Sunday August 23, 2009, 12:46 pm
We’re repulsed by the meat because we can’t connect our food to something identifiably organic.



Our featherless friends, on the other hand, seem a violation of temporality. We don’t expect the finished broiler—leg, breast, wings—to be walking about on its own. The sequence is all wrong.



You can imagine these as stars of your own personal Latourian nightmare. You’re dreaming you’re in your local supermarket—maybe only in your underwear, maybe not—and you watch these two birds walk down aisle 6 and hop right into a meats freezer. You look down into the freezer. Shivering birds “Hello, bok, bok, bok, I’m a red dot special! I’m a red dot special!” You wake up in a cold sweat with feathers from your pillow floating everywhere.




In actuality you probably couldn’t spot the difference between our featherless friends once processed and your typical supermarket poultry. Its breeding isn’t in the consumers’ interest—feathers have long been plucked at the factory anyway. Instead, it’s in the interest of the producer. They can now remove plucking from poultry processing, cutting production costs. The cost is also pushed back onto the living bird, which now expresses another attribute that would make it incompatible with living in a natural or ancestral environment. The bird has become further wedded to the industrial process.



We could consider bird baldness the anatomical equivalent of what agribusiness has imposed more broadly on livestock ecologies: thousands of poultry and swine housed atop each other, densities that could never persist in nature because of the disease costs they incur, but that allow more animals to be raised and processed faster.



Among a variety of complications, there is growing evidence that such ecologies are selecting for a greater diversity of virulent influenzas:



Such populations are characterized by little genetic diversity, offering few immune firebreaks against an outbreak.
Larger populations facilitate viral transmission.
Immune systems are likewise depressed under such densities.
And the high turnover rate of the poultry process—the duration from birth to processing has been reduced to 40 days—likely selects for more virulent strains able to reach their transmission threshold before their host is killed for food.
By increasing the throughput speed, the livestock industry may also be selecting for strains able to transmit in the face of more robust immune systems. Not a good sign for those of us 20-45 years of age.


How did this industrialization of biology came about in the first place?



The Livestock Revolution

..............more at sits, please visit -- A trully intrigueing read

Sunday August 23, 2009, 3:45 pm
Thanks Cowboss. Great story and an insightful look at the globalization of pathogens. Just wished I hadn't seen that featherless chicken. It might be economic genious, but it is animal cruelty to the nth degree.

Sunday August 23, 2009, 5:24 pm
Thanks cowboss, this will be my nightmare for tonight! The cutaneous system including hair and or feathers is the first wall of defense to many ills. Of course virus enter by the respiratory system as well ; but if the cutaneous system is weakened - and here by the loss of the protective feathers - it is obvious the rest of the body will have to fight herder not to be inected by other pathogens. Pore lil' biddies. Whatever is wrong with natural? Drat the big agribusiness...

Sunday August 23, 2009, 5:37 pm
This is so sad. Man's handiwork vs. God's handiwork.

Sunday August 23, 2009, 5:45 pm
Cowboss this is what I see everytime I go top the grocery store. I have to avoid the meat dept. because I see faces on all the animals! No joke. This article is like my nightmare! I am so glad you posted it I really thought at times my imagination had run away with me but this is real!! Thank you

Sunday August 23, 2009, 7:06 pm
This article was truly interesting to me..AND...QUITE ALARMING....

While I was reading the article I did note what you had already said above..."You're dreaming you're in your local supermarket...maybe in your underwear, and maybe you watch these two birds down asle 6 and hop right into a meat freezer. UGH!!!! UMMMMM NEVER GOING TO LOOK AT A MEAT FREZZER AGAIN. Don't really go there anyway...

Then further on I was reading "They can now remove the plucking process...WHAT???? Continued to read on, all the time I was wishing I didn't eat dinner, thanking GOD that it was only a salad with some rice...

Goes on to say... 1st, the more confined livestock -- more infection...(WELL DUHHHHH THAT HAS TO BE APPARENT EVEN TO A STUPID IDIOT!!!)

Distroying wet lands, on which many waterfowl typically stop during migration....(see site for rest)

Finally, livestock shipped at greater geographic extents, thus, with this years swine flue virus H1N1...WELL, SORRY GUYS, THAT TOO IS NO SHOCKER TO ME...

THEN AFTER READING SOME MORE I CAME DOWN TO WHERE IT SAID IN 2007 UNIVERSITY OF MINN "WON" A 22.5 MILLION GRANT FROM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT...WHO THE "SHIT" MAY I ASK PAID THOSE GOVERNMENT PEOPLE OFF...

GOTTA KNOW THIS ISN'T THE WHOLE STORY ON THIS...PLEASE DO VISIT THE ARTICLE, I COULD BE READING THIS ONE ALL WRONG...BUT THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG -- (sorry rotten) IN DENMARK AS THE SAYING GOES.

I AM TRULY UPSET ABOUT THIS...AND ACTUALLY QUITE APPALLED!!!

Sunday August 23, 2009, 7:25 pm
Dunno! Guess two different people can read two totally different things from the same article. I must say again, that I think it was well written and very informative, yes some of us know some of what was written but many are not aware of what has happened, and is happening to food production.

cowboss

Sunday August 23, 2009, 7:34 pm
Gotta agree with you it was truly well written, and, I enjoyed reading it..., but it kinda freaked me out a bit about this University getting Big Bucks to do research..

In my mind, why didn't they just leave it like it used to be with my Grandpa in Iowa, you have the chickens, with feathers, if someone wants eggs, they go get them, when my grandma wanted dinner she would chop off the head (which I really didn't care for at 5yrs old), but all of this new stuff that I was reading, just proved to me that there are too many people, to much going on with all of the farm animals...that is why I was so upset...Yep...and YOU ARE RIGHT ON....I AM ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO WERE NOT AWARE ON WHERE OUR FOOD PRODUCTION HAS GONE...THAT WAS WHY I WAS APPALLED!!!

great site - great article, and thank you for enlightening me...truly I will never go near the meat asile again. Just goes to show-- I knew & know Nothing!!!

Sunday August 23, 2009, 8:05 pm
Thanx marilyn

Just gotta hope that people will see and read this, I am sure that is why rg wallace wrote this article. Actually the whole blog is well done and I would recommend that others spend some time at this site, And No, I do not know this person or much about the credentials of the blog. So said!

cowboss

Sunday August 23, 2009, 9:47 pm
Thank you so much Cowboss. The article is interesting and alarming, and deserves more attention.

Monday August 24, 2009, 12:04 am
anx for passing this along CB; yes, it is shocking to know mass produced poultry has come to this! RG Wallace has written a fine article which makes the reader stop and think.
This article reminds me of that rumour which circulated a few years ago about featherless chickens bred for KFC. Seems it wasn't a rumour after all! :O!
Thanx again for posting CB; I'll watch this forum to other's reactions.
Peace y'all!

Monday August 24, 2009, 5:41 am
Thanks for this informative article Cowboss.

Monday August 24, 2009, 12:11 pm
The unnatural breeding process of livestock is creating disease. Yet, they will research and spend millions maybe billions to find the answer they want to the problem(s). Thanks Cowboss.

Monday August 24, 2009, 2:00 pm
thanks for the article cowboss i feel so bad looking at the poor animals factory farming is a horrible thing

Tuesday August 25, 2009, 2:05 am
I av read the article it was long and informative I agree with Jim Bynum - END FACTORY FARMING

Tuesday August 25, 2009, 3:26 am
Thannx... I think this is awful, interferring with God's creation brings in disaster