Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [68]
At one egg site, a worker would not kill the crippled birds he pulled out of cages; instead, he would leave them on the floor, unable to move, to be collected later. I found some inside the trash cans used to collect dead chickens—live, breathing birds buried underneath the dead.
Bird injuries and neglect were common at the farm. I remember coming across one bird that had a wound I can only describe as a crater in her side. I found her lying in her cage, missing most of her feathers on her exposed right side. She didn’t move as I lifted her through the cage door, examining a wound about three inches across her torso. It was sunken in at the center and built up around the edges, openly bleeding in several areas. I set her on the floor, where she lay without opening her eyes or lifting her head. She was like many hens I found, their faces and heads pressed painfully against moving egg conveyor belts from sliding partially under their cages’ front walls. Drool oozed out of their beaks and their bodies didn’t even twitch as they were slowly mutilated by the claws of other hens who were standing over the trapped birds without anywhere else to go inside these tiny enclosures. She counted as nothing now, being unable to consume feed and therefore unable to produce eggs.
I wondered how long she had endured her current state, and how much pain it took to keep her from opening her eyes or calling out. I imagined she was dehydrated and starving from being unable to stand and get food or water, but figured that was a minor discomfort compared to the pain of an infected, open wound that crippled her. I wanted to help her; I wanted to take her from the farm and try to have her healed. That would not be possible, I knew.
Many cages became damaged over time, their floorings rusting out and breaking apart. Frequently, birds in bottom-level cages had to deal with another problem: dead hens left to rot on their floorings beneath their feet. Bottom-level cages were so dark it was impossible to see inside them without a flashlight, and workers responsible for pulling dead hens from cages frequently missed corpses on the bottom row. Eventually, the dead bodies would become trampled to a flattened mass, covering much of the cage wire. Feces would then pile up on the bodies, further coating the floorings. Eggs laid by hens would then end up stuck inside the cages instead of rolling under the cages’ front walls to the collection belts, and would eventually break and rot.
After two years, when the hens were no longer productive enough, they were killed through a process called depopulation. Workers would move through the aisles with metal carts with carbon dioxide canisters attached to them, filling the carts with hens by shoving them through metal lids on the carts’ tops and sides. The workers moved at a rapid pace, grabbing two hens at once. Pulling them out of cages by their necks, wings, or legs with enough force to break their bones, the workers twisted and yanked the birds from the enclosures. If chickens were caught on each other or the cage wire, the workers pulled as hard as they could to tear them free, leaving legs ripped from the hens’ bodies behind in the cage floorings. Everywhere near the workers, hens were flapping their wings into each other and the cage wire, frantically calling out and running into the cage walls in a futile attempt to escape the imminent, certainly terrifying, danger. When the workers put the hens into the carts, they slammed the birds down as hard as they could, the hens screaming as they broke through the cart doors and into the poison chamber. Occasionally, a hen would come hopping back out of the doorway, crying out and flapping her wings as quickly as she could, struggling to slip under the battery cages to escape into the manure pit below. Once in the manure pit,