Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [66]
Workers didn’t just treat the animals aggressively while they were hanging them. I saw an employee kick a chicken off the floor fan and routinely saw, and of course secretly videotaped, workers throwing chickens around the room. Some birds managed to jump from the conveyor belt onto the floor before they were shackled, so workers would grab them and throw them back toward the belt. A couple of times, workers threw the chickens so hard, the entire line shook from the force of their bodies hitting the shackles.
All the chickens I saw had severe feather loss on their stomachs and chests, presumably ammonia burns from living and lying in their own waste in the “grow-out” facility. Poultry companies breed chickens to grow large so quickly: by the end of their life they’re often unable even to stand or walk for any significant period of time, thus they’re relegated to lying down for the vast majority of the day.
At one point during my employment, so many chickens had piled up on top of each other at one end of the conveyor belt, the line backed up. The worker on that end quickly grabbed the chickens and threw them back down the line to clear the conveyor entrance of birds. One of the birds was thrown right past my face, nearly hitting me. Neither the supervisor nor any of the other workers said anything to the employee throwing the chickens. All I heard from one worker was, “Let’s go! Hurry up!”
While working there I tried to hang the birds as gently as possible, which made me slower than my co-workers. The supervisor saw that I wasn’t as fast as the others, so he moved me to the slower line where the biggest birds, called “roasters,” were shackled. Even more so than on the faster line, the conveyor belt on the “roaster” line consistently clogged with chickens piled on top of each other, often three birds deep.
It was on this line that I saw workers shackle some chickens with their heads caught between their legs and the shackle. Since they weren’t hanging upside down, the birds’ necks would completely miss the slicing blade, so they may have gone into the scalding tanks while fully conscious. These tanks, true to their name, were filled with scalding-hot water designed to loosen the birds’ feathers. Birds who wound up in these tanks endured an even more agonizing and sordid death than those whose necks were slit: they drowned in the hot, feces-choked water.
During one break, I walked outside to check out the trucks waiting to dump the chickens onto the conveyor belt. The chickens were literally packed wing to wing and the crates were so small that the birds couldn’t even stand up. Scattered throughout the trucking area were dying birds who had fallen off the truck during the unloading process. These birds were clearly injured, but none of the workers paid any attention to them. No efforts were made to end their suffering, and they were left to die, presumably from dehydration or their injuries.
During one lunch, I went back into the hanging room while my co-workers ate lunch in the cafeteria. The belt was close to overloaded with birds. Many were injured and dying, and others were already dead. Chickens were lying on top of each other so the ones at the bottom of the piles had to struggle against the weight of so many others just to stick their heads up to breathe.
While I’ve worked for humane organizations for roughly a decade, the weeks I spent undercover at the slaughter plant taught me many lasting lessons. Perhaps the most important was that while disregard for even the most basic interests of animals is commonplace across industries, the most pressing cruelty concern is the inherent, systematic abuses that millions of birds endure at poultry slaughterhouses all over the country.
Even if every worker handled the animals with the utmost care—which would be impossible, because of the speed of the kill lines—the birds would still suffer dramatically