Time to...PANIC!!!

barbbarbbarb-"chicken heart"
http://www.flickr.com/photos/barbbarbbarb/4998859859/
A Happy Chicken

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, step right up and take a wild gander at how many animals the average American will consume over the course of their life.

1,000? Not even close. 5,000? Think bigger. 10,000? Double it up and you will be just about there.

According to Jonathan Safran Foer, “Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime” (pg. 121)  Usually, these animals are chickens. Across the globe, 50 billion chickens are raised in factory farms a year. To put this in perspective, there are close to 7 billion humans on earth (according to the US Census Bureau). Foer points out that Americans are some of the largest consumers and our intake has increased 150x since the 1920s when factory farming was first introduced (by accident).

Although these numbers are really big (and numbers of all types tend to give me the heeby-geebies), Foer points out the real threat behind these obscene figures..

In 1918, the world suffered from a pandemic that killed 100 million people. That pandemic was called the Spanish Flu and its origins have been traced to farm animals (whether it was birds or pigs is still debated).

Farm animals live in disgusting conditions for their short, brutal lives on earth. Because the environment is so toxic, farm animals are fed antibiotics even when they are not sick. The Union for Concerned Scientists reports that the factory farming industry offloads 24.6 million pounds of antibiotics into animals each year. Humans, on the other hand, only receive 3 million pounds of antibiotics a year. Foer points out the dichotomy that we limit our own intake of antibiotics to prevent the development of drug resistant diseases but inundate our animals (whose factory farm lives are the equivalent of living in a Petri dish with just about everything that makes us sick) with these same medications.

Foer argues that this will bring about more zoonotic diseases, or diseases that jump from the animal population to our own human population, in the future. The possibility for a pandemic is far greater not only because we average a pandemic every 27.5 years and we haven’t had one in awhile but also because we have created a biological time bomb out of our mass consumption of animals and our cavalier attitude in regards to how they are raised.

So what should we do for our world that it is about to catch a cold? Pay more attention to how animals are being raised. Urge stronger regulation of factory farms. Think before you eat. And STOP EATING SO MANY CHICKENS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-Shockley Nunnery

 david_shankbone (photographer)
Not a Happy Chicken