I am only one, But still I am one.
I cannot do everything, But still I can do something;
And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do… Edward Everett Hale
What on Earth does chickens have to do with living well? This morning while waiting on my coffee to brew I glanced at the Ottawa Herald lying on the counter and the headline story jumped out at me, “City hopes to cage chicken squawk.” The next line continued, “Request for chickens in Ottawa runs afoul of residents with ruffled feathers.” The point of the article was the city commissioners were discussing a citizen’s request to modify the ordinance against chickens and other livestock. The discussion centered on the noise adolescent chickens make during the mating ritual and the aroma of defecation. Now I am not taking these serious issues lightly.
Chickens are a serious issue because they have become a mainstay in the diet of the majority of people in this county. If chickens are not acceptable in their natural state and we can not live with them maybe it is time to look at social justice for chickens. Before you get the idea that I am going to advocate animal rights and a vegetarian lifestyle…let me make it perfectly clear, as a nutritionist, if I were going to be stranded on a desert island for a while and could choose survival foods, the first two that I would choose would be eggs and coconuts. Back to that old question…which comes first the egg or the chicken?
We will start with the egg which from a nutritional standpoint offers Omega 3 essential fatty acids. In recent years, large numbers of people have adopted low-fat diets and regularly eat low-fat or zero-fat foods, in the false belief that such diets are healthy and can help them to reduce weight and lower their risk of heart disease. There is compelling evidence that people eating low-fat diets have greater feelings of anger, hostility and depression. These mood changes appear to be biological consequences of inadequate dietary fat in the central nervous system.
Omega-6 fatty acids and omega-3 fatty acids are essential nutrients and without them we cannot achieve and maintain health. The healthy ratio lies between 1:1 and 4:1. The current ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids in the U.S. diet ranges from 20:1 to 30:1. Corn, soybean, safflower, sunflower, and cottonseed oil are all high in omega-6 fatty acids. Our diets have far too many omega-6′s in relationship to omega-3′s.
One of the best sources of omega-3 fatty acids is…you guessed it…the EGG. But not just any eggs… eggs produced by free range chickens fed a diet of greens and insects. Chickens LOVE lettuce, carrots, and a variety of vegetables. Another need for chickens is grit. Grit is small rocks or pebbles that chickens eat. The grit goes into their “grit pouch” and actually helps digest the food the chicken eats. The grit acts as a kind of “teeth” for chickens to digest with. The grit pouch functions like our digestive system breaking down their food.
Here is some general information about chickens that are living well. Hens begin laying eggs at 18-20 weeks of age and a healthy chicken will lay about one egg every 26 to 28 hours for 4 to 6 days then take a rest. Although most hens lay once per day, as the days get shorter they will slow down since they need sunlight to stimulate a gland in their eyes to produce egg laying hormones. A hen does not need a rooster to lay eggs but an unfertilized egg will not grow into a chicken. The eggs we buy in the store are not fertilized (they don’t hatch). The size of the egg is dependant on the age of the hen. Older birds lay larger eggs. There is no nutritional difference between a brown egg and a white egg. Different breeds of birds lay a different color egg.
Now is the time we think about not only social justice for chickens but the “food” that we are consuming and feeding our children. To date, there are no federal welfare laws regulating poultry raising, transport, or slaughter in the United States.
The modern hen laying eggs for human consumption works in the equivalent of a corporate sweatshop. She is an anxious, frustrated, fear-ridden bird forced to spend 10 to 12 months squeezed inside a small wire cage with three to eight or nine other tormented hens living in tiers of identical cages in gloomy sheds holding 50,000 to 125,000 debeaked, terrified malnourished birds.
Toxic ammonia rises from the decomposing uric acid in the manure pits beneath the cages to cause ammonia-burned eyes and chronic respiratory disease in millions of hens. Studies of the effect of ammonia on eggs suggest that even at low concentrations significant quantities of ammonia can be absorbed into the egg.
These hens suffer from the reproductive maladies that afflict female birds deprived of exercise: masses and bits of eggs clog their oviducts which become inflamed and paralyzed; eggs are formed that are too big to be laid; uteruses “prolapse,” pushing through the vagina of small birds forced to strain day after day to expel huge eggs. In recent decades, hens’ oviducts have become infested with salmonellae bacteria that enter the forming egg causing food poisoning in consumers.
This sweat-shop system depends on debeaking and antibiotics. Many of the antibiotics used to control the rampant viral and bacterial diseases of chickens in crowded confinement can also be used to manipulate egg production. For example, virginiamycin is said to increase feed conversion per egg laid, bacitracin to stimulate egg production, and oxytetracycline to improve eggshell quality.
The hens are debeaked with a hot machine blade once and often twice during their lives, typically at one day old and again at seven weeks old, because a young beak will often grow back. Debeaking causes severe, chronic pain and suffering researchers compare to human phantom limb and stump pain. Between the horn and bone of the beak is a think layer of highly sensitive tissue. The hot blade cuts through this sensitive tissue impairing the hen’s ability to eat, drink, wipe her beak, and preen normally. Debeaking is done to offset the effects of the compulsive pecking that can afflict birds designed by nature to roam, scratch, and peck at the ground all day, not sit in prison; and to save feed costs and promote conversion of less food into more eggs, because debeaked birds have impaired grasping ability and are in pain and distress, therefore eating less, flinging their food less, and “wasting” less energy than intact birds.
After this life experience, we would think that these poor creatures would be allowed to die in peace. These hens then are transported to the slaughterhouse as a mass of broken bones, oozing abscesses, bright red bruises, and internal hemorrhaging making them fit only for shredding into products that hide the true state of their flesh and their lives, such as chicken soups and pies, school lunches and other food programs developed by our food industry to dump dead laying hens onto consumers in diced up form.
At this point, I was going into how chickens are raised for mass consumption but I think you have surely gotten the idea of not only social justice for chickens but everyone who comes in contact with this health hazard. I personally cannot endure writing about this injustice anymore. Further information can be gotten from Farm Sanctuary.
Living Well with Chickens means buying products which such as free range eggs and chickens grown without hormones or antibiotics. It means reading labels and buying from local sources. Living Well is patronizing eating establishments that honor you and you health by serving nutritious food that was grown and prepared in an environmentally sustainable manner.
Living Well means taking personal responsibility for our health by seeking out and consuming non-toxic foods humanely grown chemical free.
Back to the original story…I am looking forward to the time when I live on a zero-energy environmentally sustainable casa ranch outside of city limits and live well with chickens.
Also, if you are presently Living Well with chickens or other environmentally sustainable grown food product, I would love to connect with you.
Love, Light & Lots of Laughter…Joa
***Note: Before taking offense to anything written here, please go out and do your on research on the subject matter…Joa
0 Comments until now