Optimism-of-Yesterday
The story that goes with is a bit of a downer – it’s about the beginning of factory farming – but I wanted to leave you with a happy image for the weekend.
Something I learned from my chicken behavior course: you know today’s meat chickens are mature in six to eight weeks and ready for market, yes? That’s because they’ve bred them (the old fashioned way, generation-to-generation) to be eating machines.
So. Fine. Six weeks of gluttony and out. There are worse lives, even in modern agriculture.
But when you want to make more of these little porkers? You have to raise male and female eating machine chickens to adulthood, without letting them get too obese to function and breed.
That means the parents of these little chubboes are kept strictly to regular chicken rations, making them crazy hungry all the time.
Adult meat birds have the worst escape record of any commercial chicken. Or the best, depending on how you look at it.
Woops! I wanted to leave you with a happy picture. Here’s an adorable fluffy chick I stole off the internet. Have a good weekend!
May 12, 2017 — 9:22 pm
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