Chicken Reporting

A big part of my growing up was on a farm in East Texas. We had cows, horses, pigs and chickens, as well as ubiquitous cats and dogs. When we lived on the farm with the large chicken house, I learned a lot about raising chickens. These were “broilers” . . . chickens raised for meat. The technique is different for egg-layers, but . . . chickens are chickens.

Chickens are cute when they’re tiny, fluffy, yellow chicks . . . but when they get big they’re noisy, dirty, stinky, and mean. If one chicken has a few off-color feathers, or a dirty spot . . . the other chickens will literally peck it to death. If they just don’t *like* another chicken . . . they’ll peck it mercilessly. That’s where we get the term “pecking order.” And our chickens didn’t even grow big enough to become vicious roosters with razor sharp spurs.

One of our chores after school was to check the chickens and clean the watering troughs with a sponge dipped in disinfectant. We also had to wear boots and step in disinfectant before we entered the chicken house. If there were any water or food spills on the wood shavings, we had to and shovel it out. After the chicken house was converted to a research facility, we had to feed the chickens by hand - weighing each bucket of feed and documenting the amount fed to each pen. Our research helped determine which breed of chicken had the best feed conversion. This improved chicken farming efficiency, and reduced poultry costs for consumers. (I made a 4-H demonstration speech about it and won second place in a state contest :) Farming is an excellent way to learn a good work ethic, in addition to learning the truth about where our food comes from.

Recently, ABC News reporter Brian Ross did an “investigative report” on an egg farm in Illinois, family-owned Sparboe Farms. They took a video from an animal activist, and displayed it uncritically on national news, admitting “the fox with the undercover camera was . . . in the henhouse.” As a result of their yellow journalism, Sparboe Farms lost two of its biggest customers, McDonald’s and Target.

I'd never heard of Sparboe farms before this report, but as a business major, a former farm girl, and a budget-conscious mom, I’m furious! Take a look at some of their so-called issues.

The inside videos were taken by disgruntled employees and an activist . The video of “animal abuse” does not show the perpetrator’s face. Did the animal rights activist stage the video? How about a little deeper investigation, Mr. Ross? The goal of the disgruntled employee and the activist was to harm the farm . . . and ABC news helped them succeed. Watch for massive layoffs soon, and . . . if the farm goes bankrupt, thousands of chickens may be slaughtered prematurely.


“Workers cut the beaks of young chicks to prevent them from pecking others . . .” Re-read my second paragraph. Besides, young puppies get their ears or tails cut and kittens get de-clawed when they’re very young, and that’s much more painful than blunting the sharp end of a beak, which is made of keratin, just like your fingernails.

The reporter freaked out about finding a dead chicken that might have been there a day or two. Obviously the reporter had not been to many farms, much less worked on one. If a farm has thousands of chickens, some days there will be a dead one. Know what? “Free-range” chickens don’t live as long as caged ones! Free-range chickens get more diseases and parasites and are killed by predators, wild and "domestic."

Swedish researchers have discovered that . . . bacterial infections like E. coli can run rampant through free-range chicken flocks . . . Swedish farmers made the switch from cages . . . between 2001 and 2004. Around the same time, more dead hens started showing up at the Institute. . . . The researchers found that as many as 10 times more hens were submitted from litter-based and free-range setups than from caged systems . . . . free-ranging hens had more bacterial infections (the most common cause of death), more parasites, and more viruses. They were also more likely to become victims of violent pecking and cannibalistic attacks . . .” Does ABC News want shorter, sicker, more violent lives for chickens?

Laying hens are only productive when they are healthy and comfortable. If they are disturbed, they will stop laying temporarily . . . whether it’s from a big storm, nearby construction, or a cleaning crew. The video showed the chickens jumping around and squawking in their cages in a frantic manner . . . yeah, because the people walking through with the video camera were disturbing them! How about putting a camera in the henhouse to see what they do on a day-to-day basis? They eat, sleep, and lay eggs . . . exactly what hens do in the “wild,” only with less hunger and stress. Those chickens are fed all-you-can eat, scientifically formulated, nutritious food, housed in temperature controlled houses, protected from infections, and secured against bio-hazards. Visitors and workers have to wear clean suits (an improvement from our mere boot-dipping). Agricultural Science is taught in thousands of universities, and has millions of dollars and man-hours dedicated to it. Perhaps ABC News is anti-science.

They freaked out about one dead mouse! So what? Do you know how many mice, rats, voles, gophers, frogs, squirrels, rabbits, pheasants and birds are killed each year from soybean and grain farming? Animals are routinely killed by the thousands at every step . . . accidentally when planting and harvesting, and intentionally during transportation and storage with traps and poison.

Eggs are some of the cheapest complete proteins, at less than a penny per gram. For the consumer who needs to stretch a meager food budget, this is a fantastic bargain. Why would ABC try to make eggs more expensive by intentionally harming a productive, efficient, state-of-the-art, grower? If protein costs go up for everyone, it will disproportionately harm the poor who spend a larger percentage of their income on food.

Brian Ross pretends he’s helping to protect our food supply with this story. “I never heard anybody ask us to clean the feed trays.” . . . says the agenda-driven ACTIVIST. Sparboe farms has NEVER had a salmonella incident, although ABC uses guilt-by-association when they talk about a DIFFERENT farm and a tear-jerker story of a mom who was sickened. If they care about our food supply, ABC should investigate the organic food industry. In Germany this year, organic bean sprouts resulted in over 3,700 illnesses and 44 deaths.

The CDC says people who eat forganic and “natural” foods are 8 times as likely to be infected with a new deadly strain of E. coli (0d157:H7), which kills or causes permanent liver and kidney damage . . . to the tune of 250 deaths per year in the U.S. alone. Consumers of organic food are also more likely to be attacked by a new, more virulent, strain of salmonella. Organic food is more dangerous than conventionally grown produce because organic farmers use animal manure as the major source of fertilizer for their food crops. No shit!

The ABC media and other anti-business types are the Orren Boyle on the butt of our economy. Some REAL investigative journalism would check out the animal deaths per acre of plant farming . . . or human deaths from organic farming . . . if they TRULY care about people OR animals. It’s obvious they don’t care about jobs or the cost of food for poor people.

ABC news has been my favorite source of news . . . not any longer, thanks to stories like this.

If you wish to send your comments to ABC news, please do, here’s a link: Comments on Sparboe Farms story.

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Photograph credits:
1. I took this photo when I was about 16. I was taking a picture of the calf with the heart on its forehead, and got the chicken house in the background.

2. The photo is our family unloading the hay bales into the barn. That's me on the top, lifting a bale. The kids on the fence include a sibling, foster children and some cousins.

3. Photo from the ABC news article on Sparboe farms.