Even when this system works perfectly, chickens sometimes have legs or wings broken as they are shackled. When the system fails, they are not stunned and struggle frantically as they are carried to the saw. The saw in turn misses many birds — the Agriculture Department says that 526,000 chickens were not slaughtered correctly last year — and some are boiled alive. “One day future generations will look back on our abuse of animals in factory farms with the same attitude that we have to the cruelties of the Roman ‘games’ at the Coliseum,” Peter Singer, a Princeton University philosopher, told me. More than five million young children will die this year around the world from diarrhea, malnutrition or other ailments; we let these children perish essentially because of our own tribalism.

Source: International New York Times July 11, 2020 18:22 UTC