Free Range Chicken

The other day in class a discussion of free range chicken versus caged chicken came up. While this video does poke-fun at consumers who care about eating free range chicken, it raises the question of does it matter where your chicken came from?

A trip to the grocery store used to be a trip to the grocery store. Now it's a minefield of moral dilemmas. In re chickens, a blogger named Joseph Haines has framed the question thusly: All chickens, including laying hens, eventually get the ax. Which of the following do you want on your plate?

(1) A caged chicken who, after a life of misery, hears the blade whistling down and thinks: Free at last, or

(2) A cage-free chicken whose final thought, after an existence of ease and comfort, is: Ooh, bummer.

See the problem? We're still eating the flesh of a fellow creature. It's up to each individual to decide what actions will make them feel better about killing chickens.

Although Marketing 474 is not an ethics class, a lot of the arguments tied into sustainability practices drag in the "morals" of a businesses practices. In class it was implied that free-ranged chicken is the way to go. Maybe some did feel that free-ranged chicken is morally correct, but we never discussed if free-ranged chicken is correct course of action to make the world more full of sustainable products.

Currently there are a lot of blogs and news propaganda claiming that factory farms are bad for the environment. It is difficult to find researched evidence of these claims, but after some deep digging through google I found a case study on chicken factories and pollution.
http://www.pewenvironment.org/uploadedFiles/PEG/Publications/Report/PEG_BigChicken_July2011.pdf_

According to the PEW case study on the pollution impacts of chicken factories, "Rough calculations of per-acre manure volume are not necessarily indicative of pollution issues, but agricultural experts have warned of a growing problem of excess manure." So, the excess manure a lot of news articles were claiming as the key source of environmental impacts tend to be misguiding.

Although the PEW had a hard time showing direct evidence of chicken farms contributing to pollution, there was one great example of how they may still be impacting the environment:
"University of Georgia researchers found in 2002 that 13 counties in the state had excess phosphorus in the soil. Of those, 10 were areas where poultry was concentrated."

Whether or not factory farms are bad for the environment, it's hard to find concrete evidence supporting either way. Until then it is important to keep in mind that although some people may feel morally obligated to give chickens a better life, they aught to keep a balanced view of the environmental impacts of free-ranged chicken until concrete evidence shows otherwise.

If there is better evidence of factory farms and pollution, please feel free to comment with a link to the research. I'm not saying that factory farms are either good or bad for environment, I'm just saying I would like to see more concrete scientific research showing statistically the environmental impacts of free-ranged and factory farmed chicken compared.