That’s the point I was trying to make here. I used to live like that when I lived where I had places to hunt; I’m trying to get back to that lifestyle.
Once (while on a hunting trip, coincidentally) on the eastern shore of Virginia, a friend and I had to spend some time driving right behind a truck full of chickens that had just been removed from the chicken house, and which were going to the slaughterhouse. They should have been white, but they were all a dingy grayish-brown, from having been stacked many cages high; they had been covered in each other’s excrement all of their lives. The stench was ghastly, almost indescribable, and I though we would succumb to it before we were able to pass the truck.
When you buy chicken in the store, that isn’t free-range chicken, this is what you are buying....meat from birds raised in unsanitary and unnatural conditions. We need to move away from this sort of toxic agriculture; the consequences of it are negative and long-lasting.
The problem with that is factory farming is very efficient and keeps the costs down. Free range chicken is great but if that’s all there was then chicken would be $20 a pound and many wouldn’t be able to afford it.
We should find technological ways to keep some chicken’s crap off of the others but they are pretty stupid and unsanitary and will eat poo. Even chickens I have here at home peck at other animal poo—like goat, horse, dog, and I’ve even seen them dig up the cat’s outdoor area and peck at the cat poo. They don’t finish it ever so I assume they are going after the bugs, but then they are eating bugs that just dined on poo...
Eventually, the new techniques for growing meat in a lab will become widespread. A future generation will grow up eating it, think nothing of it, and the problem will be solved. Toxic agriculture is thriving right now for the same reason the toxic finance and toxic defense industries are: many if not most of our representatives are bought and paid for, and they know they have to stay bought - or else.
Broilers and fryers are slaughtered at 6 - 8 weeks and are generally much more healthy looking when raised in confinement than in the backyard. It's not so much that poultrymen are personally all that concerned with the sensibilities of 21st Century yuppies, but it's far more efficient to feed chicks a controlled diet in a disease free environment and to slaughter them quickly, than to let them forage on their own and hope that they grow up before disease, or the neighbor's cat, removes them from inventory.
Uncle Pete bought deer licenses in his sons name, he did the hunting on Iron MT, MI even got a bear one year. They lived off deer and bear that year.
We’ve passed pig trucks and chicken trucks and you are correct they smell so bad it’s worse than a dead skunk in the middle of the road.