‘Full investigation’ launched over ‘cruel’ Morrisons chickens grown on Norfolk and Suffolk farms

‘Full investigation’ launched over ‘cruel’ Morrisons chickens grown on Norfolk and Suffolk farms | ITV News Anglia

Supermarket chain Morrisons says it has launched an urgent investigation after campaigners claimed chickens on farms run by its suppliers are being grown so fast they can barely stand up.

In a video narrated by the naturalist Chris Packham undercover filming claims to show fast-growing birds deformed and dying on farms in Norfolk and Suffolk.

Open Cages, an animal welfare charity, said new breeds of birds that grow fast feed consumers want for cheaper chicken. They claim modern chickens grow 400% faster than those farmed in 1950.

These chicks are born and locked into these giant factory farms. And in only 35 days are forced to grow to a monstrous size. Frankenchickens are cheap and efficient. Basically all cheap chicken will come from Frankenchicken breeds . People look at this footage and they will think that this is an anomaly – they’ll ask me if something illegal is happening here but no this is perfectly legal.

Connor Jackson, Open Cages Chief Executive

The organisation filmed in four intensive chicken farms in May and June. 

Those farms supply the Cranswick chicken factory which provides meat for Morrisons labelled Red Tractor approved, something designed to reassure people of high standards. 

ITV News approached Red Tractor for a comment but have not had a response at the time of writing. 

TV naturalist Chris Packham said it is ‘cruel beyond belief’ and is calling for Morrisons to sign the Better Chicken Commitment which would mean only slower growing chickens are used.

Other retailers like M&S, Waitrose and KFC are among 240 companies across Europe to commit to stop selling the fast growing birds. 

In a statement Morrisons say they have launched a ‘full investigation’ and that they ‘care deeply about animal welfare’.

We care deeply about animal welfare and require all our suppliers to maintain the highest standards. We have asked Cranswick to conduct a full investigation and get back to us.

Morrisons

Cranswick have yet to respond to our requests for comment, but elsewhere the company has said “we take the welfare of chickens at our farms very seriously and it is always our first priority.”

ITV news has not been able to independently verify the footage that came out of the farms. The video is also edited so may not reflect overall conditions the chickens face.

Morrisons Related:

Morrisons Misery.com

it’s #MorrisonsMisery for Chickens!

FrankenChicken:

Morrisons claims to “take animal welfare seriously.” However, despite horrific animal suffering in its supply chain, it has refused to sign up to the Better Chicken Commitment. These scientific measures are backed by over 40 animal protection charities from across Europe. Bred to grow so fast their bodies can’t keep up, ‘FrankenChickens’ sold at Morrisons are living lives of misery. It’s time for change. When will Morrisons hold true to their word and take this issue seriously?

BRED TO SUFFER

Birds have been so genetically manipulated that they grow to be three times as large as they would without such invasive tampering — and in less time. This accelerated growth leaves birds crippled under their own weight and causes a myriad of other problems.

TRAPPED IN FILTH

Industrial farming operations house hundreds of thousands of birds inside filthy, windowless sheds. Due to this severe overcrowding, these birds are provided slightly less space than a sheet of paper to live on. Often they are unable to walk and lie in ammonia-laden litter causing sores and respiratory problems.

Regards Mark

GOOD FARM ANIMAL WELFARE AWARDS GO VIRTUAL

Good Farm Animal Welfare Awards go virtual | Compassion in World Farming (ciwf.org.uk)

Today (24^th June), we hosted our virtual Good Farm Animal Welfare Awards.

The annual awards were streamlined this year to allow businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic to progress towards the delivery of their existing animal welfare commitments. But, despite a difficult 12-months for the industry, we are pleased to recognise 10 leading food businesses for their inspiring and often innovative work in the field of farm animal welfare and sustainable food production.

CLEVER MARKETING PUTS ANIMAL WELFARE ON THE POLITICAL AGENDA

This year’s Best Marketing Award was presented to French, higher welfare poultry producers, Les Fermiers de Loué, whose clever combination of humour and political relevance generated huge public interest with their street marketing campaign promoting their higher welfare credentials.

INNOVATION IN ANIMAL WELFARE

Hilton Seafood UK and Danone both received Special Recognition Awards for their innovative work and their capacity to provide a global baseline for best practice in animal welfare. Danone stood out for its global assessment tool for dairy cow welfare and Hilton Seafood UK’s more humane method of slaughter of King Prawns will benefit more than 100 million animals in its first year, with the potential to benefit billions of animals across the industry!

CHAMPIONING ‘LESS AND BETTER’

Italian manufacturer Barilla was awarded a Special Recognition Award under the Planet Friendly banner for successfully implementing cage free eggs across its entire operation in over 100 countries, benefitting over 2 million hens each year. In addition, Barilla has significantly reduced its greenhouse gas emissions, by decreasing its use of egg as an ingredient and by the impressive achievement of offsetting three of its brands’ CO2 emissions completely.

SUSTAINABLE FOOD AND FARMING ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Small producers Lynbreck Croft and Hollis Mead Organic Dairy were awarded in the Sustainable Food & Farming category for producing higher welfare meat, dairy and eggs in ways that protect, improve and restores wildlife and the environment.

McDonald’s UK & Ireland was a worthy winner of a Sustainable Food & Farming Corporate Award for their Regenerative Beef Project. Their rotational grazing approach helps to rebuild the soil, recharges watersheds and increases biodiversity. With over 4 million customers every day to McDonald’s in the UK alone, this project demonstrates the game-changing potential for the industry.

GOOD EGG AND RABBIT ACHIEVEMENTS

Leading Italian producer, Galbusera, received a Good Egg Award for its commitment to sell only cage-free eggs, and Chinese producer Happy Eggs received the very first Good Egg Award in China. Additionally, Nature d’Eleveurs owned by LDC in France received a Good Rabbit Commendation for committing to higher welfare, cage-free production for fattening rabbits.

OVER 2.2 BILLION ANIMALS BENEFITTING

“I’m humbled to share that, since our Food Business programme and awards began in 2007, the total number of animals benefitting is over 2.2 billion,” says our Global CEO, Philip Lymbery. “This is a truly amazing impact, which fills me with great hope for the future, for animal welfare, humankind and our planet. I’d like to congratulate and thank all of this year’s winners for all they are doing to make life better for millions of farmed animals.”

Read more about our Food Business impact.

Regards Mark

ASPCA

This is for US citizens to sign.

A recent investigation by Mercy For Animals into a chicken farm supplying wholesale grocery giant Costco revealed absolutely horrifying conditions. Tens of thousands of birds are spending their short, painful lives crowded together in sheds—many suffering from open skin sores and agonizing injuries related to their hyper-fast growth rates.

Whatever you eat, we can all agree that this is not okay. Costco needs to hear this from its customers and the American public.

Sign our open letter to Costco below, which we’ll deliver to executives as we ask them to address this urgent issue by adopting meaningful and transparent animal welfare standards.

Action Link – Tell Costco: Animals Deserve Better | ASPCA

Regards Mark

With thanks as always to Stacey at ‘Our Compass’ – Regards Mark

Regarding the Pain of Farmed Animals

by Stacey

All animals exploited for food, die for food. As long as animal exploitation exists in an accepting, apathetic world, animals will suffer: no animal farm is a humane animal farm, that’s the lie people exploit to validate the violence they inflict on animals. And don’t forget that globally, >90% of animals exploited for consumption were “produced” in intensive operations, and that figure rises to >95% in the USA.

Stop pretending there is a right way to do the wrong thing, if you care about animals, you’ll stop your participation in their exploitation. And even if you don’t care about animals, that still doesn’t give you the privilege to abuse their bodies and kill them. You don’t have to love or care for animals, you just have to not hurt them. SL

Source United Poultry Concerns

By Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns

Factory farms are places in which large numbers of genetically and chemically manipulated animals are warehoused to grow into food for human consumption. In these places, animals are mired in the squalor that results when groups of creatures of any species are crowded together in accumulating waste. We now know that these animals are not only forcibly confined in environmental filth including toxic gases, but that they are caged in bodies wracked with painful deformities and diseases inflicted on them by human beings. They are locked into what the twentieth-century animal rights activist Henry Spira referred to as “the universe of pain and suffering” from which there is no escape but in death.

By “we,” I mean those of us in the animal advocacy movement who focus particularly on the plight of farmed animals and who track the evidence reported by agribusiness researchers specializing in farmed animal “diseases of production” and “welfare.” For example, in “Pain in Birds,” animal scientist Michael Gentle writes that the “widespread chronic orthopedic disease in domestic poultry,” added to the fact that there is a “wide variety of receptors in the joint capsule of the chicken,” including pain receptors, supports the behavioral evidence that the birds are in chronic pain.

In 1990, the American Association of Avian Pathologists identified three of the most common bone pathologies associated with the forced rapid growth of present day poultry: Angular bone deformities, in which the bones become bowed in or out or twisted; tibial dyschondroplasia, in which the bones develop fractures and fissures; and spondylothesis, in which the vertebra become dislocated and/or cartilage proliferates in the lower backbone, pinching on the spinal cord and lower back nerves.

For all of these tortures, no pain relief is offered. Having been in a “pain management” program since May following my spinal surgery, I both can and cannot imagine the unrelieved suffering of these birds. I think about their suffering in its own right and also in terms of our society’s expectation of immediate pharmaceutical relief for everything from mild depression to minor stomach upset.

Before Factory Farms

In his book Animal Revolution, Richard Ryder (who coined the term “speciesism”) offers a glimpse of how animals were prepared for meals in the typical 18th-century English household during the Age of Enlightenment. Alexander Pope, the great English poet of the time, described “kitchens covered with blood and filled with the cries of creatures expiring in tortures.”

Many people believe that the pre-factory-farming era was idyllic, or nearly so, for chickens, turkeys, and other farmed animals. In reality, factory farming is an extension of age-old attitudes and practices toward animals raised for food. For example, Keith Thomas, in Man and the Natural World, observes that poultry and game birds in previous centuries “were often fattened in darkness and confinement, sometimes being blinded as well.”

Geese were thought to put on weight if the webs of their feet were nailed to the floor, and “it was the custom of some seventeenth-century housewives to cut the legs off living fowl in the belief that it made their flesh more tender.” The London poulterers, Thomas writes, “kept thousands of live birds in their cellars and attics” in conditions forecasting today’s factory farms.

In A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman describes culinary practices that arose in eighteenth-century England, when “bored city dwellers became fascinated by sadism,” including the idea that “torturing an animal made its meat healthier and better tasting.” One recipe starts out: “Take a red cock that is not too old and beat him to death.” Another instructs:

Take a goose, or a Duck, or some such lively creature pull off all her feathers, only the head and neck must be spared: then make a fire round about her, not too close to her, that the smoke do not choke her, and that the fire may not burn her too soon; not too far off, that she may not escape free: within the circle of the fire let there be set small cups and pots of water, wherein salt and honey are mingled; and let there be set also chargers full of sodden Apples, cut into small pieces in the dish. The Goose must be all larded, and basted over with butter: put then fire about her, but do not make too much haste, when as you see her begin to roast; for by walking about and flying here and there, being cooped in by the fire that stops her way out the unwearied Goose is kept in; she will fall to drink the water to quench her thirst, and cool her heart and all her body, and the Apple sauce will make her dung and cleanse and empty her. And when she roasteth, and consumes inwardly, always wet her head and heart with a wet sponge; and when you see her giddy with running, and begin to stumble, her heart wants moisture, and she is roasted enough. Take her up and set her before your guests and she will cry as you cut off any part from her and will be almost eaten up before she be dead: it is mighty pleasant to behold!

Eighteenth-and nineteenth-century literature offers additional testimony regarding the treatment of chickens and other domestic fowl. In Tobias Smollett’s novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, published in 1771, the Welsh traveler Matthew Bramble complains during a visit to London that “the poultry is all rotten, in consequence of a fever, occasioned by the infamous practice of sewing up the gut, that they may be the sooner fattened in coops, in consequence of this cruel retention.”

In order to whiten their flesh, calves, sheep, birds, and sometimes lambs, were stuck in the neck so that the blood would drain out slowly for hours and days. The wound would be stopped up and the animal would be left to linger alive for another day or so. In The Rural Life of England, William Howitt describes the practice of hanging live turkeys in the kitchen upside down by their heels to bleed out “through a vein opened under the tongue,” to improve their color. This is also how calves became veal prior to the adoption of the veal crate in the twentieth century – they were suspended upside down from the kitchen ceiling.

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