In this article, we’ll take a look at how many of your favourite meat animals are raised and treated before they end up on your plate. It’s food for thought and will hopefully inspire you towards more ethical shopping and eating.
Chickens
• In conventional chicken farms, sheds house almost around 15,000 birds in around 1,000 square metres. That’s around 15 chickens per square metre.
• Some farms house up to 65,000 chickens at ‘maximum allowable density’ (which means as many birds are crammed in as legally possible, which is still highly questionable and cruel). And these numbers are on the better farms.
• In Australia, no growth hormones are allowed anymore, but chickens are fed antibiotics to combat against diseases related to overcrowding.
Pigs• Around 6 million pigs are slaughtered yearly in Australia. 98% of these are raised in intensive farming conditions (very crowded!) The pig industry calls it ‘close confinement’.
• Breedings sows (mums) especially are kept in very small pens called ‘dry sow stalls’, which measure 600 x 200cm. They stay here for 16 weeks until they give birth. In this size pen, sows cannot even turn around to move or scratch themselves, cannot take a step backward or forward, and can only lie down with difficulty.
• Almost all Australian pigs are fed on porcine somatotropin (growth hormones).
Every animals intensively farmed that we eat in Australia lives a life of suffering from birth to death, all in the name of giving us meat to eat, a lot of which is questionably not good for our health anyway. Cow, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens and other birds, even seafood, are all doing it tough so we can sit down to eat their flesh. The least we can do is give a little more thought to where our food comes from and how it’s produced. Ethical eating is good for all living things.