When you outlaw the battery pens and the growers move those birds out onto pasture, then what do you do about rain washing that waste into streams and polluting them?
The waste is managed as it is right now.
Growers now have very strict safeguards in place, for example growers who raise meat birds for the big companies like Purdue, Tyson, etc, aren't even allowed to raise a handful of hens for their eggs on their farms.
How are birds out on open pasture going to be protected from disease?
Grown in house there is little chance of contamination from wild birds flying overhead and droppings landing where they can transfer disease.
What do you do about the added expense/costs of food for people who are barely getting by now and need those low cost eggs and meat?
It's real easy for people who only keep chickens as pets or for vegetarians to set back and throw insults at the "system" as cruel and inhuman, but like it or not that system feeds billions of people, and until a better system is put in place, stopping it would be detrimental.
It's illogical to call for the closing down of that system without first addressing the pollution caused by the change, costs from loses and disease, and added expense of the new system, and food shortages that would result from doing so.
In addition, if these billions of chickens raised in houses every year were moved outside, then confining a disease outbreak would be considerably harder, and if something like bird flu broke out on one farm, it would spread like wildfire to all farms anywhere near that farm by wild birds before it could be contained.
Would you rather see uncomfortable chickens in a house, or billions of dead chickens spread out over the countryside?
As much as I dislike the battery pen method of raising FOOD for the masses, the alternatives don't look any more promising.
If those birds are moved outside, then disease could effect all of the little guys, and the pet chicken people.
It could cripple the industry all together and wipe out the chicken population in as little as one year, like the great plague did in England back in the 1800's.
People on this board who keep calling for that system to be shut down, should also look at the consequences of just what it is that they are calling for, and address as well what would result and how that result could be dealt with.
I notice that my posts in this thread were removed from yesterday, I think that's sad that political correctness should be held as more important than truth and fact, I think it will come back to bite those who removed my posts, but that's up to them.
