Martha Rosenberg, Truthout
September 2009
Some veterinarians condemn the procedures shown in the video, which are both legal and accepted industry practices - including in so-called free-range operations - and approved by the American Veterinary Medical Association.
The "food units" cascading down the conveyor in the video are sorted like
apples, fine grade, rejects.
Except that the kinetic yellow balls - an undulating fuzzy mass - are not
pears or peppers, but newborn chicks. And they're being sorted into male,
female and deformed - with male and deformed destined for death.
A video just released by Mercy For Animals from Hy-Line Hatchery in Spencer,
Iowa, the largest hatchery for egg-laying breed chicks in the US, confirms
what has been rumored for years about the egg industry: that newborn males,
which are worthless to the industry, are ground up alive in chopping
machines called macerators.
Video from a hidden camera clearly shows healthy male chicks, peeping and
bouncing as they greet the world, fed into the blades of the macerator like
so much litter. Hello! Goodbye!
"I saw a bloody slush coming out of the bottom of the grinder," writes the
MFA investigator, who worked in the Hy-Line "transfer room" and on the
cleaning crew during May and June. "The plant manager told me that the
ground-up male chicks were used in dog food and fertilizer."
Also shown in the Mercy For Animals video is the debeaking procedure in
which chicks are inserted en masse into a laser cutter where they dangle by
their beaks, struggling, while burns are inflicted that make part of their
beak fall off in a week.
Nor does the egg industry want to waste any time letting a chick peck its
way out of its shell to start its tour of duty on the egg farm, if it's
female.
The hatchery's "separator" machine efficiently disconnects newborns from
their shells at the price of the few, which fall to the ground or get caught
in the machine and "washed" along with the equipment.
Illustration by Martha Rosenberg
Asked about the panting, damp newborns on the floor, half born and half
dead, a worker tells the MFA investigator, "Some of them get on the floor
and get wet and then they're no good."
Like veal calves on dairy farms, egg industry chicks experience no moments
with their mothers despite their innate biological urges. Their first
memories will be of blades, pain and terror, not of a mother in the
mechanized hell the egg industry has devised to bring cheap product to the
market.
Some veterinarians condemn the procedures shown in the video, which are both
legal and accepted industry practices - including in so-called free-range
operations - and approved by the American Veterinary Medical Association.
"Intense pain, shock and bleeding result" from debeaking - which is done to
offset the effects of crowding - and "some chicks may die outright in the
process," says Nedim C. Buyukmihci, V.M.D., emeritus professor of Veterinary
Medicine at the University of California, who has specialized in farmed
animals and chickens. "There is loss of weight because the chicks are too
painful or disfigured to eat properly, sometimes because the tongue is
injured or severed during the process."
Illinois veterinarian Debra Teachout agrees. The beak is a "sensory organ"
necessary not just for grasping food, but for "preening, drinking,
manipulating objects in the environment, nest building and defense," says
Dr. Teachout. "As a practicing veterinarian, if I were treating a pet
chicken of the same age that required a similar surgical procedure on its
beak for therapeutic reasons, and I did not use anesthetics followed by pain
modulation, it would be considered malpractice."
And maceration? A fate which greets 150,000 baby males a day at the hatchery
according to the MFA investigator?
To render chicks "into pink mush" even as they "bounce and vocalize" cannot
be termed euthanasia, says Dr. Teachout, because that term implies a "good
death."
The US trade group United Egg Producers confirms the daily maceration of
thousands of chicks depicted by the video. It's just the price we pay for
cheap eggs, said spokesman Mitch Head to The Associated Press. "There is,
unfortunately, no way to breed eggs that only produce female hens. If
someone has a need for 200 million male chicks, we're happy to provide them
to anyone who wants them. But we can find no market, no need."
But at simultaneous press conferences this week in Spencer, Des Moines and
Davenport, Iowa, where the video was presented, Mercy For Animals contended
that many consumers would reject such cruelty if they knew about it. The
Chicago-based group is calling on Wal-Mart, Kroger, Safeway and 47 other
grocery chains to affix a new label to egg cartons that says, "Warning: Male
chicks are ground-up alive by the egg industry," depicting a chick atop
grinding blades.
"The vast majority of Americans care deeply about farmed animal welfare
issues, yet, they're kept in the dark about the egg industry's painful
disposal of male chicks," says Nathan Runkle, MFA executive director. "If
egg producers threw, mutilated and ground up puppies or kittens, they'd be
prosecuted for cruelty to animals!"
Grocery stores and consumers have an obligation to acknowledge the truth
about eggs, says Runkle, especially when there are so many "easy and
delicious" alternatives. "Compassionate consumers can find an assortment of
mouthwatering, egg-free recipes at ChooseVeg.com," he says.
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