Purdue Farms is setting high standards for chicken welfare, claiming the high ground in the North American market.
The list of changes it
announced Monday will no doubt challenge the chicken supply-management industry
in Canada, particularly since it has the power to force a nation-wide standard.Purdue said it will improve care for birds on its farms, trucks and slaughterhouses, from installing windows in 200 barns within the next18 months to using controlled-atmosphere stunning before unloading chickens at processing plants.
Animal activist groups, such as Mercy for Animals, are praising Purdue and challenging others to match it.
Perdue said it will adopt controlled atmosphere stunning at all of its slaughterhouses and stop shackling them. This means the birds will be rendered unconscious before being unloaded.
Perdue uses this method at one of its turkey plants, will be using it at one of its chicken plants by the end of 2017, and will apply it at all of its plant over the next several years, company officials said.
Purdue has windows in its organic-standard barns and said it will add 200 of its other barns by the end of next year to provide birds natural light. It will also add “enrichments” such as hay bales and perches, and provide more space per bird.
The company also said it will start to test slow-growing birds to determine impacts on animal welfare and product quality.
Perdue Farms, already about 14 years into efforts to remove antibiotics entirely from its products, is effectively transferring practices it has learned from organic chicken production, which it began five years ago after its acquisition of Coleman Natural Foods.
Those have included feeding more probiotics and natural herbs such as oregano and thyme to strengthen the birds’ immune systems, allowing natural light to prompt activity, and providing play apparatuses, among other things.
“We would have said we were doing a pretty good job taking care of chickens based on their needs, but once you look at organic husbandry and understand it … you realize there’s more to it than just those needs,” Dr. Bruce Stewart-Brown, Perdue’s senior vice president of food safety and quality, said today in a news teleconference.
On transparency, chairman Jim Perdue said “we expect people to hold us accountable. This is going to be a long-term process, and we think it’s important that people know exactly what we’re doing on this journey.”
Mercy For Animals president Nathan Runkle said in a
statement for news media that “it’s now time for Tyson, Foster Farms, and
others to stop dragging their feet and reduce the needless pain and suffering
animals endure on factory farms and in slaughterhouses.”
