Anti-farming activists rage to denigrate, among others, organised poultry farming by constantly trying to find fault with it, despite the fact that this important industry generates an important source of healthy and cheap food for millions of people around the world, whose only alternative would be – according to the activists – a plant world dedicated to satisfying human needs, albeit necessarily in a dimension that would nevertheless conflict with the need to allow for bio-diversity. According to the activists, animals should be left wild, none bred for human needs. No control of their free proliferation would be allowed. However, it only takes a wild boar or a wolf approaching a built-up area to generate ‘panic and disturbance’. Let us move on.
Vegans and vegetarians perhaps imagine vistas of widespread cultivation for food, and areas (not clearly defined in terms of size and geographical location) populated only by wild animals, to have a world that is only ‘natural’ (as they often like to call it) and thus essentially free to self-govern and balance itself in which humans would only be guests forced to cultivate vegetables with idealistic logic. Humans would have to avoid confrontation with wild animals if only to establish which are their own food sources and which are ‘reserved’ for the wild. The only exceptions would seem to be companion animals to whom we devote every comfort and food, which in many cases must include animal protein (which animals is to be determined). ‘Life companions’, surrogates of affection, which however should (already today this is the case) adapt to the demands of sapiens and allow themselves to be sterilised and live in environments that are certainly comfortable according to human expectations, but not exactly definable as ‘natural’ and even less suited to ‘animal nature’.
Objectively, vegan worldviews are populated by ideals … and their criticisms of the poultry industry (among others), are often without scientific backing. Today, anti-farming activists mainly focus on creating narratives designed to instil fear and guilt in the public so that the public will send them money.
They periodically insist, for example, on describing industrially reared chickens as ‘sick’, pointing to the poultry industry as generating animal suffering, and amplify individual cases by describing them as constant denials of animal welfare, when in fact they belong to the norm of any observation one wants to make about the health of all living beings (including sapiens).
The activists’ statements do not take into account the fact (indeed, they precisely avoid considering it) that the cases they ‘photographed or filmed’ represent very small percentages compared to what happens to wild animals. On the contrary, it is true that farmed animals are highly protected and provided with special welfare conditions precisely because the purpose of livestock farming is to guarantee millions of people around the world an access to a source of food that is healthy and affordable from various points of view, including the economic one, which is the most ethical aspect of the whole chain and which allows millions of people around the world access to quality protein, as they are too often confronted with an economy that is geared to creating niches.
Those who pass on criticism of the sector with purely ideological and never scientific arguments are evidently seeking the approval of that large section of the public that is not in the habit of investigating and verifying what is conveyed to them by the various media. In addition to this, it must be said that those who criticise the organised poultry sector currently appear to be the only purveyors of statements passed off as ‘information’ on the poultry sector. The poultry sector, which would instead have much to counter the activists’ statements point by point, remains focused on its work, aware that it has nothing to hide and, on the contrary, works very carefully to ensure healthy and affordable eggs and meat. Consumers therefore remain poorly informed and may experience the activists’ pseudo-information as ‘health warnings’.
But the reality is simpler: all marketed meat undergoes careful veterinary checks even before slaughter.
Among the criticisms that have been coming in to the industry lately, one hears a lot about the so-called ‘white stripes on chicken breasts’ that agitate the minds of those who observe them with concern, calling them evidence of a disease. This is not the case. They are just a characteristic that occurs in some animals and the industry research has already indicated a low link with genetics and a low correlation with body weight and so-called ‘breast yield’: in simpler words, the white stripes can occur regardless of whether growth is faster or slower. On top of this, it must be said that broilers are animals selected for their instinctive propensity to feed themselves often and willingly, and to do so they have to go to the food distribution points on the farms… if they could not move (as anti-farming activists claim) they would not be able to feed themselves. On the other hand, it is true that in addition to feeding often and willingly, they are animals that not only prefer to be in close proximity with their fellow creatures (poultry are gregarious animals), but also have a marked propensity to remain in a state of rest.
The animals we eat are all animals that we (humans) breed for the sole purpose of providing food for millions of people. Doing so while guaranteeing their welfare is the task and mission of farmers who, were they not attentive to the welfare of the animals they breed, would not be able to fulfil the role they have charged themselves with because only a healthy chicken generates ‘income’ opportunities by providing food that is accessible in many ways: cheap, healthy and readily available. This last aspect definitively represents the ethics of the poultry sector that works (and we repeat this because it needs to be clearly understood) to disseminate and defend access to food even for social groups exposed to food poverty.
The niches of ‘affluent’ consumers, for whom the price of access to food makes no difference, are precisely the niches to which the poultry sector is able to respond with various alternatives such as those urged by the various activists who have called for slow-growing chickens (from which it is implicit that they want to eat chicken).
In this context, criticism of the poultry sector seems appropriate to define it as the look for nitpicks by various forms of activism engaged in ideologically trying to de-legitimise the sector by focusing attention on a few isolated cases that do not represent the sector, which independently, both for self-defence and to protect consumers, fights the presence of ‘pirates’.
The most important issue remains that more reliable access to nutritious and safe food has sustained societal progress, so that today we live in a much more equitable and inclusive world, with less poverty and better representation of minorities and opportunities for all, than ever before in human history. The evidence is unequivocal: innovation even in the poultry sector not only helps to minimise the space for food production, but also reduces the direct impact on the environment, in terms of emissions to air and water.
The more research and science enable innovations and perfect technologies that observe the best qualities of genetics, the more humanity will be able to meet the challenge of feeding more people in the face of a changing climate and limited natural resources of land, energy and water. This is why, for example, modern poultry farms house animals (destined for our food) that require less feed, less water and yet grow healthier, more and faster than 60 years ago.
The editorial team of MAC.
