USDA plan to speed up poultry-processing lines could increase risk of bird abuse

[alp227]

Source: Washington Post

Nearly 1 million chickens and turkeys are unintentionally boiled alive each year in U.S. slaughterhouses, often because fast-moving lines fail to kill the birds before they are dropped into scalding water, Agriculture Department records show.

Now the USDA is finalizing a proposal that would allow poultry companies to accelerate their processing lines, with the aim of removing pathogens from the food supply and making plants more efficient. But that would also make the problem of inhumane treatment worse, according to government inspectors and experts in poultry slaughter.

USDA inspectors assigned to the plants say much of the cruel treatment they witness is tied to the rapid pace at which employees work, flipping live birds upside down and shackling their legs. If the birds are not properly secured, they might elude the automated blade and remain alive when they enter the scalder.

Over the past five years, an annual average of 825,000 chickens and 18,000 turkeys died this way, USDA public reports show, representing less than 1 percent of the total processed. Government inspectors assigned to the plants document these kills, which are easily spotted because the birds’ skin becomes discolored.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/usda-plan-to-speed-up-poultry-processing-lines-could-increase-risk-of-bird-abuse/2013/10/29/aeeffe1e-3b2e-11e3-b6a9-da62c264f40e_singlePage.html

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Hey Americans! THIS is the way your fatty diet is created. Own up to it.

[gopiscrap]

1. it's all about making fucking money

[tofuandbeer]

2. +1

[kestrel91316]

3. The lines are already way too fast to process the birds hygienically.

Speeding them up more is going to cause MORE problems with contamination, not less.

Glad I gave up meat.

[True Blue Door]

4. The most obvious solution is to simply stop eating animals.

Humanity has come far enough morally, intellectually, and economically to finally recognize that when people have a choice, there's no justification to kill conscious creatures just to steal the nutritional content of their bodies.

When you ask them up front, most people will more or less admit it: What gives you the right to kill and take the bodies of other creatures? Does the power to do so give you the right?

Moreover, it's just a more intelligent way of life to use land for making food humans will eat directly rather than wasting it to feed factory-farm animals who live in hell and then die cruelly while cultivating antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

[moriah]

10. What is your opinion of properly managed hunting of deer?

I live in a state where it's not uncommon to see them walking down the city streets. Humans have driven away most of their larger natural predators. Many die on the roads, and if they aren't lucky enough to be killed instantly (most aren't from a collision) few have the courage to put the poor suffering animal out of its misery.

Is properly managed hunting of an overpopulated creature when we've messed with the natural balance -- where animals are killed humanely, they live their natural lives in the forest until they're harvested, and the meat is *eaten*, not wasted -- wrong by that argument? The butcher shops around here will process a deer carcass for you, and if you don't want the meat yourself, they have an arrangement to donate it for local licensed soup kitchens to use in cooking. Or you can give it to your neighbors.

[True Blue Door]

11. It's okay when there are public safety issues.

Keeping large animals away from roads where they might kill human drivers in a collision is reasonable, as long as the hunting is strictly managed geographically and numerically. Better that some number of animals die being hunted, as painlessly as possible, than the same number or more get into agonizing accidents and die slowly in fear. But penalty for breaking protocol, overhunting, or cruel hunting methods should be huge and strictly enforced. And there should constantly be attempts to look for better alternatives. Just because predator/prey dynamics come from nature doesn't mean we should accept them forever.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

5. I got some leg quarters once that looked like they weren't properly bled and some were broken....

Someone said a classic chicken truck might have been in an accident and they gathered up the dead birds and sold them anyway but I figured it was just typical sloppy work at the slaughterhouse.

[FailureToCommunicate]

6. self delete

[alp227]

8. "There is no humane way to kill animals."

Do you consider killing inherently inhumane? What about hunting?

And are you also against euthanasia for terminally ill living beings?