Written by Geoff Russell
Created Tuesday, 15 November 2011
The meat in the Baiada sandwich
ACTU President Ged Kearney managed to write an entire article on the Baiada industrial dispute in Victoriawithout mentioning the most powerless party suffering in the dispute ... the chickens.
Everybody understood that with the Qantas dispute, there were three or possibly four parties: The workers, the bosses, the public, and depending on your position, the Government. While many of the public got caught and suffered missed meetings, nights on benches or hotels, others managed to chose another airline.
With the Baiada dispute, the chickens have been caught in the middle. There is a picket in place at a Victorian chicken slaughterhouse meaning that Baiada can't get its chickens killed there.
On Sunday night, a tip that Baiada would be trucking chickens in the heat of the day over to SA for processing prompted Animal Liberation members and Unionists to combine to protest at the Adelaide Poultry chicken slaughterhouse at Wingfield. In case you saw the Adelaide Now report of the event, it is a complete fiction. We went to the plant armed with cameras to take pictures and phones to call the RSPCA, which we did. They subsequently arrived and inspected local chickens which arrived at the plant, but happily, NO birds were trucked from Victoria that day. We did not blocktrucks and the police never even spoke to us, let alone order us to desist from blocking trucks. As I said the Adelaide Now article is total fiction.
Obviously we are concerned with chickens being trucked long distances, but with the picket operating in Victoria, won't most of the chickens simply get a reprieve until the dispute is resolved? Surely this is chicken nirvana? Surely the chickens are rejoicing?
Not likely.
A Baiada chicken, like all factory farmed chickens, has such a short, horrid, painful existence, that it's hard to imagine what you could do that would render their lives more miserable. But there is one thing. The one thing worse than death for a factory farmed chicken is not dyingon time.
Here's the deal. Factory farmed chickens grow in huge batches in large sheds. The number of birds in the batch and the size of the sheds is very carefully chosen. As the birds grow, they get bigger. This means that there is less room per bird in the shed. Also as the birds grow, more and more can't walk properly. They have been bred for those huge breast and drumstick muscles and their skeletal systems simply can't keep up. So the proportion who are lame slowly rises as they age. Eventually they'd all be lame, but they don't live that long.
Factory chicken farms are pretty much the same all over the world and a tour de force UK study of over 50,000 chickens in 127 flocks a couple of years ago found that only a few percent of the birds could walk normally toward the end of the 6 week growing period.
In Baiada's specific case, it starts thinning out its sheds when the birds are just 36 days old. Taking out a batch allows more room for the rest to grow, but this has to be balanced against increased lameness levels. Happily for Baiada, a consumer can't taste the difference between a lame bird and a healthy bird, so it doesn't matter that 97 percent of birds can't walk properly. The only kind of lameness that can affect the bottom line is at the extreme end where birds can't walk at all. If they stop walking and sit down, then either they die before they get killed, which is bad for business, or end up with hock burns. These are burns from sitting in their feces. It's basically an acid burn and it makes a red or black blotch on the legs and can mean the carcase is downgraded which is bad for business.
So Baiada, like all factory chicken producers, has to keep extreme levels of lameness low while maximising meat output. As a mathematician, I understand exactly how these kinds of optimisation problems work, and chicken welfare is of no importance until it reaches a level where the birds can no longer limp well enough to drag their sore and crippled bodies over to the food and water.
So from the chicken's point of view, any delay in death means more pain.
But there is another party in this dispute besides the chickens and the workers and the company. The chicken consumer is the forth party. This party doesn't need to sleep on benches or stay in hotels or miss meetings. This party just needs to eat something else. Whatever other food you choose, that industry will grow and provide more jobs. Almost any food you can think of will provide more employment per calorie of food produced than chicken. So do yourself, your kids and the Baiada workers a favour, eat something other than chicken tonight and every other night. Stick to it and you can make the workers new and better jobs. After all, there was no commercial chicken industry 50 years ago. This is a new industry. Back in the days before diabetes and obesity epidemics, there was no KFC and no chicken industry. Nobody needs this horrid disgusting industry.
