Vegetarian Star

Jillian Michaels has whittled down her animal intake to sustainable fish, citing her reasons to the Houston Chronicle as being for animal welfare.

“Personally I’m not eating chicken or beef right now. It’s not about health; it’s about the slaughterhouse practices. I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, fish, organic yogurt and eggs and a lot of beans and nuts. But I also eat things like dark chocolate.”

Those who avoid red meat but still eat chicken may want to know that, according to the Humane Society of the United States, about 95% of land animals in the United States slaughtered for food are chickens, which undergo painful deaths to get to the plates of Americans.

In a document titled, “An HSUS Report: The Welfare of Birds At Slaughter,” Sara Shields, Ph.D. and Mojan Raj, Ph.D. write, “In 2007, more than 9 billion birds were slaughtered for food in the United States alone. The vast majority, overwhelmingly chickens,are first hung upside-down on metal shackles by their legs and then stunned using an electrified water-bath system before they are killed. Stunning is practiced in order to render birds unconscious and insensible, and to immobilize them before slaughter. However, there is growing concern that stunning several birds at any one moment using an electrified water bath supplied with a constant voltage is inhumane, as birds experience stress and pain before, during, and sometimes after this process.”

Although methods like Controlled Atmosphere Stunning and Controlled Atmosphere Killing exist using natural gases that work to put the animals to sleep, it’s a practice not widely adopted in the U.S. like it is in Europe and in the UK.

More on the pain to birds and mistreatment that can occur during standard slaughter practice steps of electrical water bath stunning, uncrating and more can be found in the paper.

Photo: PR Photos

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