The National Pro-Life Action Center on Capitol Hill
…Interestingly, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, once addressed the subject of foie gras explicitly during an interview with a journalist: “We cannot just do whatever we want with them. … Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.”
Hard to believe the monks were doing some horrible, cruel thing to the laying hens, and I’m not sure exactly what the Pope was talking about when it comes to hens being so packed together that they are “caricatures of birds”.
The conditions in a modern “integrated” system isn’t a lot different from the conditions of chickens on “Old McDonald’s Farm”, except that they’re indoors. “Range chickens” will naturally find some very small place to nest and lay eggs. The rest of the time, they’re roaming around looking for something to eat and drink.
In a modern integrated system, they set up small spaces, usually made of wire, that studies have shown are the kinds of spaces to which hens are naturally attracted. The hens go in and out of them themselves. The rest of the time they spend on what is usually a raised, “slatted” floor where the feeders and waterers are. The floor is slatted so the waste falls through. In some, there is more than one floor level, so the hens can wander from one to the other. Integrators don’t like to stress chickens because they don’t lay well or, in breeding houses, breed well when they’re stressed. Temperature, humidity and air circulation are very carefully controlled to produce the maximum comfort. The “population” is controlled to keep stress at a minimum; neither too high or too low. The most successful integrators have studied those things and know them down to the nth degree. Certainly, it’s possible that some farmers or even some (not terribly successful) integrators keep the chickens in horrible conditions. But the successful “factory farms” do not keep hens in “cages” or “pack them together”. To be sure, there are a lot of hens in a modern laying house, and doubtless those houses are aesthetically less appealing (and less dangerous) than an open field. But if the conditions manifestly do not stress the chickens, one can only conclude that while the aesthetics might not appeal to humans, aesthetics might not be a matter of great concern to a chicken.
So, if, indeed, the Pope saw conditions such as those he is said to have mentioned, he did not see them in a modern laying house operated under a successful American integrator, because that’s not what they’re like.
I suspect the monks were “state of the art” if they were making any money. I imagine PETA simply bullied the monks with baseless charges, and the monks, being monks, gave in. A terrible act by a rotten organization that sees animal abuse where it doesn’t exist and doesn’t care about inflicting “people abuse”.
