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The EU plants to totally phase out battery cages by 2012, but only to replace them with slightly larger cages. Like I said above ironically (with my extra 2cm2), even with an honorouble intention the EU is still far from target.
And anyhow the problem is mainly that meat demand is too high. Lower the demand, and there will be more space available for cattle and chickens and forests and what nots.
"If we grew as fast as battery cage chickens are forcibly grown, we'd weigh 349 pounds by age 2".
Apparently, hens mature at 6 months, so here they would be culled at 1/5th or 1/6th their adult age, which applied to humans being adults at 16-18 would make it, say, 3 years of age, so the age part is passibly accurate. (ps: I wonder whether hens are said to be adults at puberty, in which case the appropriate human age would be, what, 12 years?)
The average chicken adult body weight is at 1.5 kg, so killing them aged 6 weeks and weighing 2.5 kilos is 1.6x too much weight. (this is just a rough calculation, a quick one too, just to see if the 349 lbs statement is off or not)
Applied to humans, that would be 2-3 years of age, and 1.6 times the average human weight, and since I don't know that figure, I can't get the correct result, but I'm starting to think that the 349 lbs for 2 years can't be that far off.
The US produces more than eight billion meat chickens each year. The large producers contract out the actual raising of the chickens to small farmers. The small farmers have large sheds and the producers bring them feed, 10 - 20,000 hatchlings for each shed, and then collect the chickens when they are 4-5 weeks for what is called "Rock Cornish Game Hens" or 7-8 weeks for standard broilers. The Rock Cornish Game Hen named product was invented by Tyson Foods in the early 1950s as a way to distribute young, frozen standard meat chickens.
Spent (old) grandparent and parent broiler hens are sold to canners for soup, or other meat products. In the US, spent factory egg-laying hens, which are much smaller than meat hens, are often destroyed. Canners pay only $.10 to $.16 per chicken delivered, the cost of delivery alone from rural egg-laying areas to more urban canneries is cost-prohibitive.
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