Record temperatures have been causing mass poultry deaths in western France since June 22, Reuters reported. The heat wave, with temperatures exceeding 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit), is also behind the drowning of 40 people. Météo-France, the French national weather service, wrote in a statement that June 24 and 25 were the hottest days recorded in France since records began in 1947. Yann Nedelec, head of ANVOL, a French poultry-sector organization, estimated that at least several hundred thousand poultry in both indoor and outdoor farms died, though he told Reuters it was too soon for a precise death count. Chicken farmer Clement Blanchard, based in Saint-Andre-Goule-d’Oie, a commune in Pays de la Loire, told Reuters that around 700 of his chickens had died over the span of a few days, compared to an average death rate of one or two per day. “We’re faced with the same thing with our animals as we are ourselves: they suffer enormously from the heat, and so at times like this there are abnormally high death rates,” he told Reuters. Stéphane Delapré, a poultry breeder in Beauvoir-sur-Mer in Normandy, northwestern France, told AFP that the heat on June 22 had killed roughly half of his 17,600 chickens. “Half of the chickens died, suffocated by the heat: those that were in the buildings and also those that were under the trees,” he said. “In [my] 42-year … career, I have never seen anything like it.” The Chamber of Agriculture in both Brittany and Pays de Loire,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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They're mightily convenient is all I'm getting at.
And the chickens who die for those eggs? Do they count for anything?
You do know chickens don't die laying eggs... Right?
Yes they do actually. When the hens start producing fewer eggs, they’re sent to the slaughter house. Chickens can live for 8-10 years, but they sent away at roughly half of that. Also, the eggs that get fertilised to replace the mother hens who are slaughtered at a fraction of their potential lifespan, if they have too many fertilised, they are killed at HOURS old. Also, if they’re fertilised are boys, they will Be killed because they don’t lay eggs. Baby chicks are usually killed in one of two ways. Firstly, they could be suffocated to death. The other “humane” way is to put them in a blender. It’s called a macerator and they are ground up ALIVE into a paste.
So yes, chickens are in fact killed in the egg industry.
Edit: also, the chickens are often crammed into cages and have next to no room to move. They’re treated so badly. Even “free range” are treated badly. Technically they have access to outside, but they, for the most part, don’t. They are crammed into sheds by the tens of thousands. So they have access to a door that lets them outside, but because of severely fucked up pecking orders (by virtue of being crammed into sheds by the tens of thousands), they can’t get out.
Is your omelette really worth all this pain and suffering?
Wait, I didn't know about this. Do you mean some bully hens prevent certain others from being able to go outside? Do you have a link to an article about this?
Crap. Hmm...
Nah. Hens are crammed in by the thousands, when normally there wouldn’t be more than tens of chickens in a group in the wild ( though the chickens we have now are very far removed from wild chooks due to selective breeding. Example being that wild chooks lay 10-12 eggs a year. Much like humans. But the chooks we use for egg laying lay 1-2 A DAY), so moving around in the shed where there are tens of THOUSANDS of chooks, makes it hard to get to the door to get out.
Scroll to the top of your screen and try to read the article title again.
Aren't egg laying hens not farmed for meat? Egg farms don't really sell them for meat, they live to an age where they don't lay eggs anymore and the meat is too tough for consumer taste.
Chicken for poultry are a separate farm system because those are grown just for meat.
Both have their flaws but one does not equal another
Correct. Generally these are completely different breeds.
Ok?