Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [67]
It’s shameful that while we take so much from these animals, we can’t even afford them a less-cruel death. Chickens have the same spark of life as our pets at home. They have the same desire to avoid suffering and to follow their nature. Yet, we treat chickens so cruelly that similar abuses inflicted upon dogs or cats would warrant criminal charges.
Nathan Runkle from the nonprofit Mercy for Animals shared this story with me, from one of his undercover investigators.
Undercover at an Egg Farm
In January and February of 2008, I worked at one of California’s largest egg farms—which are a series of massive, enclosed metal buildings. They are all hidden by crops planted around them, their position given away only by the stench of tons of manure and biosecurity signs posted nearby.
The buildings themselves were either one or two stories tall, the larger ones designed to have manure piled up in the first floor with the birds housed up above. Ventilation fans covered the walls; white feathers plastered to their casings and dust formed from excrement caking their blades. The first time I stepped inside one of these sheds, the scene was an assault on the senses and my eyes immediately began to water. An incomprehensible number of lives were crammed inside wire cages four rows high and so far into the distance I couldn’t see them through the dust-filled air. Taking in a single breath threatened to choke me, and I had to fight not to go into a coughing fit without a dust mask on. Walking near the cages, the birds inside began making shrieking calls so loud I had to yell to co-workers standing right next to me to be heard. Hens were packed wing to wing and chest to tail in the cages. Not one could spread her wings fully, and they constantly rubbed up against each other and the cage wire to turn around or move toward their feed troughs.
I realized that on industrial egg farms, hens are viewed and treated as commodities. None of these hens is given a name. None of these hens is even given a number. Although each of their lives has a beginning and an end, their individual stories are hard to tell to those who haven’t been inside these factory farms. In factory egg production, the hens are treated as egg-producing machines.
Hens were kept in the barns for two years, after which time it was determined they were no longer “productive” enough for the company. For older hens, the broken remnants of their wing feathers lay over pink skin covered in small scratches that were scabbed over or openly bleeding. Many hens had infected wounds on their faces and eyes, had prolapsed uteruses, or had become so sick and lethargic they simply lay at the fronts of the cages breathing in shallow gasps while their cage mates trampled them. Many of these dying hens were cold to the touch and unresponsive to my handling them.
Workers were responsible for pulling dead hens out of the barns every day, and would pull out hens who were crippled and blocking eggs from rolling out of the cages. The workers were supposed to kill the hens by breaking their necks, in either of two methods. The more common method was pulling the hens’ necks until the vertebrae separated. A worker demonstrated the technique by pulling a hen’s head while he held her body under one armpit. She flapped her wings and kicked her legs frantically. He then held her neck out to me so I could feel the spinal cord where the two vertebrae were pulled apart. I had no way of knowing whether this method had actually cut the spinal cord, and the hens would always flop around on the ground for a minute or two after it was done. A less common