Chicken Out!

Pioneered by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall Chicken Out aims to increase the British public’s understanding and awareness of the conditions in which our chickens are kept, both for meat and egg ‘producing’.  It is a subject I have been passionate about since I was fifteen and watched a PETRA video on the subject as part of my food & nutrition GCSE course; I was so affected by it that I became vegetarian for nearly three years. 

So what made me change back to eating meat?  Well it was the increasing availability of organic and free range meat/eggs; I believed (and still do) that so long as the animal has been kept in humane conditions and led a happy life that this justifies our consumption of meat.

More than 850 million broiler chickens are slaughtered every year in the UK; and of these hundreds of millions of chickens, most of them – more than 95% – are reared inside, produced in industrial conditions in vast, enclosed sheds. Why? Because we the general public want to eat meat regularly and they want it cheap – 3p per chicken for the farmers is atrocious, the majority of whom want to farm the old-fashioned way, by that I mean free range.  We owe it to our farmers and the livestock to improve the situation by refusing to buy battery eggs and broiler chickens.

Having discussed this matter with many of my friends and family there seems to be an overwhelming consensus that one persons actions don’t make a difference, well let me tell you they do!  If every person who thought that way made a change in their buying habits it would amount to a massive impact upon the industry. 

Please, please, please sign up to the campaign and let all your friends know about it.  It really does matter.