Poultry farms in Haryana are pumping birds with steroids and antibiotics and stuffing them into into cruelly small cages, a Mail Today investigation has revealed.
Experts say the chicken you eat from these places, especially the broiler variant, is often pumped with large amounts of antibiotics and eating the meat can make a consumer resistant to drugs and leave him or her vulnerable to diseases.
An investigation by Mail Today into the poultry business in Haryana’s Sonipat, Panipat and Karnal districts exposed the unethical practices indulged in by certain farm owners for profit.
‘Our hatchery division produces 15,000 chicks every day and as soon as they are hatched, they are injected with antibiotic drugs to make them infection free,’ Sehrawat, manager of a poultry farm in Karnal, says on camera.
This necessitates the use of antibiotics to promote growth. ‘We have to grow them at a rapid pace. So we use steroids for overall physical growth,’ said Sehrawat.
With rampant use, the drugs find their way into the chicken we eat as well as the ecosystem, leading to the spread of drug resistant bacteria in human beings, experts say.
‘Antibiotics such as enrofloxacin and sulfonamides are used recklessly in the Indian poultry industry to treat infections that arise due to the unhygienic and overcrowded establishments they are maintained in,’ said Dr Amulya VR, a veterinarian based in Hyderabad.
Nearly 70 per cent of antibiotics vital for fighting infections in humans are sold for use in meat and dairy production and medical researchers have concerns that overuse of those drugs may diminish their effectiveness in fighting disease in humans.
In fact, the United Nations has asked India to urgently address the growing issue of antimicrobial resistance in the country due to indiscriminate use of antibiotics.
‘While the government is regulating the use of antibiotics in humans, it remains unorganised in the livestock sector,’ said Dr Pankaj Chaturvedi, head and neck cancer surgeon at Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai.
‘Consuming antibiotic-resistance-laden livestock can influence the bacterial flora of the human body and create the bacterial strain that is resistant to. So if you have infection – in the lungs, blood or stomach – it could become incurable. The steroids can lead to suppression of immunity and pileup extra kilos.’
A study conducted by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) on broiler chicken about three years ago found that 40 per cent of the samples were contaminated with antibiotic residue.
The six most common antibiotics used in the poultry business are oxytetracycline, chlortetracycline and doxycycline (from class tetracyclines); enrofloxacin and ciprofloxacin (from fluoroquinolones); and neomycin, an aminoglycoside.
‘The prime reason for misuse is that the conditions in which the chicken are raised are largely unsanitary, leading to high infection and mortality rates. For commercial reasons, the farmers would like to avoid such a scenario,’ said Amit Khurana, programme manager, food safety and toxins at CSE.
The Mail Today investigation has found that the hens in the Haryana poultry farms are kept in tiny metal ‘battery cages’, violating standards specified in the the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960.
The birds are injected with growth hormones and impregnated forcefully, and some roosters are even crushed alive, as they are regarded as less profitable.
It takes around 40 days for a chick to grow into a hen weighing around 1.5kgs to 2kgs and deliver eggs. Sunil, the manager of a farm in Gharauda in Karnal said that they use 12 kinds of ‘powders’ made of chemical and biological substances including gelatin in the feed to make the chicken deliver eggs faster.
‘We mix these powders in the prescribed ratio with the food grain. Once the hens consume it they will be ready to deliver eggs in the next 16 to 20 hours. A normal hen can deliver two to three eggs in 24 hours,’ said Sunil. Ambika Nijjar, animal rights activist and lawyer, describing the process of artificial insemination.
‘They first spread the legs of a rooster and pinch the sperm out. They then spread the legs of the female, open the vagina and insert the semen with a dropper. It is a very painful process for both, and in almost every bird we inspected, we found that they had swollen and infected genitalia.’
The total egg production in the country for the year 2016-17 was 29.09 billion according to the Integrated Sample Survey, with Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, West Bengal and Haryana being the top five egg producing states.You may be proud of eating eggs ‘Sunday ho ya Monday’, but the plight of the hens that lay them is far from healthy – in fact it is outright cruel, say experts.
Millions of hens are currently living in disease-ridden environments across the country in complete violation of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960 and posing grave threat to human health.
Meanwhile, the female baby chicks are sent to commercial hatcheries where they are bred under heat lamps until they are able to maintain their own body temperature. At about 16 weeks most hens are transferred into small, barren wire cages called ‘battery cages’.
Four to six hens are crammed into a single with an approximate size of 623.7 sq cm, despite the Bureau of Indian Standards’ recommended space for each hen being 450 sq cm per bird.
Over the course of two years the hens consume so much artificial substances in the form of antibiotics and steroids that their egg yielding capacity begins to decline.
‘These hens are confined to cages for the rest of their lives, where they cannot spread their wings, turn around, or nest before giving birth, which is cruel and completely illegal,’ said NG Jayasimha, a former member of the Animal Welfare Board of India and managing director of Humane Society International/India.
‘They are not able to express their natural behavior, such as dust-bathing, perching, roosting etc leading to imbalances in the lipid levels of the feathers, major structural and mechanical problems the skeletal long bones, frustration and distress without an outlet for the natural instincts.’
Being confined to this kind of ‘concentration camp’, the birds often start injurious feather pecking or harming each other via cannibalistic behaviour in order to get out.
To prevent this, the beaks are cut off or de-beaking is done at a young age using a heated blade, which can cause tissue damage, nerve injury, open wounds, bleeding and chronic pain because it is most often improperly done.
Professional bird experts or ornithologists have also found that the squawking sound from these hatcheries are actually distress calls because they are in pain or discomfort throughout.
However, the health concerns for human beings also looms large, especially for young children and old people who are the most vulnerable.
Dr Chetana Mirle, Director of Farm Animals at Humane Society International explains, ‘A number of studies conducted in the European Union show that there are higher incidence of salmonella bacteria in caged facilities than cage free facilities, which can lead to food poisoning. Even if you wash the egg you are still at risk of getting it.’
She adds, ‘These are very crowded facilities, and because a very large number of birds are in very close confinement to one another, their immune systems are weak. This means the birds are less healthy, putting human communities at risk – especially those who live near these farms that emit a lot of odour and house a large number of flies and insects.’
Date : 2 May 2017
