children's books & reality: baby chicks
We looked at a wild baby animals last week with Spring in full bloom, and this week we'll shift our attention just a bit to newborns on the farm. Most of us have pleasant images and ideas in our mind about what farm life is like for animals; we tend to think of red barns surrounded by spacious dirt pens and lush, green fields, with the various livestock contentedly feeding and going about their business.
These impressions probably stem in no small part from the books which were read to us as children. This has struck me on several occasions of late, as I've had the opportunity to spend time in children's libraries and revisit some of the books my mother used to read to me as a child (including the one pictured above, Farm Animals). They're the same books my wife and I are beginning to read to our own baby son, and which helped lay a foundation for the deep-seated love and respect for animals which surfaced again in me all these years later.
But life on the farm is rarely so idyllic, as other media representations and even advertising make it out to be. While some family farms still prioritize humane standards of animal husbandry, for a few decades now they have been increasingly supplanted by industrial behemoths, or factory farms, and their hellish machinations which pass for raising animals. We'll look at what that means for baby chickens in this post, and then calves and piglets in the next couple of days.
Much like our Easter associations with adorable baby chicks, a children's learning book I picked up at our local library, called From Egg to Chicken, describes how a mother hen lays several eggs and sits on them to keep them warm (first image from a related primer, Chickens). The baby chick eventually breaks through its shell with an egg tooth, "weak and wet," and "snuggles under its mother to keep warm." The book pictures them cute and fluffy, and soon pecking for food with their mother. And the next thing you know, the chick is a happy adolescent and a full grown chicken, happily perched on a red farm fence.
In reality, virtually all chicks raised for meat are incubated artificially as eggs and hatched by a few national breeding operations. They're shipped only hours after hatching by ground and by air, and some "small hatcheries also send chicks to backyard 'hobbyists' via U.S. Postal Service delivery." Because the newborn chicks are so much more vulnerable to temperature fluctuations, and may be deprived of food and water, millions die en route or soon after delivery ("An HSUS Report: Welfare Issues with Transport of Day-Old Chicks" and United Poultry Concerns' "Shipping Baby Chicks: Oppose Senate Bill 2395")
Unfathomably worse, around 200 million male chicks are sorted out by hatcheries and tossed aside because they "serve no purpose to egg companies - alive - because they don’t lay eggs, and don’t grow fast enough to be sold for meat." And the means of killing include allowing them to slowly suffocate in plastic bags and grabage receptacles, as well “instantaneous euthanasia” through being ground alive in a macerator or meat grinder, as a recent Mercy for Animals undercover investigation exposes (Animal Planet's "Egg Industry Grinds Millions of Baby Chicks Alive" and MFA's documentary Fowl Play).
The following footage is disturbing, but we cannot turn our eyes from this industry-accepted, absolute degradation of God's precious, newborn creatures:
Apparently these practices, which our contributor William Kruidenier has strongly condemned on his own blog, are even behind some cage free operations. And the female chicks?
They go to the debeaking machine, which burns off the beak with a laser to prevent hens from pecking one another. In a normal life, the chicks would be sheltered and comforted by their mother’s wings for the first part of their life. The video shows the chicks hanging by their beak from the machine as they squirm and flail about. (Animal Planet)
You can imagine the remainder of their lives are also largely miserable, whether as egg-laying hens or broilers raised for meat.
Lord, please work on behalf of these vulnerable chicks whom you love, to urgently remove the grossest violations of their value and dignity as your creatures. And please help us adjust our own consumption habits to reflect the standards of care and compassion we used to believe existed for all farm animals, and want to see honored.
(all images copyright their respective owners: Farm Animals illustrated by Irma Wilde (Grosset & Dunlap '80), From Egg to Chicken (Start to Finish) by Robin Nelson (Lerner '03), Chickens (First Step Nonfiction Farm Animals) by Robin Nelson (Lerner '08); last photo courtesy Farm Sanctuary)
Ben DeVries
I felt a bit of pang of conscience today for singling out the children's books I did, even though some specific examples were necessary to illustrate the disparity between idealism and reality for farm animals, including baby chicks. But I want to make clear that Farm Animals is a classic children's story of a duckling searching for his mother on a family farm, first published in 1960 when factory farming wasn't nearly so dominant. And the other two, while they may reflect an increasingly rare ideal in today's world (in setting and in refraining from mentioning the ultimate fate of the animals), are both wonderful resources to help children learn about and better appreciate chickens and chicks. I would happily read them to my own son.
Reader Comments (2)
Wow! That was hard to read. As painful as it was, I am glad I am more informed. Every now and then we need the sober reminders to catch our attention. This one certainly did.
Though part of me wishes I had not read this, especially the part about the male chicks being ground up, I think this helps me to better care for these creations of our Father.
Thanks Ben.
Thanks for your note, Scott, and for your identification with the post. In all honesty, that was hard material for me to watch and work into the post as well, I got rather physically unsettled at one point. This stuff just can't continue ... Again, thank you for your courage in persevering through the difficult material yourself, I admire your willingness to do so - Ben