The Height of GREED: Meat Industry Throws Chickens in Trash to Fix Prices

According to the Chicago Tribune, the country’s largest chicken producers are being sued for allegedly conspiring to fix the price of chicken meat over the past decade.

Supermarket chains Bi-Lo and Winn-Dixie filed the lawsuit against Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms, and Illinois-based Koch Foods. Combined, these producers control about 90 percent of the $30 billion market.

According to the article, the retailers allege that the meat companies have schemed to fix the price of chickens by “destroying their own breeder hens and eggs to thwart production, resulting in a roughly 50 percent price increase.

This isn’t just greedy and wasteful; it’s unspeakably cruel. Innocent hens were forced to live in filthy, miserable conditions only to be killed and discarded like garbage just to pad the pockets of industry leaders.

But this is business as usual in factory farming. Last year an umbrella group for the dairy industry was forced to give out $2 million in rebates to consumers after being sued for killing cows to fix prices. That’s right, the dairy industry increased profits by prematurely slaughtering half a million cows and calves.

Factory farms don’t care about the lives and welfare of animals; they care only about their bottom line. As a result, cows, pigs, and chickens raised and killed for food are subjected to nightmarish abuses: excruciating mutilations, violent deaths, and nearly a lifetime of extreme confinement.

See for yourself.


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