UPC United Poultry
Concerns
September 2018
Between insurance payouts and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s indemnification program, agribusinesses can comfortably repair and rebuild their flood-or-fire-damaged buildings and quickly restock millions of new individuals, the same as they always do whenever weather or diseases such as avian influenza devastate their “inventory.”
Chicken farm buildings inundated with floodwater from Hurricane Florence
near Trenton, N.C., Sunday, Sept. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
A caring person’s reaction to learning that millions of chickens and
turkeys and pigs drowned in North Carolina this month is the gut-wrench of
sorrow and pity for these helpless souls and outrage at the companies that
didn’t see fit to protect their captives from the hurricane they knew was
coming.
But just as farmed animal businesses are indifferent when a fire burns and
suffocates to death millions of chickens and other animals trapped in cages,
crates, and confinement sheds, so they are indifferent when, instead of
flames, the disaster occurs in the form of floods.
The North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services reported
last week that 3.4 million chickens and turkeys and 5,500 pigs died in
Hurricane Florence. The company most cited was Sanderson Farms who told
journalists that 1.7 million of its 20 million chickens drowned or starved
to death in the sheds when the company couldn’t get food to them.
Pleased to report that none of its personnel appear to have died in the
storm, Sanderson Farms noted, by contrast, that its “live inventories” were
not so lucky, and that its focus now is on “replenishing our live production
inventories.”
Companies like Sanderson needn’t worry. Between insurance payouts and the
U.S. Department of Agriculture’s indemnification program, agribusinesses can
comfortably repair and rebuild their flood-or-fire-damaged buildings and
quickly restock millions of new individuals, the same as they always do
whenever weather or diseases such as avian influenza devastate their
“inventory.”
Does anyone think that companies permitted by the U.S. Department of
Agriculture to suffocate millions of chickens and turkeys to death in
rolling tides of fire-fighting foam as a means of mass extermination – does
anyone think these companies care about the animals? An article in Poultry
World on September 20th exemplifies what matters to them: North
Carolina-based Butterball, the largest turkey producer in the U.S., assured
everyone that the storm’s impact “would not lead to any pre-Thanksgiving
turkey shortage.”
While businesses that “own” animals have an obligation to protect them
against foreseeable disasters, the unfixable problem is that the entire life
of the majority of animals in food production is so miserable that just
about anything that ends their life sooner than later may be viewed as
preferable to being “saved.” Saved for what? The experience of chickens and
turkeys, in the words of veterinary scientist John Webster, is, he said, “in
both magnitude and severity, the single most severe, systematic example of
man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal.”
The only way out of “man’s inhumanity” for these animals is to be rescued or
dead. “Rescue” must mean more than literally removing a certain number of
animals from whatever human-engineered horror they are in – important as
every rescue is. The rescue these animals need most from us is from the
plate. If people don’t buy them, they won’t be born, and that will be good.
Number of animals killed in the world by the fishing, meat, dairy and egg industries, since you opened this webpage.
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