Feeding Animals to Chickens Causes Outrage in Europe

Does feeding pigs to chickens sound strange? Well, this is something that's done. The practice was banned in Europe due to mad cow fears. Now they want to start doing it again to save money.

In 1994, at the height of the BSE crisis, the EU banned the use of animal remains for farm feedstuffs but under its transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE) road map, published in 2005, outlined proposals that in future some bans might be relaxed. Since then costs of cereals - the basis of poultry feed throughout Europe - have risen dramatically. The EU proposal to mix pig remains with cereals and use them for feeding chickens is linked to these price rises.

Only poultry feed would be exempt from the current ban on the use of animal remains. Chickens are omnivores that eat both vegetation and meat, usually by pecking for worms, officials point out. The practice of feeding the remains of ruminants, mostly cows and sheep, to other ruminants - a process linked to the spread of BSE (mad cow disease) - would still be outlawed.