PRISONED CHICKENS, POISONED EGGS An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry First published 1996. Revised Edition 2009 Book Publishing Company By Karen Davis, PhD Karen Davis, PhD, President United Poultry Concerns PO Box 150 Machipongo, VA 23405 (757) 678-7875 [email protected] 2 Table of Contents Preface to the New Edition Prologue Introduction Chapter 1 History Chapter 2 The Birth and Family Life of Chickens Chapter 3 The Life of the Battery Hen Chapter 4 The Life of the Broiler Chicken Chapter 5 The Death Chapter 6 A New Beginning References Index 3 Preface to the New Edition I wrote Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs in the mid-1990s in order to bring attention to the billions of chickens buried alive on factory farms. At the time, neither the animal rights movement nor the public at large knew very much about chickens or about how the poultry industry originated and developed in twentieth-century America to become the model for industrialized farmed-animal production around the world. Some informative articles and book chapters had appeared, but the poultry industry’s own detailed and glowing account of its transformation of the chicken, from an active outdoor bird scouring the woods and fields to a sedentary indoor meat and egg “machine,” filled with suffering, diseases, and antibiotics, remained largely unknown. The purpose of Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs was to bring this story to light in a way that would reveal the tragedy of chickens through the lens of the industry that created their tragedy without pity or guilt. The book became, as I’d hoped it would, a blueprint for people seeking a coherent picture of the U.S. poultry industry, as well as a handbook for animal rights activists seeking to develop effective strategies to expose and relieve the plight of chickens. While much has happened since Prisoned Chickens; Poisoned Eggs first appeared in 1996, little has changed for the chickens themselves, except that their lives have become, as a global phenomenon, even more miserable. Instead of 7 billion chickens being slaughtered in the mid-1990s in the United States, nearly ten billion chickens are now being slaughtered, with parallel rises in other countries reflecting the expansion of chicken consumption and industrialized production into Latin America, China, India, 4 Africa, Russia, Mexico and elsewhere. More than 40 billion chickens are now being slaughtered in the world each year, and over 5 billion hens are in battery cages, many of them in egg-production complexes holding up to a million or more birds. U.S. per capita consumption of chicken went from 42 pounds in 1972 to 48.4 pounds in 1995 to 86 pounds in 2007, and the number of “meat-type” chickens being crammed into filthy dark sheds has risen from 20,000 up to as many as 50,000 birds in a single metal building. Chickens forced to gain five pounds in six weeks in the mid-1990s are now being forced to gain eight pounds in the same amount of time. Chickens raised for meat are in such crippling pain, their bodies are so abnormally large and disproportioned, their skin, joints and intestines are so rotting with ulcers and necrotic diseases, that they can barely stand, let alone walk – not that there is anywhere for them to go, being raised as they are without room to move except onto an adjacent bird’s back. When you pick up a chicken on the road who has fallen off a truck on the way to the slaughter plant, the huge white bird with the little peeping voice and baby blue eyes feels like liquid cement. When I decided to start an advocacy group for chickens in the late 1980s, I was told by some that people weren’t “ready” for chickens. This proved to be false. The point, in any case, was to make people ready. Between 1996, when Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs first appeared, and the start of the present century, up to the time of this writing in 2008, chickens have become a primary focus of the animal advocacy movement. United Poultry Concerns’ campaign in the 1990s to expose the U.S. egg- industry’s practice of starving hens for weeks at a time, to force them to molt their 5 feathers and reduce the cost of egg production, had a decisive effect in shifting attention towards chickens. Most notably, activists in the United States and Canada have joined with their European and Australian allies in waging a high-profile campaign to get rid of the barren battery cage system for laying hens, though the European ban set for 2012 is not without problems, as I show in chapter three. Farmed animal sanctuaries and stories about rescued chickens have become an important part of the animal advocacy movement, along with shocking, well-publicized undercover investigations documenting the appalling cruelty to chickens and turkeys by poultry industry workers. Recently, a number of celebrity chefs, environmentalists, and sectors of the food industry have come on board with animal welfare groups calling for an end to industrialized poultry and egg production in favor of “humane,” “free-range” methods of production. These alliances have spawned concern and anxiety among animal advocates, many of whom consider it a betrayal to work for welfare reforms, most especially when it involves the duplicity of encouraging people to eat animals and animal products under the illusion that the animals involved were somehow raised and butchered “humanely.” Instead, it is argued that animal advocacy programs should be directed at getting people off animal products altogether. Farmed animal advocates should invest their resources in campaigns designed to increase the demand for vegan foods – the delicious mock meats, soy milks, egg substitutes and other vegan items that are now readily available. The following chapters tell the story of chickens and the poultry industry and where things stand as we move toward the end of the first decade of the new century in a 6 world in which avian influenza, food poisoning, global warming, vegan cuisine, genetic engineering, and the expansion of poultry and egg production and consumption jostle together. At the heart of this story is the chicken, to whom this book is dedicated, and on whose side, and at whose side, I remain steadfast. 7 PROLOGUE He woke up on the floor of the broiler shed with 30 thousand other bewildered young chickens under the electric lights, with the familiar pain in his throat and a burning sensation deep inside his eyes. He saw green leaves shining through flashes of sunlight, as he peeked through his mother’s feathers and heard the soft awakening cheeps of his brothers and sisters, and felt his mother’s heart beating next to his own through her big warm body surrounding him, which was his world. A crow had cried out, and another cried out again. He started – the spry, young jungle fowl was ready for the day, ready to begin scratching the soil which he had known by heart ever since way back when chickenhood first arose in the tropical magic mornings of the early world. In the jungle forest, the delicious seeds of bamboo that are hidden beneath the leaves on the ground are treasured in the heart of the chicken. The rooster called out excitedly: “Family, come see what food I’ve found for you this morning!” . Hi aching legs – they brought him back to reality as he closed his eyes stinging with ammonia burn – could not move. They could no longer bear the weight of flesh which bore down upon them, which was definitely not the body of a mother hen. A mother hen, an ancestral memory kept telling him over and over, had once shushed and lulled him to sleep, pressed against her body nestled deep inside her wings fluffed over him when he was a chick. That was a long time ago, long before he was a “broiler” chicken, crippled and encased in these cells of fat and skeletal pain. He was turning purple. His lungs filled slowly with fluid, leaking from his vessels backward through the 8 valves of his heart, as he stretched out on the filthy litter in a final spasm of agony, and died. Karen Davis, “Memories Inside a Broiler Chicken House” --------------------- I remember how wonderful it was to peck my way through the shell and step out into the warm bright dawn of life. I have seen no other sunrise. We live in eternal noontime. My birth was a grievous mistake. And yet an egg is developing in me, as always. I can’t stop it. I feel its growth, and despite all my bitterness, tiny surges of tenderness fill me. How I wish I could stop the egg from growing so that I wouldn’t have to know these tender feelings. But I can’t stop. I’m and egg machine, the best egg machine in the world. “Don’t be so gloomy, Sister. There are better times coming.” The insane hen in the cage beside mine has fallen victim to a common delusion here at the egg factory. “No better times are coming, Sister,” I reply. “Only worse times.” “You’re mistaken, my dear. I happen to know. Very soon we’ll be scratching in a lovely yard.” I don’t bother to reply. She’s cheered by her delusions. And since our end will be the same, what does it matter how we spend our days here? Let her dream in her lovely yard. Let her develop her dream, to its fullest, until she imagines that the wire floor beneath her claws has become warm dry earth.