Chicken - a Fowl Story

Chicken, once a luxury, is now often cheaper than dog food! It’s not surprising when you consider how it’s reared.

The modern broiler chicken takes only 40 days to grow from egg to a full size bird. Throughout their short lives they are kept in dimly lit units which house around 40,000 birds. The units are only cleaned out when the chickens are taken for slaughter so that after 2-3 weeks the wood chip floor is completely covered with poultry manure and the stench is unbearable. To keep costs down the birds are packed into the houses as tightly as possible. Government guidelines stipulate that birds should be kept at a maximum density of 34kg of bird per square meter. This means that the mature chicken has an area smaller than an A4 sheet of paper! If a chicken dies – and xx% of them do (often because of cannibalism,) they can’t even be recovered from the packed house.

Because of the conditions and stress that broiler chickens endure their food has to be dosed with antibiotics to keep them alive and control parasites. Growth hormones help the birds put on weight so rapidly they can often suffer from heart problems and many grow so quickly their legs cannot even support their own weight.

Processing methods often add water to the meat to artificially increase weight.

By contrast an organic chicken is typically housed in batches of 500. Their first 3 weeks are spent indoors. Once released into a field the flock can graze on grass and forage for insects and other titbits as nature intended them to. Their diet consists of organically grown grain often grown on the same mixed farm as the chickens are reared. The routine use of antibiotics is not permitted. The birds grow slowly and are taken to slaughter when they reach 77 days old.

An organic chicken is a totally different product from the cheap and tasteless broiler chicken. Because the bird has grown slowly and naturally, because it has been reared in humane conditions and suffered less stress and because it has enjoyed a natural diet it is of course, more expensive. It is also a product that you can eat with a clear conscience and actually tastes like, well – chicken.

A range of organic chicken can be bought from As Nature Intended from £xx kg

Interesting websites:-
www.rspca.org.uk
www.sheepdrove.co.uk