can be any compromise and their reporting is obviously going to be biased.

Also, practically no one free ranges their meat birds. It’s wasteful energy wise and you want tender meat.

I’m sure Mass factory meat sucks, which is partly why I raise my own and looking into branching out but bugs in chicken food is called… chicken food.

Speaking of which, I also raise mealworms. Their conditions are pretty gruesome and then they either die or I feed them to giant chickens.

Life is cruel but humans first. Factory farming sucks, needs to change. Meat is good for your hormones, brain, bones, muscle, immune system.

All these things I believe true all at once.

> As far as I can tell, there really isn’t anyway for a chicken to have a “happy death”

"Freerange" refers to how they lived, not died.

If you slaughter the chicken appropriately the animal is stunned than killed, you still take a life but suffering is limited.

Does "stunned" mean immobilized or that the animal isn't feeling fear and pain?

It means unconscious. For chickens that can be done as easily as hanging the chicken between your legs by it's feet and swinging it back and forth. Works with small mammals like rabbits and guinea pigs too.

> can be done as easily as hanging the chicken between your legs by it's feet and swinging it back and forth

Uhh.... are you sure??

Apologies for taking so long to come back to you. You're correct, you absolutely should not hold a chicken upside down.

I don't know what I was thinking. The method I mentioned exclusively works on small mammals, think rabbits, hares, guinea pigs.

I've been a vegetarian since age 12 but I have zero problem with small farms raising animals for meat and slaughtering them humanely. Factory farms are awful for the animals, the humans who work in them, and the people who consume the low-quality meat.

I wish concern for a humane death for animals was more prevalent.

I'm vegan and have no problem with you doing what you want. Factory farming does suck. That's why I'm vegan.

"Also, practically no one free ranges their meat birds."

Is this a USA thing? I can go into any UK supermarket and buy a free-range chicken to cook.

The point is it isn't really free range

Free range doesn’t mean the same thing in the USA and in the EU. As always when it comes to food, EU regulations are far more stringent and specify things like minimum time outside, which type of vegetation should cover it and what’s the maximum density of poultry allowed. It’s also controlled quite seriously.

Most people I know who keep chicken do it for the eggs and free range them because it makes for better eggs. The meat is also definitely a lot more tasty than what you get with factory farmed chicken once you do eat them.

Modern factory farming is absolutely awful. I’m still puzzled by how it’s even allowed.

Most poultry where I live is now killed using gas. That’s not very gruesome. It’s still slaughtering however.

When I was a kid I found a 50s book at my grandma's country house that detailed pickling recipes, making preserves, smoking fish and meats and all other things one might need to do at a country house. One of those things was how to slaughter a chicken and I still remember the illustration, hand drawn and very detailed.

Apparently there is an organ at the back of chicken's throat that is saturated with blood, so the technique was to prop the beak open and pierce that "sack" with an awl. The description then explained that this killed the bird instantly and helped containing all the blood inside, keeping things neat and tidy. A cherished childhood memory for me, but perhaps something actionable for you, for the next time? :)

That's harsh! started reading about it and things like suffocating with gas or electrocution baths in addition to that. I wonder why a jolt to the head cow stun-gun style is not used, whether industrial or on private farms. Too difficult for a small animal? But sticking an awl in their mouth doesn't sound too much easier.

Where I live, decapitating the chicken with a hatchet held in the other hand is the norm. The brain dies/falls unconcious within seconds even without stunning.

It is messy if you don't know how to do it, though. If you don't hold it right, the body will happily run off without the head, and it takes ~20 seconds before it dies. If you hold the legs against the chopping block when you do it, it's easy to keep the chicken in place.

They electrocute them, at least they do in Canada. They hang them by their feet on a conveyer belt that dips their head into an electrified water trough.

> you want tender meat.

Not me, I prefer it when the meat is somewhat firm instead of a greasy mess that slides off the bone.

It's hard for me to even believe you have actually raised chickens if you're going to say there's no real difference between factory farming and home slaughtering of poultry.

A chicken coop on a farm with a couple dozen birds has the birds freely roaming around the yard or within a protective fence, getting to eat bugs and scraps of vegetables from the family dinner table. The death is as simple as putting the chicken's neck against a tree stump and swinging a blade. Yes, it's bloody, but it's not an assembly line of birds screaming as they head down a conveyor belt to their death.

There's no filtering machine on a factory farm that filters hundreds of baby chicks in a dozen minutes and sends the male chicks into a blender and the female chicks into the factory.

I have friends that run a free-range chicken farm in northern NSW. The chickens are out in open fields but there is a caravan like trailer they lay eggs in. They move the trailer around to avoid the chickens wearing out the ground. Maremma dogs are used to keep predators away.

You can't buy these eggs in a supermarket as they exclusively go to restaurants.

Does Australia have actual regulations with teeth around the “free range” label, unlike the USA?

We have a standard for advertising but I have no idea if it has teeth. I also have not heard of any court cases about it.

Vertical farms and clean lab-grown proteins are the key!

Unfortunately, this key spells doom for the global chicken population.

Ironically, the push to save the chickens will be what causes their population to plummet towards extinction outside of zoos and the odd house that retains some as pets.

You forgot about eggs and their heavy use in things such as baking. I suppose you can grow an egg in a lab but producing a fully fledged quasi-viable cell is more difficult than a hunk of muscle tissue.

Once vegans take over the world, there will be no reason (and no economic basis) for chickens or cows to exist at all. But there will be less methane emissions and animal suffering.

Come to think of it, the best to live is some place like the Moon that has negligible methane and no animal suffering.

You could probably grow the egg proteins, or a subset, separately easier than growing meat. They already do this for cultured cow milk. They even skip the lactose to make it easier and more digestible. Maybe we’ll be able to buy cultured egg whites and yolks at whatever ratio we want.

Vertical farms? Sure.

Lab-grown proteins? No thank you, I'd rather starve. Same goes for bug-based food. If YOU want to eat them then sure, I won't stop you, but I'll be the old man that keeps repeating that back in my day meat came from farm animals, and I'll beat with my walking stick anyone who tries to feed me ""meat"".

I still think it should be fine to grow your own meat the traditional farming way. Humanity should never lose the knowledge and capability.

Exactly, it's fine to have the option, but for it to completely (or mostly) replace the meat industry? That's a no from me. If you want less carbon emissions there are other, better ways than replacing the way humans fed themselves for millennia. Granted, industrial/processed food is not exactly the same, but still much closer to "real" meat than lab meat.

Meat ag is terrible: pandemic microbe evolution, antibiotic overuse and resistance, climate change, pollution, and dangerous and abusive of undocumented workers who are killed and maimed without any safety net.