A group working to make eggs un-palatable to everyone has a video showing baby roosters killed by being tossed into a grinder. Male chicks apparently have no market value.
No, I didn’t watch the video. Yes, I think I’d have a problem killing cute little chicks, though I could get over it. A friend told me about killing quail for the first time recently, and he was rather disturbed going into it. But sanity returned to him, and he learned that quail come apart like they are made to be eaten. Fancy that.
About the chickens, I know the animal group thinks killing or eating animals is essentially cruel, but I don’t think most people do. A video like this will probably disturb those who are so completely removed from the land or natural processes that they don’t think where their food comes from and that any blood, dirt, or sweat is unnice and unwanted. (Unnice should be in the dictionary. It’s a good, modern word.)
I would think farmers have killed roosters for years, and I see that claim made on this blog post talking about city people keeping chickens in their city yards. Roosters fight with each other and make a lot of noise. That’s very unnice, but you can’t talk them out of it, so you have to grind them up. Someone from the hatchery shown in the video, according to USA Today, says this type of “instantaneous euthanasia” is standard for the industry and acceptable as humane by vets. It’s the industrial angle that makes this yucky, I think. Who wants to think of any animal being tossed in a grinder? Anyone would rather the company wring the chicks neck with their hands.
A grinder seems like a pretty nasty way to do the job to me, but if the vets say it’s OK, I have no standing to argue. I came to know chickens quite well as a boy, and I do not like them personally. They are hostile, and if one of their own gets hurt, they peck it to death.
When I went down to New Ulm this weekend, I was talking about these things with my friend. We’d both grown up on farms, and agreed that one major problem of life today is that people know nothing about life and death in the real world.
I also killed a young deer with my car. Not (in spite of what I’ve said above) on purpose.
While my car, I came upon a deer someone else had killed and taken the head off in the street. It was almost midnight. I was a bit confused, and after I realized that was a headless deer in the road ahead of me and the truck with it’s lights on the deer wasn’t going move on, I turned around.
How is Mrs. Hermanson doing after you said, “Oh Dear!”
No damage I can perceive, other than a dent in the front fender.
If the blades are kept good and sharp, and the machine well-maintained, I doubt that the chicks ever feel a thing. I’m genuinely bothered by the specter of adult poultry being kept in concentration camp pens, but I think this is a bit of misplaced outrage.
RE: The Killing of Chickens. This sounds like it should be a title of a new good book of some kind…
As a youth in Iowa, I was the fellow assigned by my parents to get out the old hatchet and be-head the sadistic rooster for Sunday lunches. We actually had a stump chopping block and a hatchet. I held the rooster by his legs/feet and made the great swing/s. Now, even though I was raised on a farm in Iowa…. we were NOT too familiar with sharp instruments, (except for mower-sickle blades, but that is another story….). The hatchet was seldom sharp and it usually took two to three strokes to make the job done. At this point the rooster was flopping all over, spraying blood all over me in the process.
In a panic, I usually let loose of his feet and started running. For whatever reason… he ALWAYS followed me. Scared me to death when he did that, (I’ll spare the reader the more gory details)… how could he see me to follow me so well.
Soon, he ran out of “gas” and collapsed. I then brought him up to the house for my mother to gut and clean. (To this day, I can still smell the odor of “pin-feathers” burning as she took a lit newspaper to the naked body of the bird.) No longer would that guy attack me in the hen/chicken house when I went to collect the eggs.
Yup, chickens can be nasty customers. I think I read that evolutionists say they’re descended from Tyrannasaurus Rex or something.