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Would You Buy Fuel Made from Chickens?

If you don’t think chickens are the most abused nonhuman animals with little or no hope of getting out from under the thumb of humanity, you might want to reconsider your position. As Christopher Leonard (AP) reports in "Not a Tiger, but Maybe a Chicken in Your Tank," the fat from chickens may be the next big thing in biofuels (it’s currently only a small thing).

Chicken fat usually becomes an ingredient in certain pet foods (no, not mine), soaps, and other non-vegan products. Factory farms like Tyson, Perdue, and Smithfield foods obviously have it in abundance (Tyson alone produces 2.3 billion pounds of it annually according to Leonard), and sell it for much less than soybean oil (19 cents for chicken fat/33 cents a pound for soybean oil), which accounts for 90% of biofuel now. A professor of economics at the University of Minnesota estimated that:

within five years the United States will produce 1 billion gallons of biodiesel and that half of it will be made from animal fat. By that time, soybean-based biodiesel will account for about 20 percent of the total . . .

There are quality drawbacks, and evidently animal fat clouds more at higher temperatures, but I promise you, with the potential/guarantee of increased revenue and profits, new technology will be developed at warpspeed to deal with any issues of refining.

Obviously, vegans will choose to not use fuel made from chicken fat, assuming it’s labelled properly. But what can we do now to stop animals from being viewed simply as resources for human consumption? That’s an easy one: stop using animal products, and educate as many people as you can about the cruelty involved. And if your audience is one who likes to think of themselves as ethical, appeal to their sense of morality.

In 2007, one thing is certain: We have no moral justification for using animals. Period. We can create oodles of rationales to make ourselves feel better momentarily. But anyone who seriously considers the question will arrive at the same answer.

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