Chicken welfare petition

[Juliet]

Not strictly pets, but I think this goes best on this board ...

Found this on another forum: petitions.pm.gov.uk/chookwelfare/

Friend on other forum says "It is demanding that RSPCA freedom food standards (which are very basic) be the minimum standard for intensively farmed chickens in Britain.
This does not mean organic.....or even freerange in the way we might understand.....it simply refers to space per bird, treatment of injured and dying birds, cage types (ie, not ones that cripple their feet and prevent them from sitting down their whole life)".

Please sign!

Oh, and if you sign, don't forget to click the link on the email they send you, otherwise they won't add your name to the petition (it's to make sure signatures come from real individuals, not just the same person doing it lots of times). Someone on other forum hadn't realised you needed to do this so I thought I should point it out!

[4pygmies]

Thanks Juliet...although it's still not good enough, it's a start. I just worry that in the present climate of financial pressures and the growing costs of food, that animal welfare is going to be less and less important to people....far better to forgo meat altogether than to eat the poor creatures from these hellholes IMO.

[Shrubrose]

Thanks for the 'heads up' Juliet. Have willingly signed the petition and it was easy to do.

[nightowl]

Poor old chooks Have signed

Was haunted by the sight of Hugh F-W crying his eyes out on TV cos of the suffering of intensively raised chickens

[Juliet]

Thanks folks. I couldn't bear to watch the Hugh F-W programmes, but I'm signed up to his campaign too, & get emails from him about it.

4P, I agree, and that's why I've been semi-veggie since I was 15 - there wasn't the organic meat available then that there is now & I couldn't bear to keep eating intensively farmed meat. The thing about food prices is odd though - we've noticed that our food shopping bills have actually gone down recently & we think this is probably because R has stopped buying ready meals from the supermarkets and started to buy organic meat from the butcher's instead ... it sounds as though it will be more expensive, but actually it works out cheaper because a little goes much further. We haven't noticed many of the other things we buy going up either - in fact, a lot of organic food finally seems to be going down in price, so it's more in line with non-organic. Whether that will encourage more people to buy organic though, I don't know ...