Conditions on Canadian farms are far from the storybook image that we like to imagine. Chickens raised for meat and eggs live miserable, painful lives in filthy conditions.

Meat chickens can be confined by the thousands in crowded warehouses, and egg-laying hens crammed tightly into battery cages for their entire lives, breathing toxic air in dim light. Their only glimpse of blue sky comes on the day they are loaded onto a transport truck, bound for slaughter.

This year, there is a chance for change: Canada’s poultry industry Codes of Practice are being updated. This is an opportunity to improve conditions for hundreds of millions of animals every year, and an opportunity for Canadians to be heard.

Chickens on Canadian farms suffer unimaginably. They undergo excruciating procedures without anesthesia, such as beak and claw trimming. Layer hens endure foot lesions from a life of standing on the wire floor of barren cages. Millions freeze to death or die from heat stress in transport before they ever get to slaughter. For those who survive the journey, the slaughter process is so fast and frenzied that many are horribly injured (ruptured limbs, crushing) or even boiled alive before their misery is finally ended. These living, feeling individuals are treated as production units, so genetically manipulated that their own bodies cause them to suffer. Worst of all, employees are so desensitized that abuse is common.

This is the chance to be heard!  Help Canada be a leader in farmed animal welfare: sign our petition to show regulators that you want to reduce farm animal suffering!

Contact us if you have any questions: chickenpetitioncanada@gmail.com 

Choosing to not eat animal products at all is the best choice to help animals, but whether or not we eat meat, we must fight for better conditions for animals currently suffering on factory farms.

 Photo credit: We Animals/Jo-Anne McArthur