The horrifying treatment of chicken is not just a question of insensitivity to their suffering but has serious implications for humans as well
Following studies conducted in several chick farms across India, Animal Equality, a Pune-based animal protection organisation, has brought out, with the support of photographic and videographic evidence, the horrifying cruelty with which chicken in this country from their hatching to savage slaughter. In a recent Press release, Amruta Ubale, its executive director, gives chilling details of the cruelty perpetrated at every stage. The process begins almost immediately after hatching. Day-old chicks are roughly handled and thrown into boxes. They receive no food or water during the journey to farms that follows, taking hours and sometimes even days, causing many of them to die on the way.
Ubale’s allegations make grim reading. The antibiotic laden feed at farms cripples the chicken through abnormal weight gain, preventing them from accessing food or water. Many die of starvation, others following heart attacks or respiratory infections. Once they reach their maximum weight, they are crammed into trucks and taken on nightmarish journeys, again lasting hours and sometimes days, without food or water. Many die. Those alive are savagely taken out in groups, hung upside down while being weighed, and again jammed into small cages for hours, sometimes days, without food or water. They are killed by slitting their throats and throwing them into bins where they gasp for breath and writhe in pain for several minutes before dying. The provision in the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Slaughter House) Rules, 2001, that animals have to be stunned before slaughter, is never honoured in the case of chicken.
Much of what Ubale describes happens in public. The manner in which hens and chicken are kept and killed in markets is visible to all, and certainly to those, having them slaughtered for their meat. Yet one has hardly ever heard of anyone protesting. It is not just a question of shocking indifference to cruelty to other living beings but of indifference to cruelty in general. People who are cruel to animals are generally cruel to human beings as well. That is why the whole world did nothing effective to halt Hitler’s savage persecution of Jews in the 1930s during the first stages of his genocidal effort to find a “final solution to the Jewish problem.” More recently, the world watched while the thugs of the Islamic State unleashed horror on the Yazidis. There is the truth in Theodore Adorno’s telling observation, “Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: They’re only animals.” Charles Patterson, who quotes this observation in his deeply disturbing work, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, shows in it how maltreatment of animals and their subjugation to slavery have provided the model for the enslavement and maltreatment of humans.
Unfortunately, most people are insensitive to the suffering of non-human living beings, and most of those who are not, only experience a fleeting feeling of regret when they see an act of cruelty or hear of it. In the case of chicken, it is not just a question of insensitivity to their suffering but of hazard to human health as well. There is no inspection of the health of the chicken when they arrive at markets after their long, cruel journey from farms during which many of them fall ill. Those whose illnesses are not yet pronounced enough to be detected, are either sold or are killed and their meat sold.
The Food Safety and Standards (licensing and Registration of Food businesses) Regulation, 2011, which lays down that chicken must be slaughtered only at licensed slaughterhouses, is almost universally disregarded. They are slaughtered in most markets, where the prevailing insanitary conditions make many of them ill. Besides, the random disposal of untreated feathers and remnants of carcasses aggravates the unhygienic conditions of meat markets and tends to turn them into spawning grounds of malaria, typhoid, jaundice and other diseases threatening the area’s residents.
What is to be doneIJ The first thing would be ensuring that the provisions of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Slaughter House) Rules, 2011, and Food Safety and Standards (licensing and Registration of Food businesses) Regulation, 2001, that apply to chicken, are strictly enforced. The second would be ensuring their humane treatment at farms and during transportation. Government action would not by itself be enough. There has to be a strong movement by animal lovers.
(The writer is Consultant Editor, The Pioneer, and an author)