6 Horrifying Facts About Chickens: A Wake-Up Call For The Meat Industry

By Yelena Sukhoterina

NaturalBlaze.com

Today about 9 billion chickens are raised for food in the U.S. annually, a staggering1400% increase from 50 years ago. Back then, the chicken were raised by more than 1.6 million independent farmers, while today less than 30,000 farms — many of them concentrated factory farms — raise billions of chickens.

As you may have guessed, this increase has brought a ton of unintended consequences. Most people don’t realize it, but a “simple” chicken dinner from the grocery store could have any of these 6 horrifying backstories attached to it:

200 Million Baby Chicks Are Killed As Soon As Hatched

Annually it has been estimated that 200 million baby chicks are killed, many ground up alive, as soon as they hatch. The only reason? They’re male and therefore useless for egg production.

In the past they were killed by asphyxiation with carbon dioxide, but the American Veterinary Medical Association recently added grinding to the list of acceptable ways to kill them. The chicks are not anesthetized before going through a grinder alive, according to this post from Discovery.

“Given that the nervous system of a chicken originates during the 21st hour of incubation, and that a chick has a fully developed nervous system at the time of hatching, it is reasonable to conclude, as a fact of neurophysiology, that the chicks are suffering extreme pain as they are being cut up by macerator blades,” said Dr. Karen Davis, the founder and president of United Poultry Concerns.

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