...Craig Watts, 48, a North Carolina farmer who says he raises about 720,000 chickens each year for Perdue... Watts opened his four chicken barns to show how a Perdue chicken lives.
Most shocking is that the bellies of nearly all the chickens have lost their feathers and are raw, angry, red flesh. The entire underside of almost every chicken is a huge, continuous bedsore...[A spokesman for Perdue] suggested that the operator was probably mismanaging the chicken house. That doesn’t go over well with Watts, whose family has owned the farm since the 1700s and says he has been raising chickens for Perdue since 1992, meticulously following its requirements...The claim about the chickens being raised “cage free” is misleading because birds raised for meat are not in cages. It’s egg-laying chickens that are caged, not the ones we eat. So “cage free” is meaningful for eggs but not for chicken meat. Moreover, Perdue’s chickens are crammed so tightly in barns that they might as well be in cages. Each bird on the Watts farm gets just two-thirds of a square foot.
More at the New York Times and Salon.
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