I went for a drive to our Abbotsford farm area and thought how peculiar that I don’t see any animals.
And then I read the story about the chicks that were trampled. Oh that’s right, “farm” animals are crammed by the thousands into metal buildings. It’s the agribusiness. High and efficient productivity of living beings. Bigger, faster, cheaper.
Why don’t we look at what happened to these 100-plus chicks that were trampled before they arrived at their metal enclosure.
Depending on if they were being raised for egg laying, they would have been hatched under artificial conditions and after two days been sorted.
Approximately 98 per cent of the females would then have had to endure over a year of living in a cage that would allow a space about the size of a piece of paper. They would never see sunlight nor walk on grass.
On the other hand, had these chicks been designated as a meat bird, after 43 days of rapid, unnatural growth, they would have been plucked from their crowded metal enclosure in the early morning and thrown into a transport truck.
Chickens can sit in a transport truck for up to 36 hours without food or water. I won’t get into their slaughter because as animal lovers always tell me, “I don’t want to know.”
So it looks to me like our upstanding citizens allow and inflict cruelty upon animals every second of every day.
I wonder if perhaps these thieves are not the only criminals in our society.
Jane Schneider