NPR sponsored thought:

[urbpan]

Why the hell should I care if the chicken I eat was fed vegetarian feed?  Chickens aren't herbivores--they're among the most carnivorous of the ground-dwelling pheasant family.  One of my earliest childhood memories was seeing a chicken thrashing a snake to death.  I've trained chickens using mealworms as treats--they go crazy for them, crickets too.

Not that I want chickens fed ground cow brains or anything, but it doesn't really matter--chickens can't get mad cow disease.  Cows should be fed a vegetarian diet, absolutely.  Chickens?  Pigs?  No.  Chickens are primarily a way to turn cheap corn into protein.  (Likewise, pigs are historically a way to turn garbage into delicious bacon.)  I don't mind if the eggs and chicken meat I eat come from chickens who ate some animal-based feed.  If I had my druthers, I'd eat chicken meat from chickens that foraged for bugs outdoors, and eggs from my own chickens.

Comments

[cordelia-sue.livejournal.com]

I agree with you, though I also understand the concern of not knowing what kind of meat the chickens were eating. Bugs are best, but what chickens aside from private ones get to eat bugs nowadays? That's what I'd like to see on a carton of eggs, "Guaranteed insect diet."

I don't eat eggs anyway. I think they're kind of gross. I feed them to my kids and dogs, though.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_dahne_/]

One of my earliest childhood memories was seeing a chicken thrashing a snake to death.

Whoa! I had no idea chickens were badass.

[jainabee.livejournal.com]

I'm a-gittin' HONGRAY!

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

It totally doesn't make sense does it? If you're going to eat chicken, you're not vegetarian, so why should it matter if the chicken was or not?

[rinalia.livejournal.com]

Most chickens do not eat hair, bones, hooves, horns, manure or stomach contents...healthy chickens with enough space do not commonly cannibalize their own kind either. Feeding chickens slaughterhouse by-products (condemned carcasses, fetuses, hooves, horns, inedible organs, etc.), especially from their own species is a bit suspect (and yes, imo, a bit gross).

But even with the yuck factor, most poultry diets don't contain more than 5% of bone and meal by-products.

[rinalia.livejournal.com]

One of the hens at the sanctuary where I work died protecting her offspring from a rattlesnake. The poor snake was half-dead when we found him huddled in the corner of the enclosure. The chicks were fine, nestled beneath the cold wing of their death mother.

Chickens are pretty damn nasty to fast-moving reptilian critters. We save plenty of small garter snakes, lizards and frogs/toads from the clutches of our chickens.

[okaree.livejournal.com]

Pigs can also hide a corpse real good, or so I hear.

[brush-rat.livejournal.com]

The chickens in question actually thrashed a worm to death in a horrible ten minute game of chicken vs. worm football.

When the kids threw in the garter snake the chickens simply consumed it in one disturbingly fast gulp.

[gigglingwizard.livejournal.com]

"...healthy chickens with enough space do not commonly cannibalize their own kind either."

This depends on how one defines "their own kind." They won't do it to equally sized birds they recognize as flockmates (unless they're competing roosters), but there are instances where healthy chickens with plenty of space do cannibalize other chickens. Mind, they don't "cannibalize" in the sense of some canid or feline licking the bones clean, but they kill by taking little bites. I've seen a flock of laying hens do this to chicks that weren't theirs more often than I care to remember, and earlier this year, I lost many, many healthy, free-range broilers to a vicious pack of 25 equally healthy, free-range Rhode Island Red cockerels.

Testify!

[gigglingwizard.livejournal.com]

I look at it as a marketing gimmick, like chicken packaging that says, "No Added Growth Hormones." I'm pretty sure there are no such things as added growth hormones for poultry. I've certainly never seen them advertised in any poultry industry or farm-related publications. All the other scary stuff--debeakers and automatic separaters and medicated feed and antibiotics for water and all that--but no growth hormones. That's a dairy thing. Maybe beef and swine, too. I don't know.

What did NPR have to do with it?

[wirrrn.livejournal.com]

True. Chickens are pretty much omnivorous, with a tendency towards insectivorism. You should feed them what makes them happy. So long as they're free range, I ain't got a problem with that...

One of my earliest childhood memories was seeing a chicken thrashing a snake to death

-A venomous one? I saw a chicken take down a spider-hunting wasp once- with a hop into the air!

[rinalia.livejournal.com]

I would argue that those are rather loose definitions of "cannibalize." Yes, chickens fight. Do healthy chickens with enough space commonly cannibalize (as in kill to eat) their own kind? I think it would be difficult to argue effectively that it is common chicken behavior.

Our flock has not seen "many, many" healthy birds die because of infighting. In the past five years, perhaps five or six have succumbed to wounds inflicted by other birds. Attacked birds in our flock tend to show up as cancerous or diseased upon necropsy. We've never had a healthy bird die from a fight in the past 20-years. None of our birds who have died (either from infighting or natural causes) have been eaten by other birds.

While I agree that chickens can be aggressive toward one another (especially a large group of bachelor males) it is difficult for me to believe that their normal behavior is to peck to eat one another.

Re: Testify!

[rinalia.livejournal.com]

You are right, it is actually illegal to give poultry growth hormones. Producers cannot administer growth hormones to swine either. Definitely a marketing ploy, in the case of poultry & pig flesh.

[kryptyd.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's pretty stupid. It's amazing what some people will use to assuage their guilt.

And I'm not implying that meat eaters should feel guilty at all, it's just that a lot obviously do and act really defensive (and in the this instance stupid) about it.

Re: Testify!

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

My local NPR station, announcing who helped pay for programs (with little 2 second non-commercial commercials) included some supplier of vegetarian fed chickens.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

My brother brush_rat, who is 6 years my senior and therefore has a better claim to the memory, corrects me above.

But rinalia above tells of a rattlesnake crippled by a chicken at her Californian farm animal rescue facility.

off-topic

[hissilliness.livejournal.com]

Have you posted about Prop 3 and I missed it? You're my go-to guy for clear-eyed, unsentimental animal rights thinking, so I've been watching for a post on the subject.

Fishy chicken

[(Anonymous)]

When I was a kid, the chicken that my mother bought at the grocery store was fed a diet high in fish leftovers. You could taste it. It wasn't until I went to college that I learned that chicken isn't supposed to taste like fish.

Now, I buy chicken and eggs from one of two local sources that actually manage to raise a tasty chicken. If I can't buy from them, I tend toward the vegetarian chicken but more because of the free-range, fewer-chemicals claims even though I'm well aware that the raising and slaughtering of those "naturally-raised" chickens is no less brutal than any other factory farmed chicken. And I always snort when I see the "laid by vegetarian hens" bit on the egg carton. Those hens aren't vegetarian by choice, that's for sure.