Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World (17 page)

In September 2004, on behalf of the organization Compassion over Killing, I got a job working undercover for a few weeks at a chicken slaughter plant. While I had seen plenty of animal slaughter footage, I had never experienced how truly horrific and heartbreaking the process was until I witnessed it firsthand as an employee at this plant.

My first day working at the plant was spent filling out forms, watching videos, and listening to presentations. At no time did anyone mention animal welfare, nor did trainers ever provide me any guidance on “proper animal handling.” In fact, during several hours of videos, there were only about three seconds of footage of live animals, and that was during a montage of different activities that require workers to lift objects.

My second day began in the live hang room, where workers shackle chickens onto the slaughter line. As soon as I entered the room, the smell of chicken waste hit me so hard that I struggled to keep myself from vomiting. The line leader led me to my position on the line and gave me only one sentence of instruction: “Pick up the chickens upside down and put their legs in the shackles.” With that, he walked away. I was on my own.

Speed was the most important objective, since our workday ended once a quota was achieved. Workers grabbed the chickens as quickly—and thereby as roughly—as possible from the conveyor belt, often picking them up by one wing, one leg, or their necks. They often forced the chickens into the metal shackles so hard, I was amazed their legs weren’t ripped off. Although the birds were supposed to be hung upside down by both legs, sometimes they dangled by just one.

After only thirty minutes of working on the line, two things stood out more than anything else: how the animals were treated and how they reacted.

Many of the chickens responded with screams and violent physical reactions from the moment the workers grabbed them. The screaming, frenzied wing flapping, and drone of the heavy machinery were so loud that you had to yell to the worker next to you, who was less than two feet away, just so he could hear you.

Workers didn’t just treat the animals aggressively while they were hanging them. I saw an employee kick a chicken off the floor fan and routinely saw, and of course secretly videotaped, workers throwing chickens around the room. Some birds managed to jump from the conveyor belt onto the floor before they were shackled, so workers would grab them and throw them back toward the belt. A couple of times, workers threw the chickens so hard, the entire line shook from the force of their bodies hitting the shackles.

All the chickens I saw had severe feather loss on their stomachs and chests, presumably ammonia burns from living and lying in their own waste in the “grow-out” facility. Poultry companies breed chickens to grow large so quickly: by the end of their life they’re often unable even to stand or walk for any significant period of time, thus they’re relegated to lying down for the vast majority of the day.

At one point during my employment, so many chickens had piled up on top of each other at one end of the conveyor belt, the line backed up. The worker on that end quickly grabbed the chickens and threw them back down the line to clear the conveyor entrance of birds. One of the birds was thrown right past my face, nearly hitting me. Neither the supervisor nor any of the other workers said anything to the employee throwing the chickens. All I heard from one worker was, “Let’s go! Hurry up!”

While working there I tried to hang the birds as gently as possible, which made me slower than my co-workers. The supervisor saw that I wasn’t as fast as the others, so he moved me to the slower line where the biggest birds, called “roasters,” were shackled. Even more so than on the faster line, the conveyor belt on the “roaster” line consistently clogged with chickens piled on top of each other, often three birds deep.

It was on this line that I saw workers shackle some chickens with their heads caught between their legs and the shackle. Since they weren’t hanging upside down, the birds’ necks would completely miss the slicing blade, so they may have gone into the scalding tanks while fully conscious. These tanks, true to their name, were filled with scalding-hot water designed to loosen the birds’ feathers. Birds who wound up in these tanks endured an even more agonizing and sordid death than those whose necks were slit: they drowned in the hot, feces-choked water.

During one break, I walked outside to check out the trucks waiting to dump the chickens onto the conveyor belt. The chickens were literally packed wing to wing and the crates were so small that the birds couldn’t even stand up. Scattered throughout the trucking area were dying birds who had fallen off the truck during the unloading process. These birds were clearly injured, but none of the workers paid any attention to them. No efforts were made to end their suffering, and they were left to die, presumably from dehydration or their injuries.

During one lunch, I went back into the hanging room while my co-workers ate lunch in the cafeteria. The belt was close to overloaded with birds. Many were injured and dying, and others were already dead. Chickens were lying on top of each other so the ones at the bottom of the piles had to struggle against the weight of so many others just to stick their heads up to breathe.

While I’ve worked for humane organizations for roughly a decade, the weeks I spent undercover at the slaughter plant taught me many lasting lessons. Perhaps the most important was that while disregard for even the most basic interests of animals is commonplace across industries, the most pressing cruelty concern is the inherent, systematic abuses that millions of birds endure at poultry slaughterhouses all over the country.

Even if every worker handled the animals with the utmost care—which would be impossible, because of the speed of the kill lines—the birds would still suffer dramatically because of the unnaturally rapid growth that increases the chance of skeletal and muscular problems; the transport from the factory farms to the slaughterhouse where they’re packed into small cages; the dumping of them on a conveyor belt from their transport trucks; the shackling of their legs into metal restraints; the slicing of their necks while they’re fully conscious; and the drowning in scalding tanks for those birds who don’t have their throats cut.

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.

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 method was to swing a hen by her head so that her vertebrae broke and cut the spinal cord. This was done less often, since the birds would release their bowels when it was done, and feces would go flying around in a circle as they were spun.

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, her slow death from her injuries or from lack of food or water was sure to follow.

After giving two years of their lives to produce eggs for the company, the hens were rewarded with a brutal death. Sent off to a rendering plant and then combined with cornmeal, the hens’ bodies became an ingredient for chicken feed.