Quote:
I glad the chickens are truly free range. Have you seen how and where they're slaughtered? Are they processed there on the farm where they are raised, or are they stuffed into cages and taken to a processor, by which time they're pretty freaked out?
So, it's not cruel for those folks to slaughter or send to slaughter the chickens that they raise, so you can "just buy them at the market", but it's cruel for us to slaughter the chickens we raise for our own tables? What makes it worse? That we don't send them to a grocery store? This isn't making sense to me.
I can understand you not wanting to butcher the ones you raised yourself. You get attached and just can't do it. No problem. I get that. What I don't understand is why you think the ones you buy are more "cruelty-free" than the home raised birds so many of us eat. What's the distinction? They folks who raise the ones you eat, raised and cared for their birds. The ones we eat, we raised and cared for.
My own birds have pretty nice lives, even though I don't hold them and pet them. (Except for Rita, she's spoiled rotten and will never be dinner) And, I have 3 hens, "The Banditas, Thelma, Louise, and Alice" who love to sneak into the kitchen and steal dog food. They will never be dinner either, but if you try to touch them, they squawk and run. There are a couple of others who will get retirement benefits, as well. But any that I raise specifically for meat, excess or unruly roosters, birds that get badly injured by misadventure or predator, are going be butchered, as humanely as we can manage, and we will eat them.
The main difference I see is that we choose to take responsibility for the entire process, while you choose to shift "the dirty work" to somebody else. The chickens still die. You still eat them. You just hire a hit man to do the killing, instead of doing it yourself.
