BY: ELIJAH BASSETT
Oftentimes, we omnivores forget exactly what goes into what we eat from day to day – including the horrific treatment of animals in factory farms. While many food producers and restaurants don’t pay much mind to it either (despite being the perpetrators), Quiznos has now decided to take a more ethical approach to their business.
Specifically, they will be adopting Global Animal Partnership standards, considered to be the “industry gold star in chicken welfare policy.” The standards involve making sure the animals’ conditions are acceptable both at factories and in transit, judging by “space, light and other environmental considerations.” Quiznos also plans to implement a PETA-recommended killing method that is more humane than the one that many other factory farms use, and to transition to using only cage-free eggs by 2025.
Obviously, at the end of the day they are still killing animals en masse, so the ethics will never be great, but these more humane practices nonetheless reduce the harm caused by a massive industry. And with chickens and turkeys making up 95 per cent of the animals killed in the United States (9.5 billion per year), changes in their treatment can have a wide-ranging effect. One company changing their policies is still only a drop in the bucket, but food companies around the world have been changing their operations to become more humane, so it’s possible that a trend is emerging, especially in light of increasing awareness of cruelty in slaughterhouses and pressure to stop it.
Although the trend is far from universal, we can hope that more food companies will follow this example and adopt the more ethical practices that Quiznos now plans to.
