Italy: The Grim Reality of Organic Chicken Farming
The RAI programme «Report» exposes serious problems in Italian organic chicken farming. Billions of animals suffer every year.
Broiler chickens bred in record time
The investigation once again shines a spotlight on some serious problems in chicken farming, in which billions of animals are produced every year.
Recently, Italian public broadcaster (RAI) aired an episode of its investigative programme «Che polli!» Approximately 98% of chickens raised in Italy for meat production are broilers, grown to enormous size in record time. They are slaughtered at around 4 weeks of age.
The suffering of the animals is palpable: they are killed by unqualified workers while still inside the barn. Although this practice is not legal, it is a reality on all intensive chicken farms.
An Unsustainable Production System
This is an increasingly unsustainable production system: chickens and other poultry are affected by avian influenza, which claimed more than 14 million animals last winter.
«The daily occurrence of disease and the impossibility of control make this system a sick agriculture, in which illegality is firmly entrenched,» said Roberto Bennati, Director General of LAV.
«With the current revision of animal welfare legislation, the European Commission has the opportunity to end the suffering of billions of animals,» added Reineke Hameleers, CEO of Eurogroup for Animals.
| You can help all animals and our planet with compassion. Choose compassion on your plate and in your glass. Go vegan. |
More on the subject of recreational hunting: In the dossier The Role and Criticism of Recreational Hunters we shed light on the training, power and self-image of recreational hunters. What the research says about this is shown by Hunting fact-checked: the state of research.
The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.
