Reply #25: actually [View All]

chickens of both sexes are put through processing plants. I know, because I used to have to do yield evaluations of them and had to separate them by sex. Not easy at first, since they're only a few weeks old. But you get the hang of it. Discarding half your stock would be idiotic. Chickens are sexed at hatching, because they want to be able to pull females for reproduction, but the females that aren't pulled for repro are mixed with the roosters and shipped to the grow houses, then they're both slaughtered together. Males are a bit bigger is all, but only just.

The chicken stuff that is fed back to chickens (something I don't approve of, btw) is waste product from the processing of the chickens.

No, I'm not concerned about the dismemberment, because I'm fully aware of where my food comes from and the cost of it. I grew up around farms. You don't develop a case of the warm fuzzies when you have to help slaughter a pig so you can eat next winter. You just get on with it.

Cute li'l bunnies are the enemy, because they're eating the crops. So they have to go, and generally that means killing them. If it's a choice between feeding my family and feeding the cute li'l bunny, I'm feeding the family. Besides, rabbit is tasty. So is squirrel, if you can cook it properly. Makes a good gravy, especially.

The reason I mentioned the animals getting dismembered in the fields when crops are harvested is that too many people who don't eat meat think that they're not causing any animals to die, and that's just not true. Not by a long shot.

Heck, I've accidentally killed cute li'l fuzzy critters just cutting the grass. Haele mangled the ear of a bunny a couple of springs ago. We took it to the vet, got it patched up, and released it. I'm not a barbarian, I just know the reality of our food cycle.