[harry8]

I don't think OP is really talking about the line between pet and food. There's something else going on here.

Think more about cows. Nice creatures. Live in the fields under the sun and that isn't horrific. We eat them. Maybe you had a pet cow? Ok that's fine. There's your pet/food line issue. Most omnivorous humans believe it is possible to treat them with respect in their lives and eat them. Others disagree, of course they do. That's also fine.

As a civilization, we don't treat chickens anything like that. We have factory farms that are utterly horrific, stomach-turning and detrimental to global health and we pretend we kind of pretend don't know that and don't talk about it much.

You don't have to be a vegetarian or keep chickens as pets or even particularly like chickens much (and I don't) to object to those horrors. Factory farms days are numbered. They are beyond what the consumers of factory farms can stomach. They are beyond what we should tolerate in their abuse of the commons of having effective antibiotics. They are nothing like what we think of as farms which are usually some approximation of the family farm. It is perfectly reasonable and defensible to be very proudly meat-eating and want effective reform here. In my experience most do lean that way when they find out what goes on in a shed full of caged chickens.

[igetspam]

Yeah... it's hard to decide what's worse, the crammed cages of filth or tossing the rooster chicks into a chipper. Both are terrible fates. We're pretty awful creatures sometimes.

[m463]

I noticed whole foods seems to have has labeling wrt how the chickens are raised. That said, aside from eggs the chickens are eaten in the end. (and I wonder about eggs, I've heard some are fertilized)

[0daystock]

You should research what happens to "useless" male chicks born in the industry, as they don't produce eggs. Actually watch some videos of innocent animals being ground alive, screaming, because their existence doesn't make financial sense to humans. Wonder what label Whole Foods can assign to that.