[Sca-cooks] Re: Sca-cooks digest, Vol 1 #2052

[Pixel, Goddess and Queen]

On Mon, 24 Jun 2002, Olwen the Odd wrote:

> Ladies, this one scares me.  Good thing he's young.
>
> Reminds me though of a "MaxFact" my daughter was telling us yesterday.  She
> was trying to convince us that chicken farmers (commercial) burn the beaks
> off the chickens they keep in their tiny little cages that they cann't move
> around so that they can't peck the workers.  We laughed ourselves silly.
> She was also trying for the 'did you hear that Bill Gates died.  yup.  had a
> heart attack.'  That one was not even close on the list of believable
> MaxFacts (Morningstar's first name is Maxine, goes by Max and has an
> unbounded sense of imagination that we lovingly and laughingly refer to as
> MaxFacts).
> Olwen

Actually, they *do* frequently either burn or cut the beaks off chickens,
but not so they don't peck the workers, so they don't peck each other.
Chickens will gang up on an injured or sickly one and quite literally peck
it to death. The crowded conditions that commercial chicken and egg
producers keep their animals in only exacerbates the problem.

Margaret