Free-Range: Fact or Fiction?

Most consumers believe that the hens who produce
"free-range" eggs spend much of their lives outdoors,
warming themselves in the afternoon sun, enjoying dust
baths, and laying their eggs in individual straw nests. But to
U.S. egg producers, free-range means something entirely
different--generally, that hens are uncaged, yet confined
indoors in crowded sheds similar to "broiler" houses. In fact,
no government laws or standards regulate the use of terms
like ?free-range? and ?free-roaming? on egg cartons; some
"free-range" eggs may be produced by hens who spend their
lives in conventional battery cages.(2)

Karen Davis, president of the animal protection group United
Poultry Concerns, visited one free-range egg farm--Happy
Hen Organic Fertile Brown Eggs--in Pennsylvania.
According to fliers for Happy Hen eggs, these hens run free
"in a natural setting" and are "humanely housed in healthy,
open-sided housing, for daily sunning--something Happy
Hens really enjoy."(3)

Davis tells a different story: "Through the netting at the front
of the long barn we saw a sea of chickens' faces looking out,
as though they were smashed up against the netting. Inside,
the birds were wall to wall. They were severely debeaked and
their feathers were in bad condition--straggly, drab, and worn
off."(4)

More than 7,000 birds are housed in each Happy Hen barn,
and individual hens have no more than 11/2 square inches of
space each, not enough room to even spread their wings. One
hen lays 250 eggs a year. Like their caged sisters, Happy
Hens are occasionally force-molted. (This means that the
hens are denied food for several days, which forces them to
lose their feathers, or molt, and stop laying eggs for a couple
of months. Forced-molting is an economic maneuver used by
farmers to adjust egg prices.)(5)

Chickens can live for 15 years, but hens on commercial
free-range farms are "spent," or unable to produce enough
eggs to remain profitable, after one or two years. Even on
small family farms, birds are kept for only two or three
years. Worn-out free-range hens are usually sold to
slaughterhouses or to live-poultry markets (where Santeria
practitioners buy birds to be used in religious rituals). On
both free-range and factory egg farms, male chicks are
considered worthless: At birth, they are dumped into trash
cans to suffocate one on top of another, thrown alive into a
grinder, or sold for school science projects and to
laboratories.

Birds who are raised for meat may be called free-range or
free-roaming if they have some form of access to the
outdoors. Free-range cows and sheep must be "grass fed and
live on a range."(6) No other criteria--such as the size of the
"range" or the amount of space individual animals must
have--are required. Unfortunately, the truthfulness of even
these vague claims is rarely verified. The United States
Department of Agriculture, which defines free-range and
free-roaming for labeling purposes, relies "upon producer
testimonials to support the accuracy of these claims."(7)
According to The Washington Post Magazine, in the case of
birds, especially, the term free-range "doesn't really tell you
anything about the [animal's] ... quality of life, nor does it
even assure that the animal actually goes outdoors."(8)

Unnatural "Natural" Meat

"Natural" foods "contain no artificial ingredients and are only
minimally processed."(9) Animals raised for natural meats,
sold at many health-food stores and upscale markets, are
given no hormones or antibiotics, although they may be fed
corn and other grain grown with pesticides. But again, this
term tells consumers very little about the quality of an
animal's life. For example, Coleman Natural Meats, the
largest producer of natural beef in the United States,
contracts with "ranchers of mainstream cattle to raise
animals by the Coleman method. ... [E]ach Coleman animal
receives a metal ear tag identifying it, and the ranchers must
sign affidavits swearing that no drugs or hormones have been
administered to the Coleman animals. From there, the cattle
go to 23 mainstream feedlots in Colorado, where their feed
is monitored every two weeks."(10) These so-called "natural"
steers are confined to the same crowded feedlots as
conventionally raised animals.

"Exotic" Animals on the Plate

While some people consider it daring or adventurous to eat
"exotic" meats--like ostrich steaks and buffalo
burgers--many consume non-traditional animal foods
because they believe these animals are raised more humanely
than cows, chickens, turkeys, or pigs. A look at the way two
species of these animals are treated suggests otherwise.

Recently, ostrich meat has begun to be marketed in the
United States. The ostrich feathers are sold to designers or
are used to make feather dusters, and their skin is used for
expensive leather boots and clothing. To protect the
commercial value of the hide, which can sell for hundreds of
dollars, ostriches are stripped of their feathers before being
slaughtered. To do this, farmers roughly pull ostrich feathers
from their sockets with pliers or shave them off with electric
shears. A New York Times article stated, "Slaughterhouses
often do not know what to do with the big birds, the largest in
the world."(11) A slaughterer in California said it took him
"two hours of violent struggle to kill a single ostrich."(12)
Often, ostriches are killed like chickens: They are
electrically shocked (not stunned) and hung upside down and
have their throats slit while fully conscious.(13)

Buffaloes (or American bison) who are raised for food fare
little better than other commercially raised animals. A
typical rancher confines his animals to a corral that is 7 feet
high and solid, because if buffaloes "see daylight through the
corral, they'll beat a hole into the wood in their attempt to
get out, possibly injuring or killing themselves in the
process."(14) Experimenters have tried to increase the
number of buffaloes available for food by artificially
inseminating female bison, flushing out the embryos and
implanting them into cows, then re-impregnating the
bison.(15) Bulls are slaughtered at about 2 years of age,
when their hides are "prime."

Doing the Humane Thing

From the "free-range" hen who smells fresh air for the first
time on the way to the slaughterhouse to the "humanely
raised" dairy cow whose days-old male baby is taken from
her and sold to veal farmers, all animals raised for food
suffer and are exploited. The only truly humane alternative to
contributing to this suffering is to choose alternatives to
eggs, milk, and meat. It's not as hard to do as you may think!

References

1.Williams, Scott, "Americans Overwhelmingly Oppose
  Farm Animal Suffering," World Farm Animals Day
  news release.
2."The Rougher They Look, The Better They Lay,"
  Poultry Press, Vol. 2, No. 4.
3.Ibid.
4.Ibid.
5.Ibid.
6.Donovan, Michael E., official United States
  Department of Agriculture/Food Safety and Inspection
  Service letter, April 11, 1996.
7.Ibid.
8.Perl, Peter, "The Truth About Turkeys," The
  Washington Post Magazine, November 5, 1995.
9.Donovan.
10.Sugarman, Carole, "Cattle Battle: Meat Maverick Mel
   Coleman, Blazing a Drug-Free Trail," The Washington
   Post, June 23, 1993.
11.Brooke, James, "Cattle-Poor Ranchers Turn to Elk,"
   The New York Times, January 29, 1996.
12.Davis, Karen, "Nowhere to Hide," Poultry Press, Vol.
   3, No. 4, Fall/Winter 1993.
13."Ostriches & Emus: Nowhere to Hide," United Poultry
   Concerns brochure.
14.Rudner, Ruth, "Buffalo Ranching on the Dakota
   Prairie," The Wall Street Journal, September 8, 1992.
15."Researchers Bet on Steak in Bison," The Columbus
   Dispatch, September 25, 1988.