Nutrition Assignment
Issues in Agricultural Practices-Factory Farming

1. Virtually all chickens raised for their flesh spend their lives crammed into massive, windowless sheds that typically hold as many as 40,000 birds each. A chicken shed is filled with dust, feathers and ammonia fill the air and fans turn it into airborne sandpaper, rubbing skin raw. The intense confinement and extreme crowding on factory farms also results in unimaginable filth and disease. chickens are forced to breathe ammonia and particulate matter from feces and feathers all day long. Many suffer from chronic respiratory diseases, weakened immune systems, bronchitis, and “ammonia burn,” a painful eye condition. A journalist that experienced the conditions described it in his words saying, “I was almost knocked to the ground by the overpowering smell of feces and ammonia. My eyes burned and so did my lungs, and I could neither see nor breathe …. There must have been 30,000 chickens sitting silently on the floor in front of me. They didn’t move, didn’t cluck”. Ultimately the ways the chickens are treated is inhumane, brought up in crammed cages, and disease infested sheds, feces everywhere, while ammonia fills the air choking anyone who inhales, all while getting pumped with drugs, getting debeaked and abused just to get slaughtered alive down the road.

2. The common treatment practices are chickens get genetically manipulated and regularly dosed with drugs to make them grow faster and larger. The average breast of an 8-week-old chicken is seven times heavier today than it was 25 years ago. Because of this unnaturally accelerated weight gain, these very young birds frequently die of heart attacks and lung collapse, something that would almost never happen in nature. According to Feedstuffs, a meat-industry magazine, “Broilers now grow so rapidly that the heart and lungs are not developed well enough to support the remainder of the body, resulting in congestive heart failure and tremendous death losses.” Chickens are arguably the most abused animals on the planet. They’re bred and drugged to grow so large so quickly that their legs and organs can’t keep up. When they are only 6 or 7 weeks old, they’re crammed into cages and trucked to slaughter. When the birds drink more water to try to relieve their hunger, factory farm operators often reduce the available drinking water so that they won’t have to clean up wet manure. The birds have part of their sensitive beaks cut off so that they won’t peck each other out of frustration created by the unnatural confinement. Chickens are slammed into small crates and trucked to the slaughterhouse through all weather extremes..

3. The conditions the chickens have to endure often lead to many health problems with little medical care. As mentioned before, many suffer from chronic respiratory diseases, weakened immune systems, bronchitis, and “ammonia burn,” a painful eye condition. ” In addition, chickens on today’s factory farms almost always become crippled because their legs cannot support the weight of their bodies Common health problems are they are infected with either campylobacter or salmonella bacteria or both. The high prevalence of dangerous contaminants in chicken flesh is due largely to the filthy conditions in the sheds where they are raised. The birds are not given any painkillers to ease the agony and many debeaked chickens starve to death because they are in too much pain to eat. These chickens literally receive no medical care they are just there to get slaughtered for a profit.

4. Antibiotics are used routinely in poultry to prevent and treat disease. Many believe that this puts humans at risk as bacterial strains develop stronger and stronger resistances. On factory farms, they are fed large quantities of powerful antibiotics to keep them alive in conditions that would otherwise kill them: Chickens are given nearly four times the amount of antibiotics as human beings or cattle in the United States. Due to public concerns over the widespread use of antibiotics in poultry, some producers have started eliminating the use of antibiotics in order to produce and market chicken that may be labeled “antibiotic free”. Poultry feed can also include roxarsone and or nitrasone, along with arsenical antimicrobial drugs that speed up the growth pace. The drugs contain a toxin, arsenic, which is highly dangerous and can be damaging to humans. Chickens grow fast because they are bred to do so, not because of growth hormones.

5. Chickens are forced to live on factory farms for elongated periods, months, even years. Because they live so much longer, they face an even higher risk of organ failure and death as they grow larger and larger because of their manipulated genetics. In an attempt to fix this problem, the industry decreases the amount of food given to breeding birds, keeping the animals in a constant state of hunger and frustration. Some farmers shove thin plastic rods through the delicate nasal cavities of male breeding birds. The rods stick out of both sides of their faces, preventing them from reaching through the wire barrier to eat the females’ food. The methods used to maximize production include manipulation of lighting to change the hens’ environment and hence their biological cycles; unnaturally long periods of simulated daylight encourage laying. Periodic forced molting creates an additional laying cycle: during this time, the hens are kept in darkness and put on a “starvation” diet (reduced-calorie feed) or starved altogether for up to two weeks.

6. The genetic mutilations are focused on the food the chickens get. The rapid growth rate of broiler chickens makes simply moving from one place to another a difficult and painful task. Chickens have been genetically manipulated to have larger quantities of meat in as little time as possible. In the last 60 years manufacturers have doubled the weight of the chicken in half the time it used to take. This can, of course, cause problems for the chicken. The chickens have grown so big so fast they are unable to keep up with their own growth. This leads to a lot of internal problems, such as organ failure, and makes daily tasks seem also impossible, such as walking. The chickens are genetically modified to the extremes causing an inflation in the animal, crippling it.

7. The Laws/regulations surrounding the treatment of this animal do not exist.
Chickens are exempted from the USDA’s Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, which mandates that animals be rendered insensible to pain before being slaughtered. The Humane Society of the United States is one of several organizations lobbying to obtain a requirement that poultry animals not be exempted from legislation that would protect them from painful, sometimes torturous, death. Movements are on across the globe to improve conditions for chickens and other poultry animals. The European Union has agreed to abolish the use of battery cages by 2012. The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and other organizations are pushing for such a law, and various states and communities in the United States have passed or are considering similar laws. And there have been other successes. In 2000, McDonald’s Corp. announced new policies that mandate that their suppliers increase space for caged laying hens and stop using forced molting at the facilities that produce their eggs; they also plan to phase out the practice of debeaking. In March 2007 another fast-food giant, Burger King, promised to implement new animal-welfare policies that include provisions for buying a certain percentage of its eggs from cage-free producers and some of its chickens from producers that use more-humane slaughter methods. The supermarket chains Whole Foods and Wild Oats have also moved away from using and selling eggs from caged chicken.

8. The Canadian justice laws pertaining to health of Animals regulation states: * No railway company or motor carrier shall continue to transport an animal that is injured or becomes ill or otherwise unfit for transport during a journey beyond the nearest suitable place at which it can receive proper care and attention * No person shall beat an animal being loaded or unloaded in a way likely to cause injury or undue suffering to it. * No person shall load or unload, or cause to be loaded or unloaded, an animal in a way likely to cause injury or undue suffering to it. When chickens are taken to slaughter, workers rush through the sheds, grabbing multiple birds by their legs and slinging them into crates for transport. Every year, tens of millions suffer broken wings and legs from the rough handling, and some hemorrhage to death. The journey to the slaughterhouse may be hundreds of miles long, but chickens are given no food or water and are shipped through all weather conditions. After this nightmarish journey, the bewildered chickens are dumped out of the crates, and workers violently grab them and force their legs into shackles so that they are hanging upside-down, breaking many birds’ legs in the process. The terrified animals struggle to escape, often defecating and vomiting on the workers. The screaming of the birds and the frenzied flapping of their wings is so loud that staff yell to the worker next to them. As the evidence states the whole process is INHUMANE, It doesn’t even follow the Canadian justice Laws.
We can Improve these situations by following the Three Rs: "reducing" or "replacing" consumption of animal products, and "refining" our diets by choosing products from sources that adhere to higher animal welfare standards. This focuses us to stray away from the factory produced meats hopefully snowballing to a point where there are less chickens in the harsh conditions.

9. Environmental impact of raising chickens this way is that areas of great natural beauty are being turned into smelly, fly- infested places by the poultry industry. Wildlife habitat is destroyed to erect ugly new poultry houses, slaughtering plants, and workers' trailer parks. In Accomac, Virginia, a Perdue slaughterhouse dumped chicken grease, bacteria, and ammonia into nearby Parker Creek, turning this once clean, thriving and beautiful creek into a gray, slimy, stinking mess. Keeping these factories is environmentally costly as well, think about the amount of machinery and gasoline needed in mass volumes leading to high density of pollution. In 1998, Tyson Foods was fined $6 million for pollution of the Kitts Branch waterway in Worcester County, Maryland, which has become loaded with coliform bacteria, phosphorous, and nitrogen dumped by a single poultry slaughter plant in Berlin.

10. Most Canadians assume the government ensures the humane treatment of farm animals and are shocked to discover the lack of monitoring of farms across the country. Canada has no regulations stipulating how animals should be treated on farms other than federal and provincial animal cruelty laws, and these are only used to prosecute livestock producers in cases of rare and egregious abuse, such as when animals are neglected to the point of starvation. Many countries and even some U.S. states have introduced legislation mandating the phase-out of battery cages, gestation stalls and veal crates. Fortunately, the government is now funding the development of new Codes of Practice for the Care and Handling of Farm Animals. Coordinated by the National Farm Animal Care Council (NFACC), these Codes outline acceptable standards of care for farm animals across Canada and serve as reference documents for provincial animal cruelty laws. It is truly unacceptable to see that these living things have zero to no rights when it comes to their own treatment.

11. Our eating/shopping habits can have a positive or negative impact on factory farming depending on what we do and the change we want to see. Reducing or replacing the consumption of chickens, and "refining" our diets by choosing products from sources that adhere to higher animal welfare standards. Those that continue to consume chicken are only encouraging the factories to continually mistreat. Individuals nationwide are reducing their consumption of chickens and other animals, meaning fewer birds will be crammed onto warehouse. The price currently paid by these animals each of whom is an individual with a personality and a desire to avoid suffering - in Canada each day is too high for a civilized society to accept. With a growing revulsion at how we routinely abuse animals -- and increased focus on plant-based eating it seems we may be on a path to create a much more humane food system, and a much more humane society