March 25, 2022 • 54 mins
You’d think terms like cage-free and free-range means the chickens we eat are frolicking happily in the fresh air under the shining sun, but you’d be so, so wrong. Cage-free is a huge improvement but free-range is lacking and both have a long way to go.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and it's just something is going on
with Chuck. I'm okay so far, but Jerry's not here
(00:22):
because she turned into the Chicken Lady in his in
treatment for that doing the chicken dance. Do you remember
the chicken lady from Kids in the Hall? Oh? Sure,
I was referencing arrest the development cock Cuck call. Yeah,
but you're you're taking aback even further to the great
great kids in the Hall. That's right. I can just
(00:44):
sit here and quote Kids in the Hall one liners
all day. I love those guys. So that's not what
we're here to do, though, Chuck, settle down, settle down.
We're going away from the kids in the Hall. Yes,
and since you mentioned that, Uh, what we're also not
here to do is shame anybody or make anyone feel bad,
(01:07):
or to tell anyone how to live their life and
eat their breakfast. But we're here to arm you with
information on this one about uh. And I'm not surprised
you picked this one, but I just thought, since I
had somewhat scarring experience a commercial chicken farming industry. For
those of you listening that don't know this, one of
(01:28):
my last real person jobs before this job many years ago,
as I worked for a software company that designed software
for commercial chicken uh operations to better track how they
lay eggs and how they gain weight and how you're
feeding them and kind of everything how they're killed uh.
(01:49):
And I hated that job. It was sold killing and
I never understood it. I never invested in it, and
as far as understanding the software, and I was in
tech support, and so I was terrible at it. But
my friends ran the company and eventually they fired me
because I was so bad at it. And that's the
best thing that ever happened to me, because that led
directly to getting this job. It's like Garth Brooks said,
(02:13):
some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers. All Right,
you know your prayer to be good at your chicken
killing software job was unanswered and instead an even better
prayer that you didn't even know you had was answered. Yeah.
I didn't have that prayer. I didn't want to be
good at that job. But yeah, so this is like
(02:35):
all this is probably pretty well known to you because
this this is We've been doing this kind of stuff
to chickens for a good seventy years by now, right, Yeah,
and you know the you know, we're going to talk
some about factory farming. Finally. I don't think we've dodged it,
but people have, you know, long said hey, guys, can
(02:55):
you get into this? And you know we're not touching
cattle or swine. We're just starting dipping our toe into
it with poultry, dipping our beaks, dipping our beaks untrimmed beaks. Yeah,
I can peck you till the cows come home, which
is something that happens on the farm. That's right. So
let's enough dancing around, chuck Um. We're talking about today,
(03:19):
not not necessarily factory farming all the like you said,
we have to talk about We're gonna talk about those
labels that you see on your eggs or on your chicken,
usually cage free or UM free range or something along
those lines, and whether it means anything. But one of
the great successes of the last probably five six, maybe
(03:42):
even ten years or longer Um came very quietly out
of the effective altruism community. Chuck Yeah, A group of
effective altruists said, you know, we're always looking to maximize
our charitable contributions. There's a lot of chickens out there
that are not being treated very well. Supposedly, there's seven
(04:03):
point six billion egg laying hands alone worldwide at any
given time, almost eight billion, So if you could improve
the lives of them even by a little bit, you
would really be reducing a massive amount of suffering. So
they got three million dollars together, and like um Laser,
focused it on advocacy, lobbying, getting legislation put through, and
(04:28):
then most of all pressuring really really big companies. They
went after some whales um to to commit to going
on cage free eggs within a very short period of time,
sometimes four sometimes twenty thirty UM but all of these
huge companies, everybody from dan Owe to Burger King to
(04:49):
McDonald's to Whole Foods not surprisingly but also like Dollar General,
all of them have signed a pledge that says, all
of the eggs that our customers buy, whether it's imprepared
food or eggs you buy in the store, are going
to be one cage free eggs within the next few years.
And they did it with like three million dollars and
(05:09):
and a lot of elbow grease. I think all those
companies probably said, alright, alright, if they're cheese, if they're
cage free, eggs out there, will use them stops. That's
what the burger king said. Yeah, the guy that he
said it with his mind, yeah, because his mouth doesn't move.
(05:30):
But it was a big deal. I mean, the fact
that they got that, that that that's happening. It's a
big deal. And one it's one of those things where, um,
if you scratch beneath the surface, it's not an intended punt,
but if you scratch beneath the surface, and a lot
of these terms and phrases that the U. S d
A likes to bandy about, things like cage free and
things like free range and stuff like that, it's often
(05:53):
really disappointing. But that's one of the things about cage
free is that it is an actual, substantial will increase
in the welfare and quality of life for egg laying
chickens in the in the United States. It's a big,
big deal. And it's not that they're they're they're in
these amazing conditions all of a sudden with cage free.
(06:15):
It's that they're in such poor conditions otherwise that this
is a huge improvement for them. Yeah, and I think
you know a lot of people agree. Even cage free
isn't all it's cracked up to be. Um, But there
a lot of like chicken based idioms that we use.
There's suddenly coming to the Uh. When I worked with
(06:38):
that company, they made everybody at one point, even if
you didn't do like project management where you had to
go to the farms, they made us all go to
the farms and tech support at one point. And I
know I've told the story before, but it was a
pretty awful experience. Uh. And it smells really really bad.
It smells so bad that me and my one friend
that I worked with, Barry Um, were like, did the
(06:59):
sort of the silence to the Lamb's trick with dabbing
some uh like menthal on our upper lip under our nostrils,
just so we could walk through these things. Uh. And
you know that I think they thought it would benefit
as just sort of just see boots on the ground.
What happened. I was like, it's I appreciate the peel trip,
but it did not benefit me in any way except
(07:21):
hearing things like oh man, cage or free range just
means there's a door open, they don't even use it.
And I heard this back then. I was like, oh
my gosh, is that true. And as it turns out,
as we'll see, if that's kind of true. Yeah, And
we shouldn't confuse free range with cage free. There are
two different things. We'll describe them both. But yeah, yeah,
so cage free is a huge improvement. Free range is
(07:42):
as bad as you'd expect it to be, basic because
it's coming from the U. S t A. Yeah, So
I guess let's talk about um let's briefly, and big
thanks to Dave Ruse for helping us out with this one.
But Dave starts out with a little bit of history,
and I think that's a good place to start because
you don't have to look very far. Are back in
this country. Uh, it seems like a long time ago,
(08:03):
but the nineteen forties isn't that long ago in the
in the lifespan of America. And back then they were
still like feeding America their eggs or its eggs. I
don't even know what America is um with backyard chickens basically,
um they were big farms, of course, but they weren't
like these big, massive battery cages that we see today.
(08:26):
They were hens living outdoors, generally on farms, laid about
a hundred eggs a year. Uh. And then after a
few years when they quit laying eggs, then they would
be used for meat. They'd turn into Sunday dinner they
would uh. And these days, starting in like the fifties,
things became a little more industrialized and mechanized, and that's
(08:47):
when battery cages came into play. Which is the wire
cage that you might like. If you have friends that
have backyard chickens, you probably built them a large coupe
and within that coup some battery ca just but if
you're a backyard chicken person, you probably have battery cages
that are very large for two or three for chickens. Yeah,
(09:08):
these are not the battery cages that they're raised in.
After farming became industrialized in the fifties, like these things
are usually have I've seen anywhere between three and seven
chickens in there, um and usually each one has about
the amount of space about a little lower or a
little smaller than the size of a standard piece of paper.
(09:31):
And for the the teenage listeners out there, smaller than
the size about the size of an iPad. Yeah, that's
a chicken. A chicken. They can't move around, they can't
flap their wings, they can't do a lot of stuff
that we'll find out is a is a big problem
in a minute. Um they're meant to be kept basically
in one place, and because this stuff has all been industrialized,
(09:55):
their whole job and everything about their life is to
just sit there and lay egg after or egg after egg.
So they're kept in these battery cages. The battery cages
are kept off the ground, which is good because it
means that they're away from parasites and poop borne diseases.
And the eggs are yeah, they when they poop, they
it falls onto a conveyor belt that carries the poop away,
(10:17):
so it's a little more sanitary. When they lay an egg,
the bottom of the cage is slanted downward, so it
rolls downward onto a different conveyor belt thankfully, that whisks
the egg away. So the whole thing is really automated.
And because these cages are are so um uh uniform,
they can be stacked. It's modular, so you can go
(10:38):
upward with chickens as well as outward too. You can
really raise a lot of chickens in these battery cages,
which is good if you're a farmer, not really good
if you're a chicken though. Yes, and these chickens. You know,
I said that the backyard chickens of your uh laid
about a hundred eggs a year. Today's chickens lay closer
to three hundred eggs a year. Because they are bread
(10:59):
is scifically to do so, and just the way beyond
being bred to do so, Like you said, they're set
up as such that it's just uh, you know, they
have made it a very efficient operation as far as
how much they can extract from each hen. Yeah, that
was a real quick check. That was a big part
of the industrialization of farming. Two is is breeding practices
(11:21):
to where we started selectively breeding types of chickens that
either laid a perfectly nice brown egg or um ones
that gained weight in certain places that we wanted them to. Like.
Genetics has been a huge part of that as well. Yeah,
we're really lucky because are really really good friends. Justin
and Melissa. I've known Justin since college, you know, Justin
(11:45):
he uh, they have chickens. They have these four beautiful
ladies in their backyard. Uh. And they have a big,
wonderful coupe but anytime they're outside uh and can safeguard
them from hawks by keeping an eye on them. Those
those ladies are running around the yard with their dogs.
They've somehow managed to train these dogs to kind of
give them their space. Uh. And it's great. And you know,
(12:08):
they give us eggs and we spend money in their
wine shop and it's a great symbiotic relationship that is
really great. Yeah, yeah, it's a good. Uh. We we
save our cartons and stuff when we do have to
buy eggs, so they have cartons to give out to
their friends because these ladies are laying a lot of eggs. Lightly.
So Justin has a chickens in a wine shop. Now
(12:28):
he's living the life. Oh man, it's the American dream
realized by my British import friend. Look good. So he's
doing it what you could call the right way, I think, um,
which is to say they're very necessarily the profit maximizing way.
But the chickens are, you would guess, much happier than
(12:49):
the ones that are in these battery cages. And one
of the reasons why we would say the chickens are
not so happy in the battery cages because like again,
they can't move. If you put a chicken on a
piece of paper, it's going to take up most of
that piece of paper or iPad, right, So when you
visualize that, you suddenly get like, this is this is
(13:11):
for the whole for its whole life, usually somewhere around
seventy weeks. This is how it spends almost all of
that time in this little cage, just laying eggs, laying
eggs to an unnatural at an unnatural pace. And because
it's kind of stuck in this this one small place,
there's a lot of things that it can't do that
(13:32):
people who have studied chickens say, chickens need to do
this or else they're going to go insane and have
a really horrific life. Um, and that is kind of
what the basis of creating like cage free setups or
like genuine free range setups is. It comes from giving
chickens a better life while during those seventy or so
(13:53):
weeks that they're alive. Yeah, I mean, I think it's
easy for somebody maybe who doesn't think about it much
to think of a laying hen as just this sort
of organic egg machine, like a living egg machine. Not
organic in the sense that it's you know, sort of
hard organic, but a living machine that just pumps out
these eggs that we love to eat for breakfast or
(14:16):
on top of a hamburger or you know, a good meal. Oh,
I don't know about that, but that's not the case. Like,
these birds have personalities and they have behaviors that they
want to do and that they normally do, like, uh,
it's just a handful of them they love. And you know,
(14:37):
you can see this when I go over to Justin
and Melissa's house when they're out doing their thing. They're
preening and they're cleaning their feathers and they're flapping, ruffling
their feathers around and flapping around, and they take a
little dust bass, which means they roll around on the ground,
and uh, they're absorbing oil for their feathers, and they're
getting rid of their dead skin and their shedding feathers
(14:58):
that they don't need, and little feather mites, and they
love to nest. And then here's the big one is
And I've seen it happen and I've tried to guard
my eyes because I know what's going on. They don't
like a lot of attention when they're laying these eggs.
It's a they're giving birth. It's a private matter to them,
(15:18):
you know, giving birth in the figurative sense. But it's uh,
it's like they're doing their business. They don't want a
lot of attention. They'd like to do this instinctively in private,
and they're not able to do that there. It's called
the laying act and it's on full display. And they
can get so upset about having to do this without
(15:39):
any privacy in battery cages, not can they do. They
get so upset they peck at other hens and they
fight each other. And that's why they end up clipping
their beaks because the other hens are getting injured from
being henpecked because they're stressed out from living on an iPad. Yeah.
Dr con Conrad Lorenz Or Lawrence Um, who starred in
(16:02):
our Animal Imprinting episode, I think he's popped up elsewhere.
He had a quote he said, the worst torture to
which a battery hen is exposed is the inability to
retire somewhere for the laying act. The person who knows
something about animals. It is truly heartrending to watch how
a chicken tries again and again to crawl beneath her
fellow cage mates to search their in vain for cover
(16:23):
because they don't get what's going on too. It's it is,
it's heartbreaking. Yeah, So, like that is an enormous thing.
Like not only are we forcing them to have more
eggs every year, we're forcing them to do it against
their instinct basically every day, and they really suffer tremendous
amount of distress for that. And then one of the
other ones, one of the other behaviors that's really really
(16:45):
big is roaming, their freedom to roam. Chickens are very
social animals. They like to hang out, they like to
mess with each other, like to pren one another, not
to supreme themselves, um, but they also need space to
get away from one another there and when they can't
do that, that's when things like hen pecking to uh
to an injurious degree, or cannibalism we're all sorts of um.
(17:08):
Terrible zookosis can happen when chickens are stuck together in
a very small area for their entire lives, and that
is the basis of battery cages. And you said, it's like,
like it makes sense from a mechanized industrial standpoint. But
back in the day when when when they figured this out.
These are the same people who resisted putting seatbelts and
(17:30):
cars and got us into Vietnam, you know what I mean? Like,
these aren't exactly the most moralistic generation that we've ever produced.
They were very sensible and like rational minded and didn't
take a great deal of humanity into consideration when it
came to profit maximization. Yes, this is a segment we
like to call Gen X speaks to millennials and Gen
(17:52):
Z about boomers. That's right, you got that straight. But
it's true. They also you know, alter their UH diet
and lighting to UH to maximize their output. They don't
move around, so they're obviously you know what's gonna happen
when an animal is just sort of stuck in the small,
tiny thing, They're gonna have no muscle. They have muscle
(18:14):
loss because they can't move around and do their thing,
and they basically become what I described, which is these
living egg laying machines, which is exactly how the industrial
egg complex, if that's a term wants it. But things
are changing a little bit, and we're gonna walk you
(18:34):
through some of you know, a lot of these are
marketing terms, but some of them are legitimate um terms
that the USDA allows them to use. Uh, in addition
to these great pictures that you see on your egg
cartons of chickens, like, you know, smiling under the sunshine
on a rolling pastoral scene. Uh, they're allowed to do
stuff like that, but the words that they use are
(18:58):
regulated to an extent. And if you really, really really
want to do your due diligence, though, you've got to
know what all this stuff means and then even do
a little more investigation. Yeah, typical U. S d A
type stuff. But let's take a break and then we'll
get into cage free. How about that, Let's get out
of the cage. If you want to know, then you're
(19:19):
in luck. Just chuck. Okay, So we're talking cage free,
(19:44):
and I think I already let the cat out of
the bag, although hopefully not in the chicken cooper um
that cage free actually does have some meaning like actually,
if you if you look at it compared to the
battery cage operations of your or actually I shouldn't say,
of yours are still most chickens in the United States,
at least they're still in battery cages. I think something
(20:06):
like se which amounts to two and thirty million hens
are currently in battery cages. Um, so it's still going on,
still happening. But if you if you compare the battery
cage to the cage free operation, it is a substantial difference,
for sure. Yeah, Like the more we describe this stuff,
there are levels of getting better, for sure. Uh in
(20:29):
cage free is better. Uh, it is greater than it means.
And this is a direct quote from the U. S
d A means the eggs must be produced by hens
housed in a way that allows for not only unlimited
access to food and water. And you might think, well, duh,
but they used to like keep food from hens. Uh,
(20:50):
so different things would happen with their production and they're like,
you can't do that at all anymore, and then the
rest of it goes. But unlike eggs from caged hens
also provides them freedom to roam during the laying cycle.
That's huge. But here's the deal is, they are there
aren't any guidelines about what that access to outdoors means uh,
(21:12):
it doesn't say how much space there needs to be,
And so basically what you're still seeing is a big,
long barn with a bunch of laying hens packed inside there.
They're just not in those wire cages. No, they have
now instead of about an eight by eight square of
space available to them like they do in the battery cages,
(21:33):
typically a hand in a free or cage free situation
has about ten and a half inch by eleven inch
space available to them per bird, And it's not like
it's designated. That's what they can move around. At least
they can move around these giant, giant barns. The problem
is that there's tens of thousands of hens also in
these barns, and they just don't have that much room
(21:56):
to move. If they had a ton of willpower and
they decided they were going to go to point B,
they could conceivably make their way there. But it's not
going to be easy and it's not like they're just
roaming around and they have a bunch of free space
to move around in or do much in. Again, compared
to the battery cages, where they had no chance of
moving away from their little cage, it is a huge improvement.
(22:19):
But then when you see a picture of what a
cage free barn looks like, it's it gets a little
depressing again. Yeah, and you know some of these egg
producers are not the hens, but the operations. Obviously there's
only one egg producer in the scenario. Um. They do
have some perches that are built up, and they do
(22:41):
have some nesting areas so they can hop up there.
They can stretch their wings, but they're not required to.
That's not part of the U s d A requirement.
If you want to look for requirements that you could
look for a label from the United Egg Producers. They
have a different certification guideline for cage free that's a
little more um, I guess open than the U s
(23:02):
d A s are restrictive. I guess if you're a farmer. Uh.
They must allow hens to exhibit natural behaviors that we
talked about and include enrichments such as scratch areas, purchase,
and nests, so they have to have those, and then
they must have access to litter. And litter is just
like the stuff on the ground that they like to
roll around in. It's not like beer, canson, old batteries
(23:25):
and stuff nothing crying ironized cody kind of. Uh. They
must have protection from predators and be able to move
through a barn in a manner that promote that promotes
bird welfare. So that's a little hazy, but that generally
means not as crowded. But I don't think that that
even specifies what that means. No, And and that is
(23:48):
much better than the U. S d A standards. And
the United Egg Producers are an industry industry group of
like agg operators, Like I think there's maybe a hundred
and fifty in the in the United States, which is
way less than there used to be almost all the eggs, right, yes, yeah,
and we explored a lot of them too. Um. Surprisingly
(24:10):
Uh so it's a it's a car, it's a cartel,
a lot like a salabbying group basically for the egg producers. Um.
And you know, at at the risk of sounding like
suspicious of them, like I would guess that they created
these standards to get ahead of this problem that was
growing all of a sudden and costing them money. So
(24:31):
by doing better than the U. S c A, you know,
that's great. Like their hens are are genuinely like um, um,
what's the word, what's the opposite of suffering benefiting from that?
But it makes me suspect and actually I know from
research it can be much better than that, right. And
(24:52):
a big one is density. It's a it's a huge
part of it. It's density. How like there should be
much greater limits on how many hens you can have
per barn. And then also another one is even under
these um these better more stricter standards for hand welfare,
their their lives are very much artificially controlled still because
(25:13):
they're kept in this barn. They're still in a barn.
They don't go outside to be cage free. You you
still don't go outside if your hand. You spend your
entire life in one single barn until you stop producing
enough eggs fast enough, and then they turn you into
pet food. That's right, Uh, sometimes feeding yourself back to
(25:34):
your fellow chickens. Uh. I looked a little bit into
what chicken feed is mainly made of. And because I
remember at the time when I took this tour, someone
said something about, you know, there's chicken parts in the
chicken feed. Uh. This was someone telling me this. I
didn't find that in my research, but there has been
(25:55):
a movement away from things like fish meal because fish
meal is obviously the oceans are being depleted too, to
using fishes to feed chickens isn't a great idea. And
I think just a few years ago, um, there was
final approval to use uh and it sounds gross, but
like fly larva, and you might think, like that's good.
That is good because that's what chickens would eat if
(26:17):
they were just roaming the countryside, they would eat things
like that. Yeah, so they're starting to be fed things
they normally would would eat otherwise, which is good that
their their food is still very much controlled and portioned
and everything, but they, um, they're starting to be fed
things that more resemble their diet was before it was
just whatever was cheapest and most abundant that you could
(26:37):
feed a chicken like soy and fish. That's yeah, that's
not natural. And you, as the person eating the egg,
should be like, I don't want to egg from a
chicken that's been eating fish. It's whole life. Chickens don't
eat fish. This egg probably tastes way different than it should.
And that's another thing too. There's a lot of health
benefits that have been documented in eggs that come from
(26:59):
well treated chickens. It seems to be that the you
treat a chicken, the healthier the egg it produces. Is
you can just get a and you know, if you
don't have a friend that has a back air chicken,
there's probably some local farmers market where some fish fan
will sell you their eggs. Uh. And you you need
only look at them from the outside at first, to
(27:22):
what they look like in the pan, to what they
taste like. It is a stark difference. It just is
U Yeah, totally. You eat one and you can take
on like five cops. Yeah, there's that nutrient. These cage
free chickens, whether they're United Egg Producer Standard or just
usd A standard, they still have their beaks trimmed when
(27:44):
they're ten days old. They're still forced molted. Molten is
a natural process, but they do something called force molting
when uh and this is where they used to take
away their feed entirely to force molting. Now they just
withhold some feed to force the molting. It's when they
shed those feathers and molts and that extends there their
(28:05):
layer life by you know, it's pretty substantial. It can
be like forty weeks so that again they're just they're
ringing every last egg out of those chickens, k tree
or not. I saw that the forced molting is not
actually in and of itself harmful, and that it might
actually be beneficial for the chickens because they live their
(28:26):
life indoors, and one of the ways that they do
that is through adjusting the length of the light, the
artificial light. But the problem is natural their withholding. No,
it's not naturally happening, but it's not going to naturally
happen during their lifetime anyway, And it actually is good
for them to go through a mold. But they wouldn't
without this induced or forced molting because they aren't They
(28:50):
aren't subjected to um natural light. They don't get natural light.
It's all artificial. They spend their entire lives basically indoors,
almost entirely cut off from natural light, if not entirely
cut off from it. See I thought hens malt by
being a hen. No. No, I think they take their
cues from um a shorter duration of days, and then
(29:12):
they stop eating quite as much. Then they go through
the molting process, stop laying eggs uh as frequently, and
then that happens. I'm saying, yes, it does, but it's
cued by changes in natural light. And if they're not
exposed to natural light, they're not going to undergo the mold,
right unless you Yeah, but like justin Melissa's eggs malt
(29:37):
because they like it can be the shorter day of
the natural light cycle of a year, right right, Yeah,
And that's a natural thing. I'm just saying, like they
can induce it through artificial light changes an artificial light,
and it's not necessarily bad that they induce it artificially.
It's probably better than just not doing it at all. Right, Okay,
I got you. Okay, I thought you're saying they molt normally. No, no, no,
(30:02):
I would never say something like that. Uh, now we
can move on. Those are hens that lay eggs. Now
we can move on to hens that are raised for meat.
They're called broilers, uh in the industry, and um, it's
kind of the same deal of American broilers. Chickens never
(30:23):
see light in this country. Uh. They are in those
from the moment they're born as a little chickie chicks.
They are in a barn, and they live about six
weeks and they are they are pumped up as fast
as they can be pumped up to get the biggest
breast meat possible. UM. I think there was, Dave, this
(30:45):
is pretty startling. UM day found a calculation that if
you if you sort of transferred their growth rate to
like what a human baby would look like, Uh, it
would be a three forty nine pound baby by their
second birthday, like baby huey. Yeah, that's maybe we are right. Yeah.
So the the way that they did this is through
basically selective breeding UM, selecting chickens that UM grow in
(31:10):
their breast area. But they've basically surpassed any any point
where you would normally stop because it's now very harmful
for the chicken. These chickens that we eat, the broiler
chickens UM not necessarily a whole chicken. It can also
be like you know, um, like drumsticks or breasts or
thighs or whatever, all that comes from a broiler chicken.
(31:31):
Any chicken you eat is a broiler chicken. UM. So
these broiler chickens are are usually selected for their breasts,
and their breasts are so heavy that they can't really
walk because their legs aren't developing the way that they should.
But then In addition to that, their legs can't develop
the way they should because the breast is so heavy,
so they end up with metabolic diseases, they end up
with muscle atrophy, and they don't do much of anything
(31:55):
except eat and rest because that's basically all they have
the energy to do. Six weeks is their lifespan. Yeah,
they just want to reiterate that. So over the six weeks, Yeah,
they go from like chicks to slaughtered adults in six weeks,
So they're growing that fast. But they're also growing way
bigger than any normal chicken would write, any normal breed.
(32:16):
So during that six weeks um, they're stuck in this litter.
If they're in a situation where they have litter available
to them and they're just pooping and peeing in this litter,
and they're not getting up enough to not get like
blisters from the ammonia in the litter, it's a it's
a problem in and of itself, Like that's how basically
(32:37):
obese these these chickens are. That they cannot move much
at all, and they end up getting sores from exposure
to all the yearine they're they're sitting in. Yeah, this
was the hardest part of that tour for me in
the one where my buddy Barry and I actually left
the building after And I'll go ahead, and we probably
(32:57):
should have issued a trigger warning period hopefully the titled
episode would scare off any like vegans who really didn't
don't even want to hear about this, but trigger warning
right here. Uh, one of the you know, and this
is what they do when one of the broilers or
any of the chickens are are injured or you know,
uh winged in some way that isn't uh, I don't know.
(33:20):
I'm not gonna put I'm not gonna label what exactly
is wrong with the chicken when they pick it up
by the neck and sling it in a little circle
real quick to snap their neck and then throw it
back on the ground. But that's exactly what happened in
front of us when we saw a chicken that apparently
wasn't doing well. And the guy is literally in mid
conversation and I know this is the job that they do,
(33:43):
and I don't expect him to hold a funeral. But um,
that's when Barry and I stepped out and we're like, uh,
we're gonna be out here for the rest of the tour,
I can imagine, And yeah, I had five cigarettes at
the same time. So there's this um this right, or
from the New Yorker named Michael Spencer who went to
a poultry farm and he wrote that, um, there must
(34:04):
have been thirty thousand chickens sitting silently on the floor
in front of me. They didn't move, they didn't cluck.
They were almost like statues of chickens living in nearly
total darkness. And they would spend every minute of their
six week lives that way. It's pretty sobering. And those
are the brothers, those are the ones we eat, right,
So um, again, they're bread to to grow this way,
(34:25):
and it's totally unnatural. Chickens don't normally get like that.
And when they do interact with people, which is not
obviously a requirement for a chicken to have a good life,
but it's for what you just said. It's to to
harvest or kill a sick or just a sick chicken,
or get the carcass of a dead chicken out of there.
(34:46):
And if you want to see just how little humans,
how little of a role humans have in chicken farming today,
there's a video that Day found. It's actually like a
trade video that I think Ink is kind of like
to sell all of these different machines. It's called Inside
the Million Dollar Chicken Farm, Amazing Modern Chicks, Poultry Farming
(35:09):
check Technology. It's on YouTube and it's like sixteen minutes long.
I didn't watch it with the volume, so I don't
know if there's narration, but if you watch it on mute,
it's just it's mesmerizing. And it's also like, I really
hope humans don't end up like this in the next
like hundred two hundred years, you know, like it's really
really weird and unsettling, but then also at the same
(35:31):
time deeply fascinating. Yeah. So the answer then would be
free range. That is seemingly the solution. So what does
that mean. We talked about cage free and what that means. Uh.
For the U s d A, any egg or poultry
product that can be classified as free range means the
(35:53):
housing for the birds must provide continuous free access to
the outside through their normal growing cycle. Uh. And again,
this is sort of like that story when the guy
said it just means there's a door. They don't go
out there because their food and water is in here
U S D A D A doesn't say, um, how
big this door has to be, where it has to
be placed. They don't say they don't require them to
(36:17):
go outside, like they don't shuttle them outside every day
for some sunlight like you would like in a prison
yard or something like that. All that matters is that
they have continuous access. That door stays accessible and open.
And uh, so you've got your big barn again, you've
got your small door, and if they want to go outside,
they can. But then even if they do go outside,
(36:39):
it doesn't say like and you've got to have this
much area for this many chickens to roam around if
they want to. It can be anything. It can be
a pretty small little area and it still qualifies as outside.
So so those huge dark barns with artificial light filled
with tens of thousands of chickens, if you popped a
(37:01):
hole the size of a bread plate into the wall
of that barn, you could call your operation a free
range chicken operation. Now that's it to be fair. But uh,
technically you're right, yeah, And it's like, yes, it is
technical that I'm right, But from from the research and
(37:23):
into just how um, how much of a finger the U.
S d A has on what constitutes free range and
who meets those requirements. It's entirely possible that somebody's just
cut a little hole inside of the barn and now
is is saying free range and could argue that if
an inspector did come out and argued it with them,
they would probably the the egg producer would probably win
(37:44):
that argument in court, right. I mean, the doors I
saw were bigger, and chickens could easily fit, like more
than one chicken, like they were sizeable. But again, the
whole point is their food and water is inside, and
so chickens are generally an especially when they're they're still
pretty crowded in there. They're still gonna stay where their
(38:04):
food and water is. Generally, it's not like they're saying, hey,
we're gonna put the water out. We're gonna have outdoor
class today. Guys, we're gonna put the water in the
food outside. That will really encourage you to go outside.
They don't care if they go outside or not. So um,
we should say the EU has much better standards for
what constitutes free range. They've been working at free range
(38:26):
and cage free stuff since like ninety nine and have
really made some big gains since then. Um. But then
even in the United States, Chuck, there's plenty of people
like Justin Um who are saying, like, no, I actually
want my chickens to be free range, like you would
think free range actually is. And so there's there's UM.
(38:47):
There's another kind of designation called pasture raised, which people
tend to use when they're to kind of separate themselves
from free range, because I think enough people have picked
up on the fact that free range is kind of meaningless,
so pasturage seems to be um more more legitimate, or
most people who do legitimately raise chickens outdoors would call
(39:09):
them pasture raised. So they're like wheeling them around from
place to place. They have an enclosure that they can
go to and inclement weather, but for the most most
of their lives, they're spending their time outdoors, UM doing
what chickens do given plenty of space for being chickens,
and that's typically pasture raised. Unfortunately, as far as the
(39:32):
us d IS can the U s d A is concerned,
pasture raised is the same thing as free range. So again,
if you have a shed that has all these chickens
and you cut a hole on the side. You can
now call that pastur raise too if you want, Yeah,
you can't. And and if you're saying, well, if you're
saying that some places use pastor raged raised or raged,
(39:52):
uh would be quite a party. It's like am trax
is loosing your pasture? Uh? If you're saying that, um,
some farmers are doing it right, smaller operations And when
they say past your rays, they mean it. But technically
the U S d A D A doesn't make a distinction.
What am I to do? That's where you have to,
like do your homework. You can't just make if you
(40:13):
want to you if you, if you, if it matters
to you, you gotta look up this farm and see
what they're doing. And a lot of times see smaller
farms will say, hey, come on out if you care,
and we'll show you our operation because we're proud of it.
Like you can. Uh. They generally have websites where you
can and it's all there. You know. I think the
(40:34):
U S d A even demands, not demands, but requires
a H. I demand a U r L. They take
their shoe off and bang it on the death. They
require a u r L where you can look this
stuff up if you want to. Yeah, for sure. Yeah,
the U s d is all over that, which is
good because I mean, we've got third party certification who
you know who could be illegitimate. But I think that
(40:55):
like the industry would police third party certifiers because they
don't want to like give away their money unnecessarily because
getting um, getting things like pasture raised or um free
range like these are these are like it's not required.
You can opt to have it done to be certified
like that, but you're gonna pay for it. So if
(41:17):
we had like phony you know, certifiers running around, I
guess yeah, the big producers will probably co opted and
use it to their gain. But luckily there are some
really legitimate third party certifiers. And the one that seems
to have bubbled to the top as far as I
can tell, is called Humane Farm Animal Care, A fact
I think is the way that you say the the abbreviation. Yeah,
(41:41):
I think that's a good uh cliffhanger. Okay, Yeah, and
let's take our final break and we'll talk about them
and uh and generally, how the U s d A
determines if it qualifies as K free or free range
to begin with. If you want to know, then you're
in luck. Just chuck all right. So you mentioned a
(42:21):
couple of important things before the break. One is that, um,
if you want these certifications, uh, it is an uh
like egg grating stuff like that you see like great
A eggs. It is a voluntary thing you have to
pay for. Uh, so you can you know, you do
it so you can put it on your label so
you can charge more obviously, Uh. And you know, maybe
you care about delivering a higher quality egg. Who knows.
(42:44):
But uh, the U s d d A doesn't. Um
Like if it's certified organic, they're not out there doing
that certification. That is completely done by U s d
A approved certification bodies, and those seem to be a
little more feet on the ground as far as actually
going to farms and looking at them. Uh, the U
(43:06):
s d A does not require and and they can't
there are too many, you know that. I don't think
they even had the staffing to do that if they
wanted to to go out and actually photograph arms and
check it out. If you want that descriptor and label,
you have to send in a detailed written description explaining
how it meets the standards along with an affidavit that's
(43:27):
signed that it's not false misleading. But that's kind of it.
Like that's the all the proof they need. That's so
that's for free range. Cage free they take away more seriously,
that's where they do have inspectors go out and check
so like if it says cage free has been verified
that this this meets those cage free standards. So that's
(43:47):
that's a good thing. That's another reason why cage free
is a big step up. But yeah, free ranges you say, um, yes,
my operation is free range under u s d A standards. No,
I'm not lying, and the USDA d A says, good enough,
you're you can put free range on your labels. Now,
yeah they did. Uh. I think they found a study
(44:07):
from that Animal Welfare Institute that examined records from the
f s I S and they found that only one
producer out of a hundred actually submitted photos of the
barn showing the access. Like I think eighty three out
of the hundred, uh provided evidence, Uh, I guess not
(44:28):
photographic evidence, but um affidavits and third party kind of certifications,
and then seventeen of them just had zero substantial substantiation
at all, and that they dug in a little bit
and found in forty four cases they had no detailed
written description at all, which is supposedly what's required, But
they still got approval from the U. S t A
(44:49):
did label their stuff is free range. Yeah, so I
don't want to say the words rubber stamp, but it
seems like it might be that way for sure. And again,
just buy or beware. Free range is synonymous as far
as the U. S. D A is concerned with free roaming,
pasture fed, pasture grown, pasture raised, and meadow raised. And again,
I just want to drive this home. It means that
(45:11):
there's a hole in the side of this giant barn
filled with tens of thousands of chickens who may or
may not be going in or out of that hole
on any day or if ever, during their entire lives.
And on the other side of that it might just
be a concrete pad, is what they're They could be
free ranging on like, that's it as far as the
USDA is concerned. So we have a long way to
go with free range. Um. In particular because chuck like
(45:35):
you me and basically anyone listening to this podcast has
a totally different conception of what free range means, right.
And there was a survey that was done again by
the Animal Welfare Institute. They did it in two thousand
and fifteen, and they went out to people, just everyday
people and said, hey, what do you what do you
think free range? Should, shouldn't should um entail? And they
(45:56):
came back with some pretty interesting stuff. Yeah. They you know,
as would expect, people thought that free range should mean
that there's enough space outside for every bird to be
out during the day, uh, during daylight hours that they
want to be in. Consumers said they thought the outdoor
area should be at least partially covered by grass. Like
(46:16):
the expectation from consumers is, well, you put a picture
on your carton of a hen rolling around, uh this
beautiful pastoral scene. So that's kind of what I expect.
Or am I just being hoodwinked? And the answer is
you're being hoodwinked. Well, to be fair, these are the
same people that believe that those barbecue signs where a
(46:37):
pig is actually cooking the barbecue, they think that's going
on as well. So we got to really kind of
keep this in I never understood that one those are
so disturbing. It. This is my brother Lou. We we
were eating him. Later we had a falling out. Uh um. So,
(46:58):
like I said, if you're if is all of this
is just frustrating and confusing, all you have to do
is do a little legwork, um or you know, obviously
go to those local farmers markets because that's where that's
where you're really getting into good stuff and talk to them.
I guarantee you that fish fan is gonna invite you
out to their farm to check out what's going on. Yeah,
but you might walk away with more than eggs. You
(47:20):
know what I'm saying. That's right, it would be a
nice trip. So it literally am so Um if you
do want to figure out like where to get good
eggs or what eggs you can trust and because you
it's because you don't trust a fish fan. Um. There
are organizations that say, like, let's not get fish fans
(47:41):
involved in this at all, let's keep them at bay,
and everyone says, yes, agreed, agreed, How can we move
forward without the fish? Keep them on the couch where
they belong. So again, the humane farm animal care fact Um,
they they from what I can tell, at least in
the United States, they definitely are yet and they've come
up with some definitions um for their certified humane label.
(48:05):
So that's the one that certified humane on a like
a poultry or some sort of food product. It actually
has met some really good standards and they were basically
like the U s d a's definition of free range
and pasture raised are so terrible, We're just going to
create our own definitions, and they did so, they created
(48:26):
their own standards, and to to be certified humane free
range or certified humane pasture raised, they the producers have
to meet those standards and they're good ones. Yeah, they're
really good, or you know, comparatively speaking, at least for
free range, the hens must be outside for at least
six hours a day, weather permitting, obviously, and that that
(48:46):
outdoor space must have a minimum of two square feet
for every bird. And again that doesn't sound like much
and it's not, but the difference between being able to
move around freely when you have two square feet per
bird and when you have an iPad per bird is
pretty huge, Like you can actually move around and it's
not just like being at the worst party you've ever
(49:06):
been to. Paste Ray's certified humane as even better than that,
the hens must be outdoors year round, with mobile or
fixed housing where the hens can nest or rest for
the night. Get out about whether and they are. They
get about a hundred and eight square feet per bird
(49:27):
a thousand birds for two point five acres. A bird
doesn't even know what to do with that much space. Now,
they're like, hey, can I build a wing onto my
little in house? That's right, and Chuck. One of the
big things that they're doing at HAFAC is UM they
employ veterinarians, people with advanced degrees and animal studies. Those
(49:49):
are the people that go out and visit these farms
to certify them. People who know what they're talking about,
people who are not going to be bought off, people
with the UM animals welfare in mind, to verify the
everybody's meeting these standards before they get that certification. So
that's a good one. There are plenty of other ones
out there too, But that's UM just based on our
research and from what Dave came up with. Two it's like,
(50:12):
that's that's a good one to start with. But it's
like you said, do your homework. You know, it doesn't
take long either. It's not like you've got to invest
hours and hours into this chicken research. Like I guarantee you,
wherever you live, you can find some pretty good options
with you know, fifteen minutes of research online. That's right.
(50:32):
So there you have it. We just need to get
on the U s c A to increase to to
basically say no, they have to spend a certain amount
of time outdoors to be free range. And then we'll
go from there because the USDA will probably say fifteen
minutes to start. Uh. If you want to know more
about free range chickens and cage free eggs, there's a
(50:53):
lot of stuff out there that you can read, and
we hope that you will. And since I said we
hope that you will, it's time for a listener mail.
That's right. This one is called egg on Chuck's face
because I've misspoken a big way on our National Parks episode.
When I touted disperse camping wherever you want national parks,
(51:13):
I meant I was thinking of national forests. That's where
you can do disperse camping wherever you want. And a boy,
I said it a bunch, So you can't camp anywhere
you want to national parks. Uh, and I feel terrible
for that being out there so much that we might
even have to edit that. But uh, greetings from your
friend and national park ranger. Your episode of National Parks
(51:36):
is excellent, and we heard from quite a few park rangers.
By the way, I like to address a statement made
by Chuck. Some national parks may still allow disperse camping.
It's commonly allowed in national forests. Though national parks and
national forests are similar but have different missions and are
therefore managed differently. National parks tend to regulate recreation a
little more strictly. In fact, many national parks now permit
(51:59):
systems in play for backpackers. Yeah, that's very, very true,
and those who successfully acquire permits even then are often
restricted to camping and designated back country campsites. This prevents
overcrowding and popular destinations, which lessens the amount of abandoned gear,
garbage and food scraps and every left behind by certain visitors.
Certain visitors I wanted to address us because they're regulating
(52:22):
where people camp and how many people can camp in
a certain area may seem extreme to some. Helps preserve
the wilderness character and solitude so many visitors are seeking
when they visit a national park. Additionally, visitors who disperse
camp in a park that requires a designated campsite and
or permit may be subject to fines. That's very important
(52:43):
for all visitors to research regulations for any park for
US or wilderness that they're visiting. Happy hiking and that
is uh from our no named park ranger. Park ranger
wish to remain anonymous, which is we're always happy to do.
Thank you, anonymous park ranger. Happy high king to you
as well. That's right. And I even had one park
rangers say, don't make fun of our green shorts. Uh.
(53:06):
And to be clear, I don't think those shorts of
the same color as as trucks really color I was
really making fun of. Maybe they are, but I don't.
I don't know if there's a if you could even
make a fabric that color, right, they just kind of
appear it doesn't adhere to textiles. Um. Well, thank you
(53:27):
very much again, anonymous park ranger, into all the park
rangers and everybody who rode into correct Chuck, who, by
the way, it took it with a palm, So way
we go, Chuck. If you want to get in touch
with this via email, like your friendly anonymous park ranger.
Did You Can send it to stuff Podcasts at iHeart
radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
(53:50):
of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and it's just something is going on
with Chuck. I'm okay so far, but Jerry's not here
(00:22):
because she turned into the Chicken Lady in his in
treatment for that doing the chicken dance. Do you remember
the chicken lady from Kids in the Hall? Oh? Sure,
I was referencing arrest the development cock Cuck call. Yeah,
but you're you're taking aback even further to the great
great kids in the Hall. That's right. I can just
(00:44):
sit here and quote Kids in the Hall one liners
all day. I love those guys. So that's not what
we're here to do, though, Chuck, settle down, settle down.
We're going away from the kids in the Hall. Yes,
and since you mentioned that, Uh, what we're also not
here to do is shame anybody or make anyone feel bad,
(01:07):
or to tell anyone how to live their life and
eat their breakfast. But we're here to arm you with
information on this one about uh. And I'm not surprised
you picked this one, but I just thought, since I
had somewhat scarring experience a commercial chicken farming industry. For
those of you listening that don't know this, one of
(01:28):
my last real person jobs before this job many years ago,
as I worked for a software company that designed software
for commercial chicken uh operations to better track how they
lay eggs and how they gain weight and how you're
feeding them and kind of everything how they're killed uh.
(01:49):
And I hated that job. It was sold killing and
I never understood it. I never invested in it, and
as far as understanding the software, and I was in
tech support, and so I was terrible at it. But
my friends ran the company and eventually they fired me
because I was so bad at it. And that's the
best thing that ever happened to me, because that led
directly to getting this job. It's like Garth Brooks said,
(02:13):
some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers. All Right,
you know your prayer to be good at your chicken
killing software job was unanswered and instead an even better
prayer that you didn't even know you had was answered. Yeah.
I didn't have that prayer. I didn't want to be
good at that job. But yeah, so this is like
(02:35):
all this is probably pretty well known to you because
this this is We've been doing this kind of stuff
to chickens for a good seventy years by now, right, Yeah,
and you know the you know, we're going to talk
some about factory farming. Finally. I don't think we've dodged it,
but people have, you know, long said hey, guys, can
(02:55):
you get into this? And you know we're not touching
cattle or swine. We're just starting dipping our toe into
it with poultry, dipping our beaks, dipping our beaks untrimmed beaks. Yeah,
I can peck you till the cows come home, which
is something that happens on the farm. That's right. So
let's enough dancing around, chuck Um. We're talking about today,
(03:19):
not not necessarily factory farming all the like you said,
we have to talk about We're gonna talk about those
labels that you see on your eggs or on your chicken,
usually cage free or UM free range or something along
those lines, and whether it means anything. But one of
the great successes of the last probably five six, maybe
(03:42):
even ten years or longer Um came very quietly out
of the effective altruism community. Chuck Yeah, A group of
effective altruists said, you know, we're always looking to maximize
our charitable contributions. There's a lot of chickens out there
that are not being treated very well. Supposedly, there's seven
(04:03):
point six billion egg laying hands alone worldwide at any
given time, almost eight billion, So if you could improve
the lives of them even by a little bit, you
would really be reducing a massive amount of suffering. So
they got three million dollars together, and like um Laser,
focused it on advocacy, lobbying, getting legislation put through, and
(04:28):
then most of all pressuring really really big companies. They
went after some whales um to to commit to going
on cage free eggs within a very short period of time,
sometimes four sometimes twenty thirty UM but all of these
huge companies, everybody from dan Owe to Burger King to
(04:49):
McDonald's to Whole Foods not surprisingly but also like Dollar General,
all of them have signed a pledge that says, all
of the eggs that our customers buy, whether it's imprepared
food or eggs you buy in the store, are going
to be one cage free eggs within the next few years.
And they did it with like three million dollars and
(05:09):
and a lot of elbow grease. I think all those
companies probably said, alright, alright, if they're cheese, if they're
cage free, eggs out there, will use them stops. That's
what the burger king said. Yeah, the guy that he
said it with his mind, yeah, because his mouth doesn't move.
(05:30):
But it was a big deal. I mean, the fact
that they got that, that that that's happening. It's a
big deal. And one it's one of those things where, um,
if you scratch beneath the surface, it's not an intended punt,
but if you scratch beneath the surface, and a lot
of these terms and phrases that the U. S d
A likes to bandy about, things like cage free and
things like free range and stuff like that, it's often
(05:53):
really disappointing. But that's one of the things about cage
free is that it is an actual, substantial will increase
in the welfare and quality of life for egg laying
chickens in the in the United States. It's a big,
big deal. And it's not that they're they're they're in
these amazing conditions all of a sudden with cage free.
(06:15):
It's that they're in such poor conditions otherwise that this
is a huge improvement for them. Yeah, and I think
you know a lot of people agree. Even cage free
isn't all it's cracked up to be. Um, But there
a lot of like chicken based idioms that we use.
There's suddenly coming to the Uh. When I worked with
(06:38):
that company, they made everybody at one point, even if
you didn't do like project management where you had to
go to the farms, they made us all go to
the farms and tech support at one point. And I
know I've told the story before, but it was a
pretty awful experience. Uh. And it smells really really bad.
It smells so bad that me and my one friend
that I worked with, Barry Um, were like, did the
(06:59):
sort of the silence to the Lamb's trick with dabbing
some uh like menthal on our upper lip under our nostrils,
just so we could walk through these things. Uh. And
you know that I think they thought it would benefit
as just sort of just see boots on the ground.
What happened. I was like, it's I appreciate the peel trip,
but it did not benefit me in any way except
(07:21):
hearing things like oh man, cage or free range just
means there's a door open, they don't even use it.
And I heard this back then. I was like, oh
my gosh, is that true. And as it turns out,
as we'll see, if that's kind of true. Yeah, And
we shouldn't confuse free range with cage free. There are
two different things. We'll describe them both. But yeah, yeah,
so cage free is a huge improvement. Free range is
(07:42):
as bad as you'd expect it to be, basic because
it's coming from the U. S t A. Yeah, So
I guess let's talk about um let's briefly, and big
thanks to Dave Ruse for helping us out with this one.
But Dave starts out with a little bit of history,
and I think that's a good place to start because
you don't have to look very far. Are back in
this country. Uh, it seems like a long time ago,
(08:03):
but the nineteen forties isn't that long ago in the
in the lifespan of America. And back then they were
still like feeding America their eggs or its eggs. I
don't even know what America is um with backyard chickens basically,
um they were big farms, of course, but they weren't
like these big, massive battery cages that we see today.
(08:26):
They were hens living outdoors, generally on farms, laid about
a hundred eggs a year. Uh. And then after a
few years when they quit laying eggs, then they would
be used for meat. They'd turn into Sunday dinner they
would uh. And these days, starting in like the fifties,
things became a little more industrialized and mechanized, and that's
(08:47):
when battery cages came into play. Which is the wire
cage that you might like. If you have friends that
have backyard chickens, you probably built them a large coupe
and within that coup some battery ca just but if
you're a backyard chicken person, you probably have battery cages
that are very large for two or three for chickens. Yeah,
(09:08):
these are not the battery cages that they're raised in.
After farming became industrialized in the fifties, like these things
are usually have I've seen anywhere between three and seven
chickens in there, um and usually each one has about
the amount of space about a little lower or a
little smaller than the size of a standard piece of paper.
(09:31):
And for the the teenage listeners out there, smaller than
the size about the size of an iPad. Yeah, that's
a chicken. A chicken. They can't move around, they can't
flap their wings, they can't do a lot of stuff
that we'll find out is a is a big problem
in a minute. Um they're meant to be kept basically
in one place, and because this stuff has all been industrialized,
(09:55):
their whole job and everything about their life is to
just sit there and lay egg after or egg after egg.
So they're kept in these battery cages. The battery cages
are kept off the ground, which is good because it
means that they're away from parasites and poop borne diseases.
And the eggs are yeah, they when they poop, they
it falls onto a conveyor belt that carries the poop away,
(10:17):
so it's a little more sanitary. When they lay an egg,
the bottom of the cage is slanted downward, so it
rolls downward onto a different conveyor belt thankfully, that whisks
the egg away. So the whole thing is really automated.
And because these cages are are so um uh uniform,
they can be stacked. It's modular, so you can go
(10:38):
upward with chickens as well as outward too. You can
really raise a lot of chickens in these battery cages,
which is good if you're a farmer, not really good
if you're a chicken though. Yes, and these chickens. You know,
I said that the backyard chickens of your uh laid
about a hundred eggs a year. Today's chickens lay closer
to three hundred eggs a year. Because they are bread
(10:59):
is scifically to do so, and just the way beyond
being bred to do so, Like you said, they're set
up as such that it's just uh, you know, they
have made it a very efficient operation as far as
how much they can extract from each hen. Yeah, that
was a real quick check. That was a big part
of the industrialization of farming. Two is is breeding practices
(11:21):
to where we started selectively breeding types of chickens that
either laid a perfectly nice brown egg or um ones
that gained weight in certain places that we wanted them to. Like.
Genetics has been a huge part of that as well. Yeah,
we're really lucky because are really really good friends. Justin
and Melissa. I've known Justin since college, you know, Justin
(11:45):
he uh, they have chickens. They have these four beautiful
ladies in their backyard. Uh. And they have a big,
wonderful coupe but anytime they're outside uh and can safeguard
them from hawks by keeping an eye on them. Those
those ladies are running around the yard with their dogs.
They've somehow managed to train these dogs to kind of
give them their space. Uh. And it's great. And you know,
(12:08):
they give us eggs and we spend money in their
wine shop and it's a great symbiotic relationship that is
really great. Yeah, yeah, it's a good. Uh. We we
save our cartons and stuff when we do have to
buy eggs, so they have cartons to give out to
their friends because these ladies are laying a lot of eggs. Lightly.
So Justin has a chickens in a wine shop. Now
(12:28):
he's living the life. Oh man, it's the American dream
realized by my British import friend. Look good. So he's
doing it what you could call the right way, I think, um,
which is to say they're very necessarily the profit maximizing way.
But the chickens are, you would guess, much happier than
(12:49):
the ones that are in these battery cages. And one
of the reasons why we would say the chickens are
not so happy in the battery cages because like again,
they can't move. If you put a chicken on a
piece of paper, it's going to take up most of
that piece of paper or iPad, right, So when you
visualize that, you suddenly get like, this is this is
(13:11):
for the whole for its whole life, usually somewhere around
seventy weeks. This is how it spends almost all of
that time in this little cage, just laying eggs, laying
eggs to an unnatural at an unnatural pace. And because
it's kind of stuck in this this one small place,
there's a lot of things that it can't do that
(13:32):
people who have studied chickens say, chickens need to do
this or else they're going to go insane and have
a really horrific life. Um, and that is kind of
what the basis of creating like cage free setups or
like genuine free range setups is. It comes from giving
chickens a better life while during those seventy or so
(13:53):
weeks that they're alive. Yeah, I mean, I think it's
easy for somebody maybe who doesn't think about it much
to think of a laying hen as just this sort
of organic egg machine, like a living egg machine. Not
organic in the sense that it's you know, sort of
hard organic, but a living machine that just pumps out
these eggs that we love to eat for breakfast or
(14:16):
on top of a hamburger or you know, a good meal. Oh,
I don't know about that, but that's not the case. Like,
these birds have personalities and they have behaviors that they
want to do and that they normally do, like, uh,
it's just a handful of them they love. And you know,
(14:37):
you can see this when I go over to Justin
and Melissa's house when they're out doing their thing. They're
preening and they're cleaning their feathers and they're flapping, ruffling
their feathers around and flapping around, and they take a
little dust bass, which means they roll around on the ground,
and uh, they're absorbing oil for their feathers, and they're
getting rid of their dead skin and their shedding feathers
(14:58):
that they don't need, and little feather mites, and they
love to nest. And then here's the big one is
And I've seen it happen and I've tried to guard
my eyes because I know what's going on. They don't
like a lot of attention when they're laying these eggs.
It's a they're giving birth. It's a private matter to them,
(15:18):
you know, giving birth in the figurative sense. But it's uh,
it's like they're doing their business. They don't want a
lot of attention. They'd like to do this instinctively in private,
and they're not able to do that there. It's called
the laying act and it's on full display. And they
can get so upset about having to do this without
(15:39):
any privacy in battery cages, not can they do. They
get so upset they peck at other hens and they
fight each other. And that's why they end up clipping
their beaks because the other hens are getting injured from
being henpecked because they're stressed out from living on an iPad. Yeah.
Dr con Conrad Lorenz Or Lawrence Um, who starred in
(16:02):
our Animal Imprinting episode, I think he's popped up elsewhere.
He had a quote he said, the worst torture to
which a battery hen is exposed is the inability to
retire somewhere for the laying act. The person who knows
something about animals. It is truly heartrending to watch how
a chicken tries again and again to crawl beneath her
fellow cage mates to search their in vain for cover
(16:23):
because they don't get what's going on too. It's it is,
it's heartbreaking. Yeah, So, like that is an enormous thing.
Like not only are we forcing them to have more
eggs every year, we're forcing them to do it against
their instinct basically every day, and they really suffer tremendous
amount of distress for that. And then one of the
other ones, one of the other behaviors that's really really
(16:45):
big is roaming, their freedom to roam. Chickens are very
social animals. They like to hang out, they like to
mess with each other, like to pren one another, not
to supreme themselves, um, but they also need space to
get away from one another there and when they can't
do that, that's when things like hen pecking to uh
to an injurious degree, or cannibalism we're all sorts of um.
(17:08):
Terrible zookosis can happen when chickens are stuck together in
a very small area for their entire lives, and that
is the basis of battery cages. And you said, it's like,
like it makes sense from a mechanized industrial standpoint. But
back in the day when when when they figured this out.
These are the same people who resisted putting seatbelts and
(17:30):
cars and got us into Vietnam, you know what I mean? Like,
these aren't exactly the most moralistic generation that we've ever produced.
They were very sensible and like rational minded and didn't
take a great deal of humanity into consideration when it
came to profit maximization. Yes, this is a segment we
like to call Gen X speaks to millennials and Gen
(17:52):
Z about boomers. That's right, you got that straight. But
it's true. They also you know, alter their UH diet
and lighting to UH to maximize their output. They don't
move around, so they're obviously you know what's gonna happen
when an animal is just sort of stuck in the small,
tiny thing, They're gonna have no muscle. They have muscle
(18:14):
loss because they can't move around and do their thing,
and they basically become what I described, which is these
living egg laying machines, which is exactly how the industrial
egg complex, if that's a term wants it. But things
are changing a little bit, and we're gonna walk you
(18:34):
through some of you know, a lot of these are
marketing terms, but some of them are legitimate um terms
that the USDA allows them to use. Uh, in addition
to these great pictures that you see on your egg
cartons of chickens, like, you know, smiling under the sunshine
on a rolling pastoral scene. Uh, they're allowed to do
stuff like that, but the words that they use are
(18:58):
regulated to an extent. And if you really, really really
want to do your due diligence, though, you've got to
know what all this stuff means and then even do
a little more investigation. Yeah, typical U. S d A
type stuff. But let's take a break and then we'll
get into cage free. How about that, Let's get out
of the cage. If you want to know, then you're
(19:19):
in luck. Just chuck. Okay, So we're talking cage free,
(19:44):
and I think I already let the cat out of
the bag, although hopefully not in the chicken cooper um
that cage free actually does have some meaning like actually,
if you if you look at it compared to the
battery cage operations of your or actually I shouldn't say,
of yours are still most chickens in the United States,
at least they're still in battery cages. I think something
(20:06):
like se which amounts to two and thirty million hens
are currently in battery cages. Um, so it's still going on,
still happening. But if you if you compare the battery
cage to the cage free operation, it is a substantial difference,
for sure. Yeah, Like the more we describe this stuff,
there are levels of getting better, for sure. Uh in
(20:29):
cage free is better. Uh, it is greater than it means.
And this is a direct quote from the U. S
d A means the eggs must be produced by hens
housed in a way that allows for not only unlimited
access to food and water. And you might think, well, duh,
but they used to like keep food from hens. Uh,
(20:50):
so different things would happen with their production and they're like,
you can't do that at all anymore, and then the
rest of it goes. But unlike eggs from caged hens
also provides them freedom to roam during the laying cycle.
That's huge. But here's the deal is, they are there
aren't any guidelines about what that access to outdoors means uh,
(21:12):
it doesn't say how much space there needs to be,
And so basically what you're still seeing is a big,
long barn with a bunch of laying hens packed inside there.
They're just not in those wire cages. No, they have
now instead of about an eight by eight square of
space available to them like they do in the battery cages,
(21:33):
typically a hand in a free or cage free situation
has about ten and a half inch by eleven inch
space available to them per bird, And it's not like
it's designated. That's what they can move around. At least
they can move around these giant, giant barns. The problem
is that there's tens of thousands of hens also in
these barns, and they just don't have that much room
(21:56):
to move. If they had a ton of willpower and
they decided they were going to go to point B,
they could conceivably make their way there. But it's not
going to be easy and it's not like they're just
roaming around and they have a bunch of free space
to move around in or do much in. Again, compared
to the battery cages, where they had no chance of
moving away from their little cage, it is a huge improvement.
(22:19):
But then when you see a picture of what a
cage free barn looks like, it's it gets a little
depressing again. Yeah, and you know some of these egg
producers are not the hens, but the operations. Obviously there's
only one egg producer in the scenario. Um. They do
have some perches that are built up, and they do
(22:41):
have some nesting areas so they can hop up there.
They can stretch their wings, but they're not required to.
That's not part of the U s d A requirement.
If you want to look for requirements that you could
look for a label from the United Egg Producers. They
have a different certification guideline for cage free that's a
little more um, I guess open than the U s
(23:02):
d A s are restrictive. I guess if you're a farmer. Uh.
They must allow hens to exhibit natural behaviors that we
talked about and include enrichments such as scratch areas, purchase,
and nests, so they have to have those, and then
they must have access to litter. And litter is just
like the stuff on the ground that they like to
roll around in. It's not like beer, canson, old batteries
(23:25):
and stuff nothing crying ironized cody kind of. Uh. They
must have protection from predators and be able to move
through a barn in a manner that promote that promotes
bird welfare. So that's a little hazy, but that generally
means not as crowded. But I don't think that that
even specifies what that means. No, And and that is
(23:48):
much better than the U. S d A standards. And
the United Egg Producers are an industry industry group of
like agg operators, Like I think there's maybe a hundred
and fifty in the in the United States, which is
way less than there used to be almost all the eggs, right, yes, yeah,
and we explored a lot of them too. Um. Surprisingly
(24:10):
Uh so it's a it's a car, it's a cartel,
a lot like a salabbying group basically for the egg producers. Um.
And you know, at at the risk of sounding like
suspicious of them, like I would guess that they created
these standards to get ahead of this problem that was
growing all of a sudden and costing them money. So
(24:31):
by doing better than the U. S c A, you know,
that's great. Like their hens are are genuinely like um, um,
what's the word, what's the opposite of suffering benefiting from that?
But it makes me suspect and actually I know from
research it can be much better than that, right. And
(24:52):
a big one is density. It's a it's a huge
part of it. It's density. How like there should be
much greater limits on how many hens you can have
per barn. And then also another one is even under
these um these better more stricter standards for hand welfare,
their their lives are very much artificially controlled still because
(25:13):
they're kept in this barn. They're still in a barn.
They don't go outside to be cage free. You you
still don't go outside if your hand. You spend your
entire life in one single barn until you stop producing
enough eggs fast enough, and then they turn you into
pet food. That's right, Uh, sometimes feeding yourself back to
(25:34):
your fellow chickens. Uh. I looked a little bit into
what chicken feed is mainly made of. And because I
remember at the time when I took this tour, someone
said something about, you know, there's chicken parts in the
chicken feed. Uh. This was someone telling me this. I
didn't find that in my research, but there has been
(25:55):
a movement away from things like fish meal because fish
meal is obviously the oceans are being depleted too, to
using fishes to feed chickens isn't a great idea. And
I think just a few years ago, um, there was
final approval to use uh and it sounds gross, but
like fly larva, and you might think, like that's good.
That is good because that's what chickens would eat if
(26:17):
they were just roaming the countryside, they would eat things
like that. Yeah, so they're starting to be fed things
they normally would would eat otherwise, which is good that
their their food is still very much controlled and portioned
and everything, but they, um, they're starting to be fed
things that more resemble their diet was before it was
just whatever was cheapest and most abundant that you could
(26:37):
feed a chicken like soy and fish. That's yeah, that's
not natural. And you, as the person eating the egg,
should be like, I don't want to egg from a
chicken that's been eating fish. It's whole life. Chickens don't
eat fish. This egg probably tastes way different than it should.
And that's another thing too. There's a lot of health
benefits that have been documented in eggs that come from
(26:59):
well treated chickens. It seems to be that the you
treat a chicken, the healthier the egg it produces. Is
you can just get a and you know, if you
don't have a friend that has a back air chicken,
there's probably some local farmers market where some fish fan
will sell you their eggs. Uh. And you you need
only look at them from the outside at first, to
(27:22):
what they look like in the pan, to what they
taste like. It is a stark difference. It just is
U Yeah, totally. You eat one and you can take
on like five cops. Yeah, there's that nutrient. These cage
free chickens, whether they're United Egg Producer Standard or just
usd A standard, they still have their beaks trimmed when
(27:44):
they're ten days old. They're still forced molted. Molten is
a natural process, but they do something called force molting
when uh and this is where they used to take
away their feed entirely to force molting. Now they just
withhold some feed to force the molting. It's when they
shed those feathers and molts and that extends there their
(28:05):
layer life by you know, it's pretty substantial. It can
be like forty weeks so that again they're just they're
ringing every last egg out of those chickens, k tree
or not. I saw that the forced molting is not
actually in and of itself harmful, and that it might
actually be beneficial for the chickens because they live their
(28:26):
life indoors, and one of the ways that they do
that is through adjusting the length of the light, the
artificial light. But the problem is natural their withholding. No,
it's not naturally happening, but it's not going to naturally
happen during their lifetime anyway, And it actually is good
for them to go through a mold. But they wouldn't
without this induced or forced molting because they aren't They
(28:50):
aren't subjected to um natural light. They don't get natural light.
It's all artificial. They spend their entire lives basically indoors,
almost entirely cut off from natural light, if not entirely
cut off from it. See I thought hens malt by
being a hen. No. No, I think they take their
cues from um a shorter duration of days, and then
(29:12):
they stop eating quite as much. Then they go through
the molting process, stop laying eggs uh as frequently, and
then that happens. I'm saying, yes, it does, but it's
cued by changes in natural light. And if they're not
exposed to natural light, they're not going to undergo the mold,
right unless you Yeah, but like justin Melissa's eggs malt
(29:37):
because they like it can be the shorter day of
the natural light cycle of a year, right right, Yeah,
And that's a natural thing. I'm just saying, like they
can induce it through artificial light changes an artificial light,
and it's not necessarily bad that they induce it artificially.
It's probably better than just not doing it at all. Right, Okay,
I got you. Okay, I thought you're saying they molt normally. No, no, no,
(30:02):
I would never say something like that. Uh, now we
can move on. Those are hens that lay eggs. Now
we can move on to hens that are raised for meat.
They're called broilers, uh in the industry, and um, it's
kind of the same deal of American broilers. Chickens never
(30:23):
see light in this country. Uh. They are in those
from the moment they're born as a little chickie chicks.
They are in a barn, and they live about six
weeks and they are they are pumped up as fast
as they can be pumped up to get the biggest
breast meat possible. UM. I think there was, Dave, this
(30:45):
is pretty startling. UM day found a calculation that if
you if you sort of transferred their growth rate to
like what a human baby would look like, Uh, it
would be a three forty nine pound baby by their
second birthday, like baby huey. Yeah, that's maybe we are right. Yeah.
So the the way that they did this is through
basically selective breeding UM, selecting chickens that UM grow in
(31:10):
their breast area. But they've basically surpassed any any point
where you would normally stop because it's now very harmful
for the chicken. These chickens that we eat, the broiler
chickens UM not necessarily a whole chicken. It can also
be like you know, um, like drumsticks or breasts or
thighs or whatever, all that comes from a broiler chicken.
(31:31):
Any chicken you eat is a broiler chicken. UM. So
these broiler chickens are are usually selected for their breasts,
and their breasts are so heavy that they can't really
walk because their legs aren't developing the way that they should.
But then In addition to that, their legs can't develop
the way they should because the breast is so heavy,
so they end up with metabolic diseases, they end up
with muscle atrophy, and they don't do much of anything
(31:55):
except eat and rest because that's basically all they have
the energy to do. Six weeks is their lifespan. Yeah,
they just want to reiterate that. So over the six weeks, Yeah,
they go from like chicks to slaughtered adults in six weeks,
So they're growing that fast. But they're also growing way
bigger than any normal chicken would write, any normal breed.
(32:16):
So during that six weeks um, they're stuck in this litter.
If they're in a situation where they have litter available
to them and they're just pooping and peeing in this litter,
and they're not getting up enough to not get like
blisters from the ammonia in the litter, it's a it's
a problem in and of itself, Like that's how basically
(32:37):
obese these these chickens are. That they cannot move much
at all, and they end up getting sores from exposure
to all the yearine they're they're sitting in. Yeah, this
was the hardest part of that tour for me in
the one where my buddy Barry and I actually left
the building after And I'll go ahead, and we probably
(32:57):
should have issued a trigger warning period hopefully the titled
episode would scare off any like vegans who really didn't
don't even want to hear about this, but trigger warning
right here. Uh, one of the you know, and this
is what they do when one of the broilers or
any of the chickens are are injured or you know,
uh winged in some way that isn't uh, I don't know.
(33:20):
I'm not gonna put I'm not gonna label what exactly
is wrong with the chicken when they pick it up
by the neck and sling it in a little circle
real quick to snap their neck and then throw it
back on the ground. But that's exactly what happened in
front of us when we saw a chicken that apparently
wasn't doing well. And the guy is literally in mid
conversation and I know this is the job that they do,
(33:43):
and I don't expect him to hold a funeral. But um,
that's when Barry and I stepped out and we're like, uh,
we're gonna be out here for the rest of the tour,
I can imagine, And yeah, I had five cigarettes at
the same time. So there's this um this right, or
from the New Yorker named Michael Spencer who went to
a poultry farm and he wrote that, um, there must
(34:04):
have been thirty thousand chickens sitting silently on the floor
in front of me. They didn't move, they didn't cluck.
They were almost like statues of chickens living in nearly
total darkness. And they would spend every minute of their
six week lives that way. It's pretty sobering. And those
are the brothers, those are the ones we eat, right,
So um, again, they're bread to to grow this way,
(34:25):
and it's totally unnatural. Chickens don't normally get like that.
And when they do interact with people, which is not
obviously a requirement for a chicken to have a good life,
but it's for what you just said. It's to to
harvest or kill a sick or just a sick chicken,
or get the carcass of a dead chicken out of there.
(34:46):
And if you want to see just how little humans,
how little of a role humans have in chicken farming today,
there's a video that Day found. It's actually like a
trade video that I think Ink is kind of like
to sell all of these different machines. It's called Inside
the Million Dollar Chicken Farm, Amazing Modern Chicks, Poultry Farming
(35:09):
check Technology. It's on YouTube and it's like sixteen minutes long.
I didn't watch it with the volume, so I don't
know if there's narration, but if you watch it on mute,
it's just it's mesmerizing. And it's also like, I really
hope humans don't end up like this in the next
like hundred two hundred years, you know, like it's really
really weird and unsettling, but then also at the same
(35:31):
time deeply fascinating. Yeah. So the answer then would be
free range. That is seemingly the solution. So what does
that mean. We talked about cage free and what that means. Uh.
For the U s d A, any egg or poultry
product that can be classified as free range means the
(35:53):
housing for the birds must provide continuous free access to
the outside through their normal growing cycle. Uh. And again,
this is sort of like that story when the guy
said it just means there's a door. They don't go
out there because their food and water is in here
U S D A D A doesn't say, um, how
big this door has to be, where it has to
be placed. They don't say they don't require them to
(36:17):
go outside, like they don't shuttle them outside every day
for some sunlight like you would like in a prison
yard or something like that. All that matters is that
they have continuous access. That door stays accessible and open.
And uh, so you've got your big barn again, you've
got your small door, and if they want to go outside,
they can. But then even if they do go outside,
(36:39):
it doesn't say like and you've got to have this
much area for this many chickens to roam around if
they want to. It can be anything. It can be
a pretty small little area and it still qualifies as outside.
So so those huge dark barns with artificial light filled
with tens of thousands of chickens, if you popped a
(37:01):
hole the size of a bread plate into the wall
of that barn, you could call your operation a free
range chicken operation. Now that's it to be fair. But uh,
technically you're right, yeah, And it's like, yes, it is
technical that I'm right, But from from the research and
(37:23):
into just how um, how much of a finger the U.
S d A has on what constitutes free range and
who meets those requirements. It's entirely possible that somebody's just
cut a little hole inside of the barn and now
is is saying free range and could argue that if
an inspector did come out and argued it with them,
they would probably the the egg producer would probably win
(37:44):
that argument in court, right. I mean, the doors I
saw were bigger, and chickens could easily fit, like more
than one chicken, like they were sizeable. But again, the
whole point is their food and water is inside, and
so chickens are generally an especially when they're they're still
pretty crowded in there. They're still gonna stay where their
(38:04):
food and water is. Generally, it's not like they're saying, hey,
we're gonna put the water out. We're gonna have outdoor
class today. Guys, we're gonna put the water in the
food outside. That will really encourage you to go outside.
They don't care if they go outside or not. So um,
we should say the EU has much better standards for
what constitutes free range. They've been working at free range
(38:26):
and cage free stuff since like ninety nine and have
really made some big gains since then. Um. But then
even in the United States, Chuck, there's plenty of people
like Justin Um who are saying, like, no, I actually
want my chickens to be free range, like you would
think free range actually is. And so there's there's UM.
(38:47):
There's another kind of designation called pasture raised, which people
tend to use when they're to kind of separate themselves
from free range, because I think enough people have picked
up on the fact that free range is kind of meaningless,
so pasturage seems to be um more more legitimate, or
most people who do legitimately raise chickens outdoors would call
(39:09):
them pasture raised. So they're like wheeling them around from
place to place. They have an enclosure that they can
go to and inclement weather, but for the most most
of their lives, they're spending their time outdoors, UM doing
what chickens do given plenty of space for being chickens,
and that's typically pasture raised. Unfortunately, as far as the
(39:32):
us d IS can the U s d A is concerned,
pasture raised is the same thing as free range. So again,
if you have a shed that has all these chickens
and you cut a hole on the side. You can
now call that pastur raise too if you want, Yeah,
you can't. And and if you're saying, well, if you're
saying that some places use pastor raged raised or raged,
(39:52):
uh would be quite a party. It's like am trax
is loosing your pasture? Uh? If you're saying that, um,
some farmers are doing it right, smaller operations And when
they say past your rays, they mean it. But technically
the U S d A D A doesn't make a distinction.
What am I to do? That's where you have to,
like do your homework. You can't just make if you
(40:13):
want to you if you, if you, if it matters
to you, you gotta look up this farm and see
what they're doing. And a lot of times see smaller
farms will say, hey, come on out if you care,
and we'll show you our operation because we're proud of it.
Like you can. Uh. They generally have websites where you
can and it's all there. You know. I think the
(40:34):
U S d A even demands, not demands, but requires
a H. I demand a U r L. They take
their shoe off and bang it on the death. They
require a u r L where you can look this
stuff up if you want to. Yeah, for sure. Yeah,
the U s d is all over that, which is
good because I mean, we've got third party certification who
you know who could be illegitimate. But I think that
(40:55):
like the industry would police third party certifiers because they
don't want to like give away their money unnecessarily because
getting um, getting things like pasture raised or um free
range like these are these are like it's not required.
You can opt to have it done to be certified
like that, but you're gonna pay for it. So if
(41:17):
we had like phony you know, certifiers running around, I
guess yeah, the big producers will probably co opted and
use it to their gain. But luckily there are some
really legitimate third party certifiers. And the one that seems
to have bubbled to the top as far as I
can tell, is called Humane Farm Animal Care, A fact
I think is the way that you say the the abbreviation. Yeah,
(41:41):
I think that's a good uh cliffhanger. Okay, Yeah, and
let's take our final break and we'll talk about them
and uh and generally, how the U s d A
determines if it qualifies as K free or free range
to begin with. If you want to know, then you're
in luck. Just chuck all right. So you mentioned a
(42:21):
couple of important things before the break. One is that, um,
if you want these certifications, uh, it is an uh
like egg grating stuff like that you see like great
A eggs. It is a voluntary thing you have to
pay for. Uh, so you can you know, you do
it so you can put it on your label so
you can charge more obviously, Uh. And you know, maybe
you care about delivering a higher quality egg. Who knows.
(42:44):
But uh, the U s d d A doesn't. Um
Like if it's certified organic, they're not out there doing
that certification. That is completely done by U s d
A approved certification bodies, and those seem to be a
little more feet on the ground as far as actually
going to farms and looking at them. Uh, the U
(43:06):
s d A does not require and and they can't
there are too many, you know that. I don't think
they even had the staffing to do that if they
wanted to to go out and actually photograph arms and
check it out. If you want that descriptor and label,
you have to send in a detailed written description explaining
how it meets the standards along with an affidavit that's
(43:27):
signed that it's not false misleading. But that's kind of it.
Like that's the all the proof they need. That's so
that's for free range. Cage free they take away more seriously,
that's where they do have inspectors go out and check
so like if it says cage free has been verified
that this this meets those cage free standards. So that's
(43:47):
that's a good thing. That's another reason why cage free
is a big step up. But yeah, free ranges you say, um, yes,
my operation is free range under u s d A standards. No,
I'm not lying, and the USDA d A says, good enough,
you're you can put free range on your labels. Now,
yeah they did. Uh. I think they found a study
(44:07):
from that Animal Welfare Institute that examined records from the
f s I S and they found that only one
producer out of a hundred actually submitted photos of the
barn showing the access. Like I think eighty three out
of the hundred, uh provided evidence, Uh, I guess not
(44:28):
photographic evidence, but um affidavits and third party kind of certifications,
and then seventeen of them just had zero substantial substantiation
at all, and that they dug in a little bit
and found in forty four cases they had no detailed
written description at all, which is supposedly what's required, But
they still got approval from the U. S t A
(44:49):
did label their stuff is free range. Yeah, so I
don't want to say the words rubber stamp, but it
seems like it might be that way for sure. And again,
just buy or beware. Free range is synonymous as far
as the U. S. D A is concerned with free roaming,
pasture fed, pasture grown, pasture raised, and meadow raised. And again,
I just want to drive this home. It means that
(45:11):
there's a hole in the side of this giant barn
filled with tens of thousands of chickens who may or
may not be going in or out of that hole
on any day or if ever, during their entire lives.
And on the other side of that it might just
be a concrete pad, is what they're They could be
free ranging on like, that's it as far as the
USDA is concerned. So we have a long way to
go with free range. Um. In particular because chuck like
(45:35):
you me and basically anyone listening to this podcast has
a totally different conception of what free range means, right.
And there was a survey that was done again by
the Animal Welfare Institute. They did it in two thousand
and fifteen, and they went out to people, just everyday
people and said, hey, what do you what do you
think free range? Should, shouldn't should um entail? And they
(45:56):
came back with some pretty interesting stuff. Yeah. They you know,
as would expect, people thought that free range should mean
that there's enough space outside for every bird to be
out during the day, uh, during daylight hours that they
want to be in. Consumers said they thought the outdoor
area should be at least partially covered by grass. Like
(46:16):
the expectation from consumers is, well, you put a picture
on your carton of a hen rolling around, uh this
beautiful pastoral scene. So that's kind of what I expect.
Or am I just being hoodwinked? And the answer is
you're being hoodwinked. Well, to be fair, these are the
same people that believe that those barbecue signs where a
(46:37):
pig is actually cooking the barbecue, they think that's going
on as well. So we got to really kind of
keep this in I never understood that one those are
so disturbing. It. This is my brother Lou. We we
were eating him. Later we had a falling out. Uh um. So,
(46:58):
like I said, if you're if is all of this
is just frustrating and confusing, all you have to do
is do a little legwork, um or you know, obviously
go to those local farmers markets because that's where that's
where you're really getting into good stuff and talk to them.
I guarantee you that fish fan is gonna invite you
out to their farm to check out what's going on. Yeah,
but you might walk away with more than eggs. You
(47:20):
know what I'm saying. That's right, it would be a
nice trip. So it literally am so Um if you
do want to figure out like where to get good
eggs or what eggs you can trust and because you
it's because you don't trust a fish fan. Um. There
are organizations that say, like, let's not get fish fans
(47:41):
involved in this at all, let's keep them at bay,
and everyone says, yes, agreed, agreed, How can we move
forward without the fish? Keep them on the couch where
they belong. So again, the humane farm animal care fact Um,
they they from what I can tell, at least in
the United States, they definitely are yet and they've come
up with some definitions um for their certified humane label.
(48:05):
So that's the one that certified humane on a like
a poultry or some sort of food product. It actually
has met some really good standards and they were basically
like the U s d a's definition of free range
and pasture raised are so terrible, We're just going to
create our own definitions, and they did so, they created
(48:26):
their own standards, and to to be certified humane free
range or certified humane pasture raised, they the producers have
to meet those standards and they're good ones. Yeah, they're
really good, or you know, comparatively speaking, at least for
free range, the hens must be outside for at least
six hours a day, weather permitting, obviously, and that that
(48:46):
outdoor space must have a minimum of two square feet
for every bird. And again that doesn't sound like much
and it's not, but the difference between being able to
move around freely when you have two square feet per
bird and when you have an iPad per bird is
pretty huge, Like you can actually move around and it's
not just like being at the worst party you've ever
(49:06):
been to. Paste Ray's certified humane as even better than that,
the hens must be outdoors year round, with mobile or
fixed housing where the hens can nest or rest for
the night. Get out about whether and they are. They
get about a hundred and eight square feet per bird
(49:27):
a thousand birds for two point five acres. A bird
doesn't even know what to do with that much space. Now,
they're like, hey, can I build a wing onto my
little in house? That's right, and Chuck. One of the
big things that they're doing at HAFAC is UM they
employ veterinarians, people with advanced degrees and animal studies. Those
(49:49):
are the people that go out and visit these farms
to certify them. People who know what they're talking about,
people who are not going to be bought off, people
with the UM animals welfare in mind, to verify the
everybody's meeting these standards before they get that certification. So
that's a good one. There are plenty of other ones
out there too, But that's UM just based on our
research and from what Dave came up with. Two it's like,
(50:12):
that's that's a good one to start with. But it's
like you said, do your homework. You know, it doesn't
take long either. It's not like you've got to invest
hours and hours into this chicken research. Like I guarantee you,
wherever you live, you can find some pretty good options
with you know, fifteen minutes of research online. That's right.
(50:32):
So there you have it. We just need to get
on the U s c A to increase to to
basically say no, they have to spend a certain amount
of time outdoors to be free range. And then we'll
go from there because the USDA will probably say fifteen
minutes to start. Uh. If you want to know more
about free range chickens and cage free eggs, there's a
(50:53):
lot of stuff out there that you can read, and
we hope that you will. And since I said we
hope that you will, it's time for a listener mail.
That's right. This one is called egg on Chuck's face
because I've misspoken a big way on our National Parks episode.
When I touted disperse camping wherever you want national parks,
(51:13):
I meant I was thinking of national forests. That's where
you can do disperse camping wherever you want. And a boy,
I said it a bunch, So you can't camp anywhere
you want to national parks. Uh, and I feel terrible
for that being out there so much that we might
even have to edit that. But uh, greetings from your
friend and national park ranger. Your episode of National Parks
(51:36):
is excellent, and we heard from quite a few park rangers.
By the way, I like to address a statement made
by Chuck. Some national parks may still allow disperse camping.
It's commonly allowed in national forests. Though national parks and
national forests are similar but have different missions and are
therefore managed differently. National parks tend to regulate recreation a
little more strictly. In fact, many national parks now permit
(51:59):
systems in play for backpackers. Yeah, that's very, very true,
and those who successfully acquire permits even then are often
restricted to camping and designated back country campsites. This prevents
overcrowding and popular destinations, which lessens the amount of abandoned gear,
garbage and food scraps and every left behind by certain visitors.
Certain visitors I wanted to address us because they're regulating
(52:22):
where people camp and how many people can camp in
a certain area may seem extreme to some. Helps preserve
the wilderness character and solitude so many visitors are seeking
when they visit a national park. Additionally, visitors who disperse
camp in a park that requires a designated campsite and
or permit may be subject to fines. That's very important
(52:43):
for all visitors to research regulations for any park for
US or wilderness that they're visiting. Happy hiking and that
is uh from our no named park ranger. Park ranger
wish to remain anonymous, which is we're always happy to do.
Thank you, anonymous park ranger. Happy high king to you
as well. That's right. And I even had one park
rangers say, don't make fun of our green shorts. Uh.
(53:06):
And to be clear, I don't think those shorts of
the same color as as trucks really color I was
really making fun of. Maybe they are, but I don't.
I don't know if there's a if you could even
make a fabric that color, right, they just kind of
appear it doesn't adhere to textiles. Um. Well, thank you
(53:27):
very much again, anonymous park ranger, into all the park
rangers and everybody who rode into correct Chuck, who, by
the way, it took it with a palm, So way
we go, Chuck. If you want to get in touch
with this via email, like your friendly anonymous park ranger.
Did You Can send it to stuff Podcasts at iHeart
radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
(53:50):
of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
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