New Way to Help Chickens Cross to Other Side (Coming soon: stress-free?)

NY Times ^ | 10/21/10 | WILLIAM NEUMAN

[Libloather]

New Way to Help Chickens Cross to Other Side
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
Published: October 21, 2010

Shoppers in the supermarket today can buy chicken free of nearly everything but adjectives. It comes free-range, cage-free, antibiotic-free, raised on vegetarian feed, organic, even air-chilled.

The chicken producers are planning to use systems like this one to render the birds unconscious before they are hung by their feet to have their throats slit.

Coming soon: stress-free?

Two premium chicken producers, Bell & Evans in Pennsylvania and Mary’s Chickens in California, are preparing to switch to a system of killing their birds that they consider more humane. The new system uses carbon dioxide gas to gently render the birds unconscious before they are hung by their feet to have their throats slit, sparing them the potential suffering associated with conventional slaughter methods.

“When you grab a chicken, turn it upside down and put it on the line, it’s stress, stress, stress,” said Scott Sechler, the owner of Bell & Evans. “Our system is designed so that we put them to sleep without stress and we kill them without stress.”

[Libloather]

SAVE THE WINGS!

Chicken-wing craze sends prices soaring

[coloradan]

I didn’t know carbon dioxide put them to sleep ... I thought it was suffocating, like when you take a breath just as your face goes into a big glass half full of ginger ale.

[GeronL]

humane?

Your killing birds, for crying out loud

[Darkwolf377]

New Way to Help Chickens Cross to Other Side

I prefer the old way--carrying them across the street in my stomach.

[FlingWingFlyer]

[OCC]

“Our system is designed so that we put them to sleep without stress and we kill them without stress.”

Can this be applied to death row inmates to cut down on appeals?

[FrankR]

"New Way to Help Chickens Cross to Other Side"

Base on the headline, I was already imagining a $3.2 trillion dollar stimulus to create "shovel ready" jobs for building "chicken overpasses" to the cluckers could get to the other side of the road safely.

I mean, didn't they spent a coopload of money to building something like that for turtles once?

But then after reading, I saw it was the other, "other side", they were talking about.

I guess next we'll have to read them their Miranda rights before killing them, complete with a right of appeal. That way the chickens will die of old age before the execution can take place.

Just random thoughts...

[Libloather]

I didn’t know carbon dioxide put them to sleep...

Once global warming hits, they're toast. (Will that effect the taste?)

[Hunton Peck]

chicken free of nearly everything but adjectives

Wow! Just like a New York Times editorial! (Well, those include adverbs, too. But still....)

[LibFreeOrDie]

Reminds me of a South park episode...

[eclecticEel]

Which is itself a Soylent Green parody.

[Viking2002]

Forgive my Saturday Night stupor here, and the adult beverage influencing it, but how the hell did we attach a term such as 'humane' to popping chickens for our dinner? If using gas to give a bunch of birds a buzz into oblivion is considered 'humane', is there an avian equivalent of labeling what happened to the Jews at Auschwitz? (*Viking ducks and runs like hell*) And who the hell spends their day walking along a clothesline through the bird coop yelling "Allah Akbar" with a knife while de-beaking them from the neck-up? Ain't that a lot of chickens to put down manually? And while we're at it, whatever happened to Grandma just reaching out the kitchen window, grabbing the first fistful of feathers that went by, giving it a little twist like a cap on a Snapple bottle, and saying, "OK, children! Chicken and dumplings for dinner!" Is it more humane than the last time I caught a catfish, and sent it to the Great Pond In The Sky by taking a HAMMER to it's noggin in my kitchen sink? Or pinning a squirrel to a tree trunk by it's skull with a blowgun?

If a bear falls in the woods, does it stink like a tree? I want some tequila-lime wings. And the catfish I'm gonna club like a baby seal want the livers. Keep the dead chickens coming.

"But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: for men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away, for his name is Obama."

[Libloather]

...I'm gonna club like a baby seal want the livers.

Taste kinda like spotted owl? I'm in.

[Viking2002]

If spotted owl tastes like them wrapped in bacon, skewered, and broiled in honey BBQ sauce, then spotted owls better find their own planet. I could go for a few endangered species at the moment.

"But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: for men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away, for his name is Obama."

[EQAndyBuzz]

“I thought it was suffocating, like when you take a breath just as your face goes into a big glass half full of ginger ale.”

Don’t you just hate when that happens?

[EQAndyBuzz]

“Taste kinda like spotted owl? I’m in.”

They taste like Delta smelt.

[GeronL]

I think all of the adds, “stress free” and “free roam”, are nothing mnore than excuses for the companies to charge more while making the eco-nuts “feel” better.

I wonder how a chicken becomes a McChicken...

[Old Student]

“I wonder how a chicken becomes a McChicken...”

Really, REALLY bad luck. It starts by hatching out as a chicken, instead of an eagle or velociraptor, and then goes downhill from there...