I have chosen to write this research paper on a topic that until recently, I have not really explored in my life. What I would like to inform you about is how farm animals are fairing in our country. Does that sound childish to you? You might think that at first, I could be writing about how pigs love to roll around in the mud, or how cows love to graze in the large open pastures. I could write how chickens run around pecking everything they see on the ground. That’s far from what I’ll be writing about, I will be writing how all of these animals barely ever get to do any of their favorite things. Could you imagine being locked in your room your whole life, but with another group people enough to make it so crowded you cannot even stretch. Being stolen away from your parents almost right after your birth. Can you imagine how your parents would feel? Never being able to see you? They would never see what you would grow up to be, because they would be murdered, and you would be murdered, before you ever get the chance to be anything at all.

Animals can be considered a commodity to humans. We raise them, then we eat them. Oh, I left out the part where we use drugs, inhumane ways of feeding and breeding on the parents, the way we overlook the fact that all the confinement and cruelty causes them psychological disorders, and the part where we torture them their whole life before we kill them. Many animals are contained in inhumane ways. Why should we treat them like this? This isn’t right, many of the things we do to animals lead them to be diseased, and then in turn we disease ourselves. The famous quote, “What goes around, comes around” is a good way to look at it. Why do we continue to treat animals this way? It’s hard to say, but I’m going to explain to you what exactly it is that we do, and how it is affecting our society.

According to a nationwide survey sponsored by the Vegetarian Resource Group, only 2.5% of the population are vegetarians. That means that about 95% of our population eat meat almost daily. Can you imagine how many animals we have to kill, daily? There are also a wide variety of meats, such as steak, fish, chicken, and ham. That means we are killing a wide variety of animals too. According to the Animal Aid Organization there are two main categories in each species of animal, a breeder and the slaughter stock. The breeders are drugged, or treated in someway for the optimum amount of production as possible, and the offspring becomes the slaughter stock.

We treat chickens extremely horribly, every time I used to think of a chicken, I thought of “bocking” and roaming around a farm freely. Now that has been altered, now I think can’t think of just one chicken, I think of six or seven crammed into a small wire cage, with no room to move or stretch. These cages are called battery cages, they are about 16 inches wide, and usually contain more than one chicken. The chickens get irritated, just as humans would, being so jam packed they can barely move. According to the Free Farm Animals organization, approximately 300 million chickens kept for egg production in the U.S. are confined in battery cages. Battery cage egg production is so cruel that European countries have outlawed it, and it is time for the United States to follow suit. A quote from Bill Hall explains how cruel this treatment is “Even a maximum security psycho in the state pen gets to stretch his legs in the yard”. I also think of their beaks being cut off at birth. Chick’s beaks are cut off in order to control the feeding process, and to also prevent them from biting out of the cages or biting other chickens. This is very painful, cutting through soft tissue, cartilage, and bone. I think of them being starved for up to two weeks, just so they will lay more eggs. This is a process called “Force Molting”; egg-laying hens are starved in order to cause them to lose their feather, which in turn makes them grow new ones. This causes them to lay more eggs. The process force molting is performed usually two or three times in a chicken’s short life. If the chicken survives this inhumane challenge, it is then taken off to be slaughtered.

For every egg-laying hen in a battery cage, there is a male chick that has been killed at the hatchery. They barely have any economic value, because egg laying chickens breeds have already been selected for maximum egg production. So, instead of letting them live out their life, we have to go and do something inhumane of course! The male chicks are usually thrown put through a “grinder” which sometimes leaves the chick still alive, but cut up into pieces, or they are thrown in a trashcan where they are suffocated or crushed by the weight of other chicks. Another way to dispose of them is by gassing them, then using their corpses as fertilizer. This could be compared to abortion, just after the child is born. The average lifespan of a normal chicken would be about 10 years. Chickens on a farm with special fatting techniques give them an expectancy to be slaughtered at 6 weeks. They grow so fast; their legs can not even support their own overweight bodies. A studies have been done that show 90% of the chickens cannot walk properly. According to the Viva! organization “Every year over 800 million chickens are killed in the UK for their meat.” If you average that out, that comes out to a horrifying number of 25 chickens killed a second.

Recently there was a huge disaster at Cypress Egg Farms, in Florida, and in Georgia. Quoting the humane society of the United States, “In Florida after the company declared bankruptcy in January and left nearly 200,000 laying hens to starve on its site in Pasco County. In the egg farm in Florida 30,000 hens are said to have died of starvation, and the remaining 170,000 were gassed and buried. Of the 1.2 million birds in Georgia, approximately 426,000 were deemed "unsalvageable" and were killed by cervical dislocation and rendered; 705,000 were sent to other poultry companies; and the remaining 40,000 birds were shipped to slaughter.”