Скачать или смотреть Raising chicks by artificial means 🐣🐣

It's a common misconception that chickens raised for consumption—often known as "broiler chickens"—are pumped full of artificial growth hormones or steroids to make them plumper. While the vast majority of Americans believe this to be the case, it's just not true.

There are several reasons why growth hormones are not used on broiler chickens, but it's not because big factory farms care about our health or the welfare of chickens. Thanks to regulations from the FDA, poultry producers are prohibited from injecting their birds with hormones and steroids.

Even if they were allowed to, however, they most likely still wouldn't do it. According to the University of ArkansasDivision of Agriculture, injecting millions of chickens each year with artificial growth hormones would be too inefficient and costly to do on a large scale. Since hormones are not effective when added to feed or water, they would need to inject them almost every day. That would cost factory farms too much in added expenses, labor, and time.

So when you see a bag of frozen chicken strips at the grocery store bragging that their product contains no added hormones or steroids, remember that this isn't anything special. Considering that it's illegal for farms to give chickens hormones in the first place, these labels are simply a misleading marketing tactic.

It's no misconception, however, that broiler chickens are far bigger than they used to be. Instead of using hormones or steroids, the poultry industry has created bigger birds through the use of antibiotics and years of "selective breeding." Selective breeding is the process of breeding two animals with desirable qualities so that their offspring will have those traits as well. In the case of broiler chickens, they've been selectively bred to grow unnaturally large at a very fast pace, 300% faster than chickens in 1960.

Due to intense breeding practices and liberal use of antibiotics, chickens today have much bigger appetites, and their bodies are extremely efficient at converting the food they eat into breast meat. This partly explains why chicken products have become such popular and inexpensive items in restaurants and grocery stores across the country. However, this also contributes to the pain and suffering that milions of chicks.