How Chicks are Made on Discovery Channel
Today the Discovery Channel aired an episode of “How It’s Made” covering the topic of chicks. A midwest commercial hatchery reveals how it “raises” (in no sense of the word) chicks from fertilized eggs for meat or egg production. Odd. The show had never ventured into realm of Living Product before. It begins with thousands of fertilized (how, they never said) eggs hermetically sealed in a chamber with automatic heat and humidity. Each egg rested on a metal prongs which rotated and tipped the egg at intervals to a 45 degree angle. This was supposed to simulate the way a mother hen turns her eggs. But the gears were not gentle. Thousands eggs turned and rotated on the metal prongs like a Pachinko game.
As the chicks began to gestate needles punctured their shells and shot vaccine into their amneotic fluid. How they missed the chicks I’ll never know. As the chicks began to break through the shells on their own (quite exhausting for a chick) suction cups abruptly clamped down on their escape holes and cut off their air supply. The suction cups flipped the hatching eggs onto trays that soon became overcrowded, chick stepping on chick, as more emerged from their shells. Then the fun really started.
Newly hatched chicks were then dumped by conveyor belts ONTO gears. The gears were diabolically spaced to force the chicks to fall through onto another conveyor belt below while empty shells rolled over the gears. Leg and wings were caught in the gears and painfully twisted as they fell into darkness beneath. Repeatedly the distressed chicks were forced to fall considerable distances to the next conveyor belt. Each belt was going in an opposite direction from the first. No human could see this without some reaction regardless of whether you subscribe to the philosophy that a society can only be measured by how well it treats its animals. By now I was personally so upset at seeing this flinging and dropping of the hapless chicks I was literally shouting “Stop it!” at the tv set. But there was more.
In the final stage the chicks were “sorted” by workers who pinched the chicks’ wings open (their first contact with human life) to determine their sex. Next these workers balled the chicks up like a pair of dirty socks and flung them down one of two steeply descending tubes. Some workers gathered the chicks by their ankles and flung them at the tubes, banking the chicks off the metal walls. Tiny, newborn, still living, tossed away like dead animals. Over this footage the narrator touted the effiency, the marvel of this commercial operation: Just 36 days to laying or meat grade!
You could have knocked me over with a feather. Did I really just see that? Was the Discovery Channel on crack? What teacher, parent would expose their child to this? Puzzling that this episode did not appear among the complete episodes list of “How Its Made” on Discovery.com. Did anyone else post about this? I found only one blog whose comments dated back a year ago. Must have been when it first aired.
I am disgusted and yet glad Discovery Channel aired this particular episode. It sheds much needed light on the highly abusive practice of commercial animal husbandry. We simply don’t want our food treated this way. More and more people are choosing organic and “FREE RANGE” and hence the stipulations for organic and free-range animals are becoming more stringent. One wonders why nothing has been done to improve these animals lives.
In this episode we see firsthand how our government creates federal mandates to remove nutritive value from food so delighted Corporations can re-inject their own synthetic and inferior additives. These additives create more health problems for the consumer than unaltered food. For example, Snackwell brand touts itself as low calorie but in fact, its Oreos are only 6 calories lighter than regular Oreos. Also witnessed here is the troubling reliance of the food industry on drug companies to keep the food supply “disease-free” (it can’t) and production up utilizing egg vaccines, bovine rBst, even genetically altered crops.
While this may be great business for the drug food industry it is bad news for the the food supply and all of us. Scientists just don’t know the long term effects of their chemicals in our milk, yogurt, ice cream, cheese, grains, meat. But they do know in that rBst, the bovine growth hormone degrades the health of cows. Cows on rBst must be given additional antibiotics to keep their udders from becoming infected with the constant and artificially induced milk. The milk coming from these cows can still be infected. This industry has to do better.
The French are onto something. I’ve read quite a bit about the benefits of unpasteurized milk and cheese. We’ve been trained in the US to shun anything that isn’t pasteurized but in fact pasteurization removes a scary amount of nutritive value from food. Unfortunately due to the 2002 bioterrorism laws there are increased restrictions on food imports. Basically anything from France that is edible and delicious is forbidden. Cheeses, not just the runny ones, wines, pastries like Calissons. I’ve had harmless French tea cookies sent back to France by the FDA. France has if not the highest then a highly excellent food quality. These import restrictions are definitely arbitrary and political. I’ve read that even Customs agents are confused by the FDA laws and when in doubt they deny entry. But if we can’t import chemical-free food in this country due to rigorous FDA bioterrorism laws, we are forced to eat a toxic food supply.
Consumers need to be extremely careful. Really read those labels and ask about the conditions in which your food supply is raised. Free-range is often not. Keep tabs on companies that fail health requirements. Then check again and make sure they aren’t covering up problems with vaccines and poor production conditions. With enough raised eyebrows, the industry must capitulate and offer a saner safer alternative.