A few months ago I received a dinner invitation from the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy, an organization for which I have the highest regard. The meal preference card said, “Kindly indicate whether you would prefer a poultry or vegetarian main dish.”
I thought to myself, “Poultry? At a dinner to save the environment?”
Unless the bird comes from a small family farm where chickens actually run around outdoors and their manure goes back to the garden, I’m afraid a chicken dinner at an environmental fund-raiser isn’t quite putting your money where your mouth is!
As Kenley Neufeld’s article on Vegetarianism and the Environment (posted below) reports, in November of 2006, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization issued a report stating that livestock agriculture generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined.
The report projects that unless more people commit to eating less meat, the number of farmed animals will double in the next 50 years.
Have you ever wondered why our beautiful valley has no chicken farms or slaughterhouses?

When my family immigrated to Ojai from Holland in 1957, my father briefly held down a part time job working at a chicken farm on Thacher Road. I was seven years old and sometimes I would follow my dad around as he cleaned up the manure underneath the wire cages, filled the feeders and gathered the eggs.
My father remembers it as an egg production factory, where about one-hundred hens were kept in individual wire cages and the lights were on 24 hours a day to assure the maximum laying of eggs all year round. When their worn out bodies could no longer produce, it was time for the chopping block. Sometimes we would find dead chickens with their intestines spilled out from all the forced laying.
Fifty years later, I realize that the chicken farm on Thacher Road was a forerunner to today’s chicken factories where millions of birds are housed in windowless warehouses and where every aspect of the environment is “scientifically” manipulated to maximize profits and minimize costs.
Feedlots and slaughterhouses are major polluters of rivers and streams, filling them with poisonous residues and animal waste. Animal agriculture is the greatest producer of sewage wastes in the U.S.
A hen factory that houses 60,000 birds produces 82 tons of manure every week.
“Farm” animals produce 2 billion tons of manure each year–about 10 times that of the human population. It ends up in ground water, streams, rivers and lakes.
Millions of gallons of water are used every day in just one plant that processes chickens–enough water to service a community of 25,000 people.
It takes 25 times more water to produce a pound of meat than it does to produce a pound of vegetables.
With a growing number of consumers switching from red meat to poultry, the poultry industries are booming. Nearly ten billion chickens and half a billion turkeys are hatched in the U.S. annually.
Every day, 23 million chickens are killed in the U.S. for food–that’s 269 chickens per second!
If you want to see for yourself how modern day chickens (and turkeys) arrive on the dinner table, simply Google “how poultry is raised.” With few exceptions, for most chickens their lives from hatch to slaughter are one of unrelenting horror.
These birds are typically crowded by the thousands into huge, factory-like warehouses where they can barely move. Shortly after hatching, both chickens and turkeys have the ends of their beaks cut off, and turkeys also have the ends of their toes clipped off. These mutilations are performed without anesthesia, to reduce injuries that result when stressed birds are driven to fighting.
Today’s “broiler” (meat) chickens have been genetically altered to grow twice as fast and twice as large as their ancestors. An industry journal explains that “broilers now grow so rapidly that the heart and lungs are not developed well enough to support the remainder of the body, resulting in congestive heart failure and tremendous death losses.”
Confined in unsanitary, disease-ridden factory farms, the birds also frequently succumb to heat prostration, infectious diseases, and cancer.
Poultry are specifically excluded from the federal Humane Slaughter Act which requires that other animals be stunned before they are slaughtered. However, many slaughter plants first stun the birds in an electrified water bath in order to immobilize them and expedite assembly line killing. Poultry slaughterhouses commonly set the electrical current lower than what is required to render the birds unconscious because of concerns that too much electricity would damage the carcasses and diminish their value. The result is that while birds are immobilized after stunning, they are still capable of feeling pain, and many emerge from the stunning tank still conscious.
After the shackled birds pass through the stunning tank, their throats are slashed, usually by a mechanical blade. Inevitably, the blade misses some birds, who may still be moving and struggling after improper stunning. Proceeding to the next station on the assembly line — the scalding tank — the birds are submerged in boiling hot water. Those missed by the killing blade are boiled alive.
While recent reports on meat and global warming give a generally positive plug to a more vegetarian way of eating, somehow the public perceives global warming as related mainly to cattle. As polls show, many people who think of themselves as “vegetarian” eat chicken, turkey and/or fish. Alas, the “inconvenient truth ” is that it takes approximately 200 intensively raised birds to supply as many meals as one steer.
The greening of Ojai will gradually include the awareness that we all need to cut back on eating meat. If everyone reduced their animal consumption by just 10%, we’d reduce demand by one billion animals.
Ojai has some of the best vegetarian cooks in the country! Going veggie is becoming mainstream. With the huge popularity of vegan restaurants, with all the delicious vegetarian menus available, there is simply no need for any organization to feel obligated to always have a meat option on the menu.
As a step in the direction of the greening of Ojai, I recommend that the Ojai Valley Green Coalition puts forth the recommendation that local fund-raisers, most especially local environmental groups, dog park and other animal related fund raisers, church dinners, high school reunions, school fund raisers, etc., use these events as opportunities to educate the public about delicious vegetarian and vegan food.
Eating less meat or no meat is an idea whose time has come. I hope that the next dinner invitation I receive will say “Scrumptious Vegan Feast!”
“The only way of winding down the factory farms is by withdrawing our weight, each person, one act of conscience after another, from the momentum of consumer demand,”
–Matthew Scully, author, “Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.”
To learn more, visit:
http://www.veganoutreach.org/globalwarming.html
A Truly inconvenient truth
http://www.veganoutreach.org/enewsletter/EnterTheChickenShed.pdf
Enter the chicken shed