More Use Regulation Failures.

The problems grow for the large animal welfare corporations on both sides of the Atlantic as they try to regulate the exploitation of nonhuman rights bearers and thereby connive in rights violations.

The RSPCA's "Freedom Foods" initiative has been exposed once more by TV's Five News. This footage, taken at night and unannounced, reveals once again the extreme problems of attempting to regulate atrocities.

Meanwhile, as their US members astonishingly dress up as the KKK a few weeks after the election of an African American president, PeTA's favoured slaughtering method, known as "Controlled Atmosphere Killing" (CAK) or "Controlled Atmosphere Stunning," (CAS) is apparently not measuring up to the inflated claims made for it.

The US National Chicken Council, the American Association of Avian Pathologists and American College of Poultry Veterinarians have looked at the CAK issue and the ongoing research about it. The NCC quote animal welfare expert Bernard Rollin, who states:

There is no distress as severe as the feeling of not being able to breathe. This feeling of suffocation is not only a result of lack of oxygen but also the inability to blow off carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide drives respiration. Even though CAS creates unconsciousness, there must be a period when the animal feels a sense of suffocation. For this reason, I do not accept CAS as a humane method of euthanasia.

Of course, we should be wary of claims coming from organisations such as 'chicken councils', or composed of 'avian pathologists' and 'poultry veterinarians', and therefore assess them critically. For example, one issue that none of them seem to consider is PeTA's welfare claims about the handling of birds. The problem is that PeTA's claims about handling mislead too. No doubt with the requirement of regular 'victories' to announce, they, once more, exaggerate. So while the VCC, AAAP, and the ACPV focus on the welfare of birds as they are actually stunned and thereby ignore PeTA's suggestion that welfare is improved in the CAK system because the birds are already dead when they are shackled onto the processing line, PeTA exaggerate this potential improvement, saying that 'workers never handle live birds'.

This is not true in relation to the workers at the farm end who often roughly remove birds from their prisons and violently stuff them into transportation crates. It may not even be true at the slaughter plant either if the stun/kill system is not working perfectly. As I have pointed out before, overblown welfare claims must be assessed in the knowledge that CAK is not a commercially-operated system in the USA yet. The KFC/PeTA bird gassing partnership agreement is not due to kick in for another seven years.

PeTA's own video collection shows that speciesist workers, whether on farms or in processing plants, routinely violate the rights of animals, use them as footballs, and sexually assault them. The CAK/CAS system leaves the birds at the mercy of these same speciesists in charge of a different system of animal use. Even if the CAK system is successful in terms of the birds not being taken out their transportation crates until dead or properly stunned, there seems to be no reason why chickens will not be abused by workers while they are alive inside crates, as they are offloaded from lorries and into the gassing chambers, for example. Therefore, the welfare benefits of the CAK system are likely to be negligible at best. Not only does it not alter what occurs at the farm-end of the process of exploitation, it cannot guarantee 'humane' treatment elsewhere either.

There is only one solution for animal advocates who do not want their money spent on these increasing failed initiatives: do not support the corporate welfare organisations and, instead, seek out the growing numbers of individuals and groups adopting a rights-based position on human-nonhuman relations.