Veganinthecountry’s Weblog

So I haven’t blogged for a while. The 100% raw food lasted about 9 days but I’m still about half raw and running almost daily so I’m feeling great.

On to FrankenFarms… I mean Foster Farms.  Let me share my experience with discovering how insanely cruel this company (and all animal agriculture companies) are.

Our flock of chickens dwindled down to half a dozen and I wanted a few more. We are vegan and don’t eat the eggs. Every chicken that lives at our house lives a very lucky life indeed. I knew that I couldn’t go to the feed store because of course I’m not going to support the egg facilities so I looked on Craigslist, hoping to find someone who was going to get rid of some “useless” old egg layers and I could take them off their hands and let them finish out their lives in peace, right?

Well, I found a post titled ‘meat birds’ and contacted the guy. He wanted $5 a bird and there were 12 of them. Turns out he was a Future Farmer’s of America student at the high school and he raised these birds, they were all of 8 weeks old and ready for slaughter. The whole situation was very strange. I do live on an acre in the country but have limits on the amount of birds and didn’t want to upset my neighbors with crowing so I’m on the phone with him trying to figure out if they’re all hens and I’m sure he’s just thinking what the heck do you care if they’re hens or not? They’re for eating!

So anyway, I come home with 11 BIG white baby birds. I say they were babies but these guys were HUGE, bigger than my smaller hens we already had. I really had no concept of what a FF chicken would look like until I brought them home. So we took care of our “babies”, my kids taught them how to find bugs and we fell in love with them. Initially, we couldn’t get them away from the grain feeder, they ate like maniacs. They didn’t act like normal chickens at all, they only had eyes for their food. It was really crazy to watch. They wouldn’t willingly walk away from the food and water.

After a while, as they gained weight RAPIDLY, I realized that I needed to encourage them to get exercise and do things aside from eating. I went to the local feedstore (shows you how much I knew back then. As though the feed store was going to really know how to keep these birds alive and healthy) and she informed me that “broilers” would eat themselves to death and that there was nothing I could to to stop it. She also suggested that I go and adopt myself a dog from the animal shelter and donate these chickens to the local food bank. Yes sure, because I spent $40 to rescue these birds only to give them to the local food bank. I was extremely annoyed with the insinutation that I was selfish to keep these birds and that if I really cared about humanity, I would have them slaughtered. Don’t you just love the irony of that?

So I did some of my own research. I discovered that these poor birds were ‘designed’ to gain weight rapidly. In fact, so rapidly that they developed heart problems, could not hold their own weight under their legs and suffered from all kinds of maladies.

I had a very hard time finding information on these issues because generally these birds just don’t live beyond 2 months of age. The few accounts I could find of broilers health issues were at places like Farm Sanctuary and I learned that these birds most likely would be dead by 5 to 6 months of age. It hit me like a ton of bricks what our society was doing to these helpless animals. I came home and just sat by the coop and watched them eat and eat and eat and I cried and cried and cried. Then I got mad.

I reduced their grain by at least 50%, combined it with whole corn and massive amounts of raw scraps from my kitchen. Sometimes not even scraps but fresh whole berries, avocados and seeds. It was an adjustment for them and at first they resisted eating anything but the grain. We took them out of the coop and closed it so they would be forced to walk around and explore their new territory. They became so completely attached to us. It was so hilarious to see them when I would come walking down the slope of our hill toward their favorite resting spots. They would get up and start flapping and running toward me. Their ill proportioned bodies would come clumsily toward me, swaying and limping along… but they did run.

I did get some curious looks and comments when telling people about our birds. Why would I want to spend all that money on feeding these birds? Why didn’t I just eat them? DUH, that one’s obvious! Couldn’t I see that they were suffering more living with me than if I just killed them? It is true that they suffered… but I was not about to take the blame for what Foster Freaking Farms did to them. They did develope pulmonary edema. The fluid around their hearts became so enlarged that it sometimes nearly dragged on the ground.

One by one, they succumbed to heat stroke, heart attack and other unknown ailments. We buried them, said a prayer and whispered our good-byes to them. Some suffered so much in the end that I did take them to the vet to be put down humanely. The vet workers were sometimes polite. I knew the the least I could do for these birds was give them a trip to the vet in an air-conditioned car, some soft straw and their favorite treat of cantaloupe seeds in a tupperware lid next to them.

The hardest one to watch go was Ace. Ace loved the ladies (hens) but as he grew to a nearly whopping twenty pounds, I had to keep him either confined in the coop while the ladies roamed the yard or vice versa. He was so heavy that he injured the hens trying to mate and eventually I’m sure he would have just broken their backs. So, one morning I went down to the coop to let the birds out and Ace didn’t get up to greet me like usual. On closer inspection, I could see that Ace *couldn’t* get up. His tired legs just gave out under him. He could spin himself in a circle but that was it. I gave him a waterer and some favorite treats right next to him and sat to pet him. In his state, he couldn’t harm the hens so I opened the entire coop up and his ladies came to see him. It was so bittersweet. He could finally have his ladies near him and they rested in the warm morning sun together, so sad that the only thing that could bring him closer to his natural state of being surrounded by his hens was his crippled state.  He actually tucked his little head under my chin at the vet right before he was called back.

Today, we are left with one Foster Farms rooster. Chochie has made it to the ripe old age of seven months and I can see that he is on his last legs, literally. It’s ironic that in the beginning, I was so concerned about having several roosters crowing and upsetting my neighbors but in the end, most of them didn’t live long enough to crow effectively. I like to think that these birds have made good ambassadors of veganism. I know a few people who don’t feel the same way about chicken meat and eggs now and that’s a good thing. What’s so sad to me though is how hidden this is. Even I, a serious animal right activist, didn’t have any idea of what a broiler chicken really was.

I’ll end with a couple pictures of these special guys.

This first one was a weigh-in. We stopped weighing for a while. This was at the height of my mission to keep them healthy.

I can’t seem to find anymore outdoor shots but this was an indoor photo shoot I did with my daughter.

I’ve been putting off telling their story because it depresses me so much. I’ve been up since 4 this morning, unable to sleep so I thought it was a good time. And now at 6, with my chickens chatting up a storm and my last “broiler” boy crowing, I’ll end it.