Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
There are occasions when standard handling techniques
appear questionable or cruel on video but in reality are more
nuanced. For instance, scenes from the documentary
Samsara
(
http://vimeo.com/73234721
) shows a machine (referred to as
a mechanical chicken catching system) traveling on the edge
of a dense crowd of birds within a barn, catching birds with
soft, rotating fingers, and moving them onto a conveyor belt,
where humans pick them up and place them in a bin to be
transported.
The catching machine is actually considered to be quite
humane, both for the birds and workers. Without the machine,
intensive and strenuous human labor is needed, where work-
ers enter large flocks and pick the birds up by hand, holding
them upside down with three or four other birds and then
placing them in a cage for transport. The birds experience
stress when being caught, regardless of which method is used,
but there is evidence that stress and injury rates are lower with
the machine. Perhaps future research will find newer tech-
nologies to advance and improve handling methods, but the
important thing is to keep asking how animal welfare might
be improved and conduct scientific research to parse the good
ideas from the bad.
Even a casual perusing of YouTube using the search terms
“undercover + investigation + farm” will return a number of
videos showing pigs, cattle, and chickens handled cruelly.
Some are too difficult for most people to watch, but often,
many of the videos are interspersed with both cruel treatment
and acceptable day-to-day management practices. When such
videos are viewed by the layperson, all practices presented
on the video are lumped into a single “inhumane” category
that further confuses those far removed from agriculture and
obscures the discussion of livestock welfare. While depictions
of cruel treatment are not representative of most farms and are
misleading to viewers, they sometimes show what is possible
when humans do not abide by accepted norms of animal treat-
ment. Every new depiction of cruelty posted online is not only