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Ethical poultry 

October 19, 2023   ·   1 Comments

By Martina Rowley

Thanksgiving has just passed, and I give thanks that it is over and done with for another year. For holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas, even if they are low-key, I always ensure I prepare a good meal. Small numbers of diners do not require an enormous turkey, so for me, an oven-roasted chicken does the trick just as nicely. Being the environmental and food nerd that I am, I want my meat to be as safe and healthy for me and as ethical for the animal as possible. 

Here in Orangeville, I have two good stores to go to: an organic market store and an actual butcher’s shop. Last year, I bought a fresh roasting chicken from the butcher, and it was absolutely enormous! I think I even questioned if they were sure it was really a chicken and not a small turkey. It tasted very good, but I opted for something much smaller this year, reducing the mountain of meat for leftovers, as well as keeping the purchasing cost down.

I decided to check what Sobey’s may have while I was there anyway. This was an unusual thing for me, as I rarely buy meat from a grocery store shelf because I simply do not trust that their high-volume, shrink-wrapped, mass-produced meats come from a healthy and ethical source. What I found, though, much to my delight, was an organic chicken from Maple Leaf Prime. The packaging label called it organic and said it was raised without antibiotics, non-GMO feed, vegetable grain fed with no animal by-products, humanely raised, and Canadian farm raised. The small print also stated that it was certified by CSI, which is an organic certification body accredited by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. All that sounded acceptable to me, so the little chicken was allowed to come home with me, and it tasted very good indeed. 

One other acknowledgement I wanted to see was for it to be free-range. Checking this online later, I was disappointed at Maple Leaf’s vague and misleading statement about its organic chickens, which claims them to be “free-roaming” and says: “Our chickens have room to roam and are raised cage-free in climate-controlled barns with access to food, water and social play at all times.” 

Let’s unwrap this kind of misleading food labelling, where food companies like to pull the wool over our unsuspecting eyes. Firstly, claiming animals have ‘room to roam’ is subjective and leaves a lot open to interpretation… and misinterpretation. How much room to roam does each chicken get? Apparently, not enough to roam or even grow humanely. According to The Canadian Coalition for Farm Animals, barn-raised broiler chickens get only about a half-square foot (465 sq cm) of space each because the barns of factory farms house tens of thousands of chickens, often as many as 50,000! I calculated what that kind of space looked like, and it made me gasp. It means each chicken has the amount of space equivalent to the size of one sheet of standard letter-sized paper (which measures 21.6cm by 27.9cm). That is barely enough space for it to stand in one spot or even spread its wings. 

These barns are also barren, containing only feeding and watering stations, and are artificially lit almost 24/7 and said to have only about four hours of darkness to stimulate higher food consumption. Such conditions do not allow for normal behaviour patterns or socializing, resulting in severe stress and physical discomfort too. Come to think of it, keeping bright lights on around the clock in a small, window-less space, are those not interrogation techniques to bring a human crime suspect or terrorist to breaking point? 

Ontario is the largest producer and processor of chicken in the country, with one-third of all the chicken produced in Canada. Of the 2,800 chicken farmers in Canada, around 1,100 are in Ontario and have over 200 million chickens every year. A curious nomenclature on the agricultural website states that they “grow” chickens, not “raise” them. My gut reaction to that wording is that these mostly large-scale and intensive poultry farms see chickens as just another farm product, like a vegetable or grain crop. 

To sum up, the most common misleading labelling we see on our flats of eggs or packaged chickens and product advertising are these three: 1) Cage-free or free-run, which means animals are not confined to cages but typically have very little space in huge, overcrowded barns. 2) Free-roaming, which means the same as free-run, or 3) free-range. This is the gold standard for happier and healthier chickens. It means they have access to an outdoor enclosure at least some of the time. Again, one can easily be fooled about that too, as “outdoor enclosure or outdoor space” will mean fresh air and sunlight, but it does not guarantee an actual green space with interesting little things, like seeds, worms or fresh vegetation on the ground for the animals to peck at. 

No matter, I will continue buying the more expensive free-range eggs and organic chicken in the hope that the claims are true and I am not part of the problem of our food animals being treated despicably. I understand that not everyone can afford the much higher cost of organic eggs or chickens, which tend to cost around double or more. Really, it should be the norm for our food animals to be treated right, but that is a much more complex problem. For my own conscience, I think my next roasting chicken needs to be from a local small farmer or the farmers’ market, so I can truly be assured of its origin and treatment. 

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