Eat less chicken

A boom in industrial kitten farming, reports the Chinese newspaper Diàn bào, is creating waste products that are poisoning the environment. Activists claim that kitten manure, which is being spread across farmers’ fields, as well as being released in sewage spills, is turning water green and making it smell.

This is being fuelled by a rising demand for kitten meat in China, where the average Chinese person eats 35kg of kitten meat — or about 23 kittens — per year.

Okay, they don’t. I made that up. But if you read about the industrial farming of kittens, I think you would care less about the environment than, well — the kittens.

“A boom in industrial chicken farming,” reports The Telegraph, “is creating a waste product that campaigners claim is ‘like asbestos’ for our waterways.” British consumers, according to the Tele, eat 35kg of poultry meat a year — equivalent to about 23 chickens. I have absolutely no doubt that getting rid of the feces of hundreds of millions of chickens has environmental side effects. But I also have to ask — what about the chickens?

Sure, I have no emotional attachment to chickens. They aren’t the most beautiful creatures. Their beady eyes and scrawny necks are actually a bit off-putting. But ethical thinking is not a beauty contest. Chickens are cognitively, socially sophisticated animals which can solve problems, form hierarchies, socially bond, and play.  

I’m not saying a chicken is going to read Ulysses or study astrophysics. I’m just saying a chicken almost certainly suffers when it has minimal space, lives in its own filth, and is fed to the point that its limbs don’t work. This, again, applies to hundreds of millions of chickens just in the United Kingdom.

I’m sure this has damaging environmental consequences. According to the Telegraph, it can lead to deaths among the thousands of salmon in the River Wye. But while we should certainly consider the predicament of the thousands of salmon, I still find it baffling that the Telegraph never even mentions the predicament of the millions of chickens. Sure — the salmon are endangered. That is relevant. But I think it is also consequential that the salmon are outside — in front of the people — while the chickens are locked away, out of sight and out of mind.

Recent reports have alleged that the government is going to relax planning rules for factory farms. Industry sources claim that giving chickens more space — by which they mean generously providing chickens with a piece of ground of an A4 sheet of paper on which to live — means they need more space to keep the same production levels. Activists fear that once planning permissions have been granted, voluntary commitments to lower density will be abandoned.

I don’t know. Perhaps this will turn out to be too cynical. But I don’t think there should be the same production levels when even the more compassionate standards entail such an unnatural cramped existence.

I don’t often have a lot of time for left-wing arguments about “othering” and “marginalisation”, obviously, but they have some value when practices that would be rejected if applied to cuter animals like rabbits and guinea pigs are applied to more intelligent creatures because we mentally classify them as food. I’m a vegetarian, but I do understand that the argument about killing animals per se is complicated. 

Still, if you really want to eat chicken, at least consider eating less of it — and paying more for it.