"Free-Range" Eggs and Meat: Conning Consumers
According to a poll conducted by Opinion Research Corporation of Princeton, N.J., 93 percent of Americans oppose the suffering of animals raised for food; nine out of 10 specifically disapprove of the extreme confinement endured by chickens, pigs, and other animals on today's "factory farms."(1) Increasingly, conscientious consumers are turning to "free-range" eggs and "natural" meats as humane alternatives to animal foods produced by the factory-farming system. But how much more humane are "free-range" farms?
Most consumers believe that the hens who produce "free-range" eggs spend much of their lives outdoors, warming themselves in the afternoon sun, enjoying dust baths, and laying their eggs in individual straw nests. But to U.S. egg producers, free-range means something entirely different--generally, that hens are uncaged, yet confined indoors in crowded sheds similar to "broiler" houses. In fact, no government laws or standards regulate the use of terms like ?free-range? and ?free-roaming? on egg cartons; some "free-range" eggs may be produced by hens who spend their lives in conventional battery cages.(2)
Karen Davis, president of the animal protection group United Poultry Concerns, visited one free-range egg farm--Happy Hen Organic Fertile Brown Eggs--in Pennsylvania. According to fliers for Happy Hen eggs, these hens run free "in a natural setting" and are "humanely housed in healthy, open-sided housing, for daily sunning--something Happy Hens really enjoy."(3)
Davis tells a different story: "Through the netting at the front of the long barn we saw a sea of chickens' faces looking out, as though they were smashed up against the netting. Inside, the birds were wall to wall. They were severely debeaked and their feathers were in bad condition--straggly, drab, and worn off."(4)
More than 7,000 birds are housed in each Happy Hen barn, and individual hens have no more than 11/2 square feet of space each, not enough room to even spread their wings. One hen lays 250 eggs a year. Like their caged sisters, Happy Hens are occasionally force-molted. (This means that the hens are denied food for several days, which forces them to lose their feathers, or molt, and stop laying eggs for a couple of months. Forced-molting is an economic maneuver used by farmers to adjust egg prices.)(5)
Chickens can live for 15 years, but hens on commercial free-range farms are "spent," or unable to produce enough eggs to remain profitable, after one or two years. Even on small family farms, birds are kept for only two or three years. Worn-out free-range hens are usually sold to slaughterhouses or to live-poultry markets (where Santeria practitioners buy birds to be used in religious rituals). On both free-range and factory egg farms, male chicks are considered worthless: At birth, they are dumped into trash cans to suffocate one on top of another, thrown alive into a grinder, or sold for school science projects and to laboratories.
Birds who are raised for meat may be called free-range or free-roaming if they have some form of access to the outdoors. Free-range cows and sheep must be "grass fed and live on a range."(6) No other criteria--such as the size of the "range" or the amount of space individual animals must have--are required. Unfortunately, the truthfulness of even these vague claims is rarely verified. The United States Department of Agriculture, which defines free-range and free-roaming for labeling purposes, relies "upon producer testimonials to support the accuracy of these claims."(7) According to The Washington Post Magazine, in the case of birds, especially, the term free-range "doesn't really tell you anything about the [animal's] ... quality of life, nor does it even assure that the animal actually goes outdoors."(8)
"Natural" foods "contain no artificial ingredients and are only minimally processed."(9) Animals raised for natural meats, sold at many health-food stores and upscale markets, are given no hormones or antibiotics, although they may be fed corn and other grain grown with pesticides. But again, this term tells consumers very little about the quality of an animal's life. For example, Coleman Natural Meats, the largest producer of natural beef in the United States, contracts with "ranchers of mainstream cattle to raise animals by the Coleman method. ... [E]ach Coleman animal receives a metal ear tag identifying it, and the ranchers must sign affidavits swearing that no drugs or hormones have been administered to the Coleman animals. From there, the cattle go to 23 mainstream feedlots in Colorado, where their feed is monitored every two weeks."(10) These so-called "natural" steers are confined to the same crowded feedlots as conventionally raised animals.
While some people consider it daring or adventurous to eat "exotic" meats--like ostrich steaks and buffalo burgers--many consume non-traditional animal foods because they believe these animals are raised more humanely than cows, chickens, turkeys, or pigs. A look at the way two species of these animals are treated suggests otherwise.
Recently, ostrich meat has begun to be marketed in the United States. The ostrich feathers are sold to designers or are used to make feather dusters, and their skin is used for expensive leather boots and clothing. To protect the commercial value of the hide, which can sell for hundreds of dollars, ostriches are stripped of their feathers before being slaughtered. To do this, farmers roughly pull ostrich feathers from their sockets with pliers or shave them off with electric shears. A New York Times article stated, "Slaughterhouses often do not know what to do with the big birds, the largest in the world."(11) A slaughterer in California said it took him "two hours of violent struggle to kill a single ostrich."(12) Often, ostriches are killed like chickens: They are electrically shocked (not stunned) and hung upside down and have their throats slit while fully conscious.(13)
Buffaloes (or American bison) who are raised for food fare little better than other commercially raised animals. A typical rancher confines his animals to a corral that is 7 feet high and solid, because if buffaloes "see daylight through the corral, they'll beat a hole into the wood in their attempt to get out, possibly injuring or killing themselves in the process."(14) Experimenters have tried to increase the number of buffaloes available for food by artificially inseminating female bison, flushing out the embryos and implanting them into cows, then re-impregnating the bison.(15) Bulls are slaughtered at about 2 years of age, when their hides are "prime."
From the "free-range" hen who smells fresh air for the first time on the way to the slaughterhouse to the "humanely raised" dairy cow whose days-old male baby is taken from her and sold to veal farmers, all animals raised for food suffer and are exploited. The only truly humane alternative to contributing to this suffering is to choose alternatives to eggs, milk, and meat. It's not as hard to do as you may think!