The images in the following
program are very sensitive and may be as disturbing to viewers as they
were to us. However, we have to show the truth about animal cruelty.Karen (f): They’re animals like us.
HOST:
Compassionate viewers, today on Supreme Master Television’s Stop Animal
Cruelty series Karen Davis, founder of United Poultry Concerns and Kim
Sturla, co-founder and Executive Director of Animal Place Sanctuary and
Education Center will discuss the unspeakable cruelty endured by
chickens on factory farms.
United Poultry Concerns is a
non-profit group based in Michigan, USA that addresses “the treatment
of domestic fowl in food production, science, education, entertainment
and human companionship situations.” Founded in 1989, Animal Place
Sanctuary and Education Center is a non-profit shelter for abused,
neglected and abandoned animals in Vacaville, California, USA.
Karen (f): Chickens
evolved in the jungle. They evolved in a green, lush world full of
colors, full of sound. And they were busy all day raising their
families, and finding food. Doing all the activities that interest
chickens – perching, running around, very involved and much of the time
with their family life in which both the roosters
and the hens are very involved.
HOST: Chickens are caring, loving and intelligent beings.
Kim (f): You can see them interact in flocks. And you can see the male roosters kind of take over their hens and protect them.
Karen (f):
They break up during the day into smaller groups of several hens and
one rooster and they go off, and roosters will call to each other
through the dense foliage
throughout the day to keep track of each other.
Kim (f):
To see the relationships between the mothers and the chicks, to see the
relationships between the roosters and the females, there's no doubt in
my mind at all that they are sentient creatures.
They have a
brain. They can learn things. They can use tools. They communicate
widely. So, chickens and turkeys both (are) very, very intelligent
animals.
HOST: According to the non-profit group the World
Society for the Protection of Animals, each year a staggering 57
billion poultry are raised for meat and eggs worldwide, the vast
majority on squalid, utterly filthy factory farms where they are
deprived of the most basic rights as our co-inhabitants on Earth.
These
animals live their entire lives without ever breathing fresh air,
seeing sunshine, trees and grass or enjoying a moment of freedom. The
only time may experience the outside world is when they are sent to the
slaughterhouse.