There is simply no way to humanely raise so many birds, in such close quarters. By no means do these pledges render the lives of these chickens luxe, and many cage-free hens still suffer terribly. Dozens of companies have pledged to source only cage-free eggs, including Trader Joe’s, Unilever, Pizza Hut, Mars and Hormel Foods. In the United States, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington have either banned them or are in the process of doing so. The European Union has phased out battery cages and India has declared them illegal. As the Humane League notes, a typical piece of paper is no more than 90 square inches. According to 2017 guidelines by the industry group United Egg Producers, each bird should have 67 to 86 square inches of usable space within the cage. And they’re succeeding.īattery cages, for instance, are small cages where egg-laying hens are kept for almost the entirety of their mature lives. They are fighting to see farm animals treated in a way that’s far beneath what they believe to be moral, but far above what’s become normal. The Humane League and Mercy for Animals have become, in a way, part of a system they loathe. This is activism that does not permit itself the comforts of purity. I’ve never forgotten what Coman-Hidy said when I asked him how he could bear to spend his days negotiating over the finer points of chicken slaughter: “The thought experiment that helped me is if I could die, or have a member of my family die, by being euthanized by gas, or have what I just described happen to them, what would I give to get the gas? And the answer is everything.” The Humane League, and others, are trying to persuade chicken producers to simply gas the birds to death. You can watch the process here, if you have the stomach for it. If the kill isn’t clean, they are pulled through boiling water that defeathers them while still conscious. But the panicked, spasming birds sometimes miss the bath, and their throats are cut while they are conscious and terrified. The conveyor is supposed to drag them through electrified water, stunning them before their throats are slit. The birds flap and squawk in terror, and the shackling can leave them with broken legs or dislocated hips. These are birds that have barely ever moved being handled by low-paid workers with inhuman production quotas. In live shackling, which remains the dominant method, workers turn chickens upside down to shackle them by their legs to a conveyor.
In 2020, David Coman-Hidy, president of the Humane League, told me about his work trying to persuade companies to shift from live shackling of chickens to atmospheric killing. Today, the factory farms that produce the overwhelming majority of meat, both globally and domestically, are dark marvels of technology, as are the carefully bred and managed animals inside them. Disease would rip through thick flocks, and carcasses would spoil across long trips.
In past eras, we didn’t have the antibiotics and sanitation chemicals needed to keep so many animals crowded so closely together, nor the preservation and transportation technologies needed to ship them en masse. What’s changed over the past century is that we’ve developed the technology to produce meat in industrialized conditions, and that has opened vast new vistas for both production and suffering. We’ve hunted them, bred them, raised them and consumed them. How we treat farm animals today will be seen, I believe, as a defining moral failing of our age. Now comes the hard part: Persuading you that they’re worthy of your support. In choosing these groups, I’ve relied heavily on the work Open Philanthropy and Animal Charity Evaluators have done assessing the effectiveness of dozens of animal-suffering groups, as well as my own reporting. Here, the Good Food Institute, New Harvest and the Material Innovation Initiative are my recommendations. The second is substitution: replacing the animals with meat made from plants or grown from cells. Here, the Humane League and Mercy for Animals are my picks.
One is amelioration: trying to better the conditions of these animals now. Two strategies dominate among groups trying to help factory farmed animals.
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