Intensive Chicken Farming Hits Screens and Raw Nerves

Over the past few years, the UK has enjoyed the dubious pleasure of having its terrestrial TV channels jammed with celebrity chefs.

Turn on the TV and you’ll see one of them drizzling olive oil over some preposterous dish hardly suitable for a family of four on a tight budget.

But recently, there’s been a refreshingly unsavoury turnaround.

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Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (see photo above) - a thoroughly English name I’m sure you’ll agree and to be fair, though a celebrity chef, not one usually associated with olive oil, has a series on Channel 4 entitled Hugh’s Chicken Run.

It’s reduced him to tears. Why? Because he’s taken it upon himself to intensively farm chickens in a bid to show viewers the cruelty that’s involved.

Shoehorning 2,500 poultry into a shed in an experiment that lasted just over 5 weeks, he wanted to see for himself how hideous the practice is. A report in The Independent describes the situation:

He could not face doing it on a standard chicken industry scale. “Normally there’s between 20,000 and 40,000 birds in a shed. We scaled that down to 10 per cent” [ said Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall.]

Even that unsettled him, he confessed, as he patrolled his chicken shed in a biosecurity suit, looking for weaklings to smash against a metal beam and flinging their twitching torsos into a black bin liner. At one point in the programme he broke down in tears, saying: “I really don’t want to kill another bird this morning.”

It’s sparked quite the debate here in the UK. This man, educated at one of Britain’s top public schools, and now earning a fortune in his own right, can afford to buy organic vegetables and free range meat.

Though it makes for good reality TV, in reality, many people cannot afford to buy what their conscience tells them to. An intensively farmed chicken costs around £2.50 ($5) where as a bird reared in more natural surroundings will cost - as a starting price - around £6.

Perhaps it’s regrettable that it should be such a privelaged man who lifted the veil on such barbaric farming. A well-spoken man with his background may indeed cause a backlash.

But what he’s done is absolutely the right thing. He’s blown intensive farming out of the water and shown what goes on behind barbed wire.

I mentioned that it had sparked a debate. For a full and frank exchange of views, the UK’s Guardian newspaper has a section online where readers can respond to articles.

One article and the resultant comments on intensive chicken farming makes for lively reading.

Now, that’s the healthiest outcome possible. Bringing the subject out into the open.

Sources:

The Independent

Photo courtesy of Flickr

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