I've just been reading about the River Cottage Campaign against intensively reared chickens being sold in our supermarkets and campaigning for stricter regulations on producers of chicken for meat!!
BRITAIN LOVES CHICKEN!
Really loves it... The average Brit eats almost 25 kilos of chicken a year.
More than 850 million broiler chickens are slaughtered every year in the UK.
And of these hundreds of millions of chickens, most of them - more than 95% - are reared inside, produced in industrial conditions in vast, enclosed sheds.
Their lives are pitiful – but at least they’re short...
Standard chickens are now grown from newly hatched chick to oven-ready bird in an astonishing 39 days (40 years ago it used to take 84 days).
In fact, this intensive poultry production is so slick and efficient that chicken is actually cheaper now than it was 20 years ago! In most supermarkets, you can now buy a whole chicken for less than £3...
How can it be so cheap?
A typical chicken shed holds 40,000 birds...
They never set foot outside or see natural light...
They feed round the clock – with as little as one hour of darkness for every 24 hour period...
About 5% die prematurely from heart and lung failure or suffocation in panic-induced mass smothers, or because they are culled on account of their leg injuries....
That’s 45 million factory farmed birds thrown away every year before they even reach slaughter-weight.
They grow fast. And as they grow, their living space – smaller than an A4 sheet of paper for each bird – gets more and more cramped: as they near the end of their short lives, around 17 birds are packed into each square metre.
It’s not nice – but it’s certainly cheap.
And THAT is how Tesco can afford to offer you two whole birds for a fiver...
Or how Asda can sell a whole fresh British chicken for £2. You can go to the link here and read about it
http://www.chickenout.tv/
I wonder if there were many requests our local butcher in Boscombe would get some free range chickens in?? Prob say they're too expensive....
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