Chicken Run

Over the last few days, I’ve been watching Channel 4’s “Hugh’s Chicken Run. It’s not been pleasant viewing – not least because I find I get truly annoyed by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall – but to me it’s something important.

Now with Herself being vegetarian, we eat hardly any meat here anyway (I do have the occasional sausages, but not often) and we don’t have chicken at all, but before I moved in with Herself I can’t deny that I did eat a fair amount of it.

I’ve always found it truly disturbing the way chickens are raised for mass-production – and I think even more so now that we’ve actually got some chickens of our own – and I hate the idea of birds going from chick to slaughter in 39 days (the industry standard) with only 30 minutes of darkness per day in order to fatten them as fast as possible. (if it’s light, they eat – if it’s dark, they don’t)

As the first programme in the series showed, most people don’t know the conditions for breeding supermarket chickens (for example that the industry standard is 17 chickens per square metre of shed) and so I firmly believe that programmes like this one are essential for getting more people to know what it involves.

And that’s why I’m also linking to the Chicken Out campaign site – because I believe in this sort of campaign, even when it’s fronted by a bell-end like Fearnley-Whittingstall. (And there’ll be another post about him later, I think)