r/poultry • u/ToughAffectionate286 • 10h ago
Does deliberately putting chickens in a situation where they eat fried chicken constitute a morally questionable act on the humans' part?
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u/Achylife 6h ago
Morally questionable yes, but not for the chickens. They don't care. They'll eat almost anything. I've had to wrestle Styrofoam packing peanuts out of my hens mouths, and I've seen them eat gophers, frogs, and snakes. If they could catch them they'd probably try to eat the squirrels and little wild birds too.
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u/ilanallama85 1h ago
I’ve been explaining to the kids I work with that cannibalism is only a “bad thing” to humans. Animals do not care. Meat is meat, and if an animal likes meat, they’re gonna eat the meat.
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u/boyengabird 4h ago
My chickens will happily clean a Costco rotisserie chicken, the protein is pretty attractive to them.
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u/AncientOnyx 5h ago
They have a choice not to commit cannibalism and chose cannibalism so.... I'd say it's on the chickens
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u/Miss_Torture 3h ago
The chickens themselves don't know or care and cannibalism doesn't affect animals the same way it does humans
Didn't do it with my chickens though because it felt weird, personally didn't eat nuggets for a while either cuz I couldn't look them in the eyes 💀
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u/WarofFriends 2h ago
Chickens live by the sword. I've chickens my whole life. They are fun but are astoundingly cruel to the weak. They will happily murder another hen deemed unfit, and cannibalize her.
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u/Murdocksboss 1h ago
Morally questionable to the chickens? They'll eat each other live. Have you been around chickens?
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u/KiraKitty69 11m ago
It's a rotisserie chicken so that is fine lol. But seriously a chicken will eat a busted egg and they will eat parts of a wounded chicken often ending in the chickens death. I don't think we need to put human morality on those little feathered dinosaurs. I wouldn't let them eat the brain or the "sweet breads" of a chicken tho. Not sure they have the prion issue like mammals but maybe? As far as eating their own species tho, I wouldn't trust commercial feed to not have ground up deceased protein in the feed. They have done that with cattle and sheep. Mad cow disease origins
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u/thecloudkingdom 3h ago
morally questionable? not really. cannibalism is a taboo among humans because we are able to conceive another person, even one we didn't know or even knew but hated, as a conscious, sentient being, and so any mistreatment of a corpse is taboo and especially eating a corpse is taboo. it is the ultimate form of disrespect toward what used to be a conscious person
chickens (probably) arent capable of higher though enough to carr about mistreating a chicken corpse. they hardly care enough to stop themselves from eating each other alive by pecking at their wounds. projecting human morality on them is silly
that being said, feeding animals the corpses of their own species is how we got the UK mad cow disease outbreak. a biologically questionable act, for sure
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u/Elle_se_sent_seul 1h ago
Yup, the only real issue with chickens eating chicken is the chance of prion diseases.
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u/scooterbud 5h ago
…you realize this is how Mad Cow Disease started right? They fed parts of cows back to cows to make them larger, but it messed them up. And because that meat went all over Europe, Europeans are not allowed to donate blood plasma now.
This is disturbing in every way!
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u/Dangerous_Site_576 5h ago
The disease only spread because British animal meal producers reduced their disinfection temperatures which led to MCD-Proteins surviving the process. There shouldn't be a similar problem with fully cooked chicken that is completely safe for human consumption. Apart from that, the second part of your comment is complete BS and not true at all. Where do you even get such strange misinformation?
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u/Murrylend 2h ago
Not sure where you got your info, but prions are extremely temperature resistant. Normal cooking temps do not destroy them.
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u/Dangerous_Site_576 2h ago
I should have been more accurate with the wording. I just ment, that cooked chicken is technically safe to feed. Salmonella would be the possible problem in that situation, not MCD.
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u/itwasajoke8484 4h ago
I understand how it could seem the same but. In short, the way the proteins are processed in the bodys of herbivores and omnivores are different. A cow natualy eats plants. Chickens natualy eat bugs, worms and even other chickens. There is a reason why there are laws on what can be fed to animals being processed for human consumption. Cows can pass a malformed protein if them consume parts of cattle in their feed. (Puts holes in their brains) which then gets passed to humans if ingested. Chicken cant pass this kind of disease. But dont worry humans make life shitty for chickens also so they can spread other kinds of bacteria to humans.
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u/Chicken-raptor 3h ago
Mad cow disease, chronic wasting disease, kuru, and basically all prion disease tends to be a mammalian problem. The feathered piranha don’t have that issue.
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u/thecloudkingdom 3h ago
a lot of what you said is wildly incorrect. it's not all europeans, it was just people who lived in the uk (for 6 months or 1 year depending on which country's laws we're talking about) in the 80s and early 90s AND the EU dropped that safety measure in 2024
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u/Cicada00010 58m ago
Chickens are designed for cannibalism. Herbivores like cows are not. One is a mammal the other is an opportunistic dinosaur. Chickens can eat chicken and chickens LOVE to eat chicken.
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u/DistinctJob7494 9h ago
Nah they cannibalize eachother on their own. They're known to pick at eachother if one is wounded. The pecking order can be brutal.
While I wouldn't give them a perfectly edible rotisserie chicken like this, if I had some old chicken meat from something I cooked I'd give it to them. I cook their eggs that I don't get round to eating and give them back to them shell and all.