Laying bare the wretched lives of battery reared chickens, television chef Jamie Oliver has turned his celebrity spotlight on poultry and the appalling conditions in which many of them live.
His attempt to stop such cruelty and to encourage supermarkets to invest solely in free range or organic birds is being backed by chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who has made his own series of programmes exposing the horrors of battery farming.
The pair hope their combined efforts will draw attention to the suffering of the birds and the poor quality of the meat when chickens are reared cheaply and in cramped conditions.
In some supermarkets, entire chickens can be bought for as little as £2.50, while recent RSPCA figures revealed that just five per cent of the birds in the UK are kept in high welfare conditions.
Oliver, who campaigned against unhealthy school dinners in 2005, examines the poultry industry in his one-off programme Jamie’s Fowl Dinners on Channel 4 on January 11.
In front of invited guests, he will show a series of films and interviews explaining how the birds are killed and their brutal living conditions.
At one stage he examines the 39-day life of a battery reared chicken and says: "It’s disgusting, the smell is awful. Why would anyone want to eat these birds who are walking in their own faeces?"
In Fearnley-Whittingstall’s three part Hugh’s Chicken Run, the chef rears battery chickens in overcrowded conditions in a specially built factory in Axminster in Devon while free range birds are bred nearby.
He tries to ensure that more than 50 per cent of chicken bought and eaten in the town over the space of a week is free range. This includes all curry houses, burger bars and pubs in the area.
Earlier this week, the RSPCA urged shoppers to pay a little extra to ensure their poultry has been bred in decent conditions and called for retailers to sell only higher welfare chicken by 2010.
Of the 855 million chickens reared for their meat in the UK every year, the majority are kept in cramped, dimly-lit spaces.
RSPCA farm animal scientist Dr Marc Cooper said: "If people knew how the average chicken was treated before it ended up as their Sunday roast, they would probably be disgusted.
"Currently, some supermarkets are selling chicken meat for as little as £2 per kilo - this can be less than it costs to produce the bird."
from Telegraph UK
