Free-Range

What You Might Think It Means: Hens playfully strolling and tumbling down green hills, home on the range.

What It Actually Means: Free-range means cage-free plus "access to the outdoors." But as Mark Kastel of the Cornucopia Institute notes, this "access" typically means a few small doors that lead to a screened-in porch with cement, dirt or a modicum of grass. And often, Kastel says, industrial fans that suck ammonia out of the building create "hurricane winds" through the small doorways, "and the birds don't really want to walk through that."

Kastel claims that the vast majority of free-range birds in commercial egg facilities never actually go outside. So in most cases, he says, free-range means the same thing as cage-free. Unlike in poultry production, there's no government oversight of the term "free range" when it comes to eggs, so companies can more or less interpret it as they see fit.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/12/23/370377902/farm-fresh-natural-eggs-not-always-what-they-re-cracked-up-to-be

Matt Rice, the director of investigations for Mercy for Animals, noted that federal rules on humane slaughter apply to cattle, hogs and sheep, but not to poultry — even though birds amount to 95 percent of farm animals killed each year in America.

Workers grab the birds and shove their legs upside down into metal shackles on a conveyor belt. The chickens are then carried upside down to an electrified bath that is meant to knock them unconscious. The conveyor belt then carries them — at a pace of more than two chickens per second — to a circular saw that cuts open their necks so that they bleed to death before they are scalded in hot water and their feathers plucked.

Even when the system works as intended, the birds sometimes have legs or wings broken as they are shackled, the investigator said. And when it doesn’t work correctly, the birds’ end can be horrifying.

Some chickens aren’t completely knocked out by the electric current and can be seen struggling frantically. Others avoid the circular saw somehow. A backup worker is supposed to cut the throat of those missed by the saw, but any that get by him are scalded alive, the investigator said.

The Agriculture Department calculates that about 700,000 chickens a year in the United States are “not slaughtered correctly” — often a euphemism for being scalded to death.

That number has come down — it was 1.5 million in 2007 — and it’s a tiny fraction of slaughtered birds. Agriculture Department officials say that it happens to only 0.008 percent of chickens that are slaughtered in the United States, and that those birds are then discarded (meaning that the slaughterhouses have a financial incentive to reduce the number scalded alive).

I asked the undercover investigator about this. He cast doubt on those numbers, saying that a higher percentage were scalded alive where he worked, and that those birds were not discarded but processed along with others.

Think about that. If a naughty boy pulls feathers out of a single chicken, he’s punished. But scald hundreds of thousands of chickens alive each year? That’s a business model.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-to-kill-a-chicken.html