ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MARCH 2004

How the U.S. kills sick and "spent" chickens

SAN DIEGO--Calls to television stations and letters to newspapers indicate that Americans were mostly shocked by coverage of live burial and sometimes live incineration of chickens in Souteast Asia to stop the spread of avian flu H5N1––but live burial of chickens is also common here, to dispose of “spent” hens and surplus male chicks from laying hen “factories.”

The wreckage of this Buckeye Egg farm barn after a September 2000 twister showed how the hens lived and died. (Mercy for Animals photo)

The U.S. egg industry kills about 170 million spent hens and as many as 235 million male chicks per year. In 2002 about 111 million spent hens were killed in U.S. and Canadian slaughterhouses. Nearly 59 million hens, along with the male chicks, were killed by other means. That number is expected to increase by about 21 million in 2004, warned Poultry Times writer Barbara Olenik in September 2003.

“The USDA purchased approximately 30 million spent hens a year through their canned boned and diced chicken purchase programs, making it the largest market for spent hens,” Olenick explained. “However, in July 2003 the USDA announced new specifications that fowl producers must meet…due to complaints of bone fragments and injuries to consumers in the National School Lunch Program.”

United Egg Producers estimated that the inability of many producers to meet the new specs would leave “13 million to 15 million spent hens annually without a market.”

Earlier, Olenick wrote, the Valley Fresh slaughterhouse in Water Valley, Mississippi, closed in anticipation of the new specs, leaving 22 million to 25 million spent hens per year to be killed elsewhere.

When there are no slaughter markets, explained Animal Liberation author Peter Singer and DawnWatch animal advocacy newsgroup host Karen Dawn in a December 2003 commentary for the Los Angeles Times, “Spent hens’ are often packed into containers and bulldozed. Or they are gassed using carbon dioxide distributed unevenly among tens of thousands of birds. It is common for them to die slow, painful deaths.”

It is also increasingly common for spent hens to be killed by live maceration, long the standard means of killing surplus chicks. The remains are fed to pigs, cattle, or other chickens. The chicks are pulverized after as many as will fit are shoved into bags by “chick sexers,” who are typically low-paid and poorly educated young women working in an assembly-line environment.

Job turnover, absentee-ism, psychological trauma, and substance abuse are common among chick-sexers, ANIMAL PEOPLE has been told by meat industry union representatives, who have found in trying to organize them that the instability of the workforce is as formidable an obstacle as the considerable employer hostility to unions. “A macerator is just a fancy name for something that crushes and kills baby chickens. It is ugly and inhumane,” Vermont veterinarian Peggy Larsen told ANIMAL PEOPLE.

Not even mentioned in the current edition of the American Veterinary Medical Association Report on Euthanasia (2000), live maceration is nonetheless among the generally approved and recommended methods of killing both spent hens and surplus chicks, according to guidelines posted by the South Dakota State University Department of Animal and Range Sciences.

“ Carbon dioxide delivered via a mobile killing unit with an on-board delivery system, cervical dislocation, or instant maceration using a specially designed high-speed grinder, are acceptable on-farm slaughter methods when properly performed,” says the SDSU poultry management web site, in a statement jointly attributed to Joy Mench of the University of California at Davis and Paul B. Siegel of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

Mensch, director of the U.C Davis Center for Animal Wel-fare, more cautiously endorses live maceration at the CAW web site: “Maceration in a high-speed grinder results in rapid death, and is considered a humane method for disposing of young chicks and embryonated eggs. Only grinders specifically designed for disposal of poultry, which have blades that turn at 5000 or more RPM, should be used...The grinder should be properly maintained and must not be overloaded, as birds may be incompletely macerated under these circumstances.”

AVMA inaction

The absence of specific AVMA guidelines on live maceration and a broad exemption included in the AVMA Report on Euthanasia for “mass euthanasia” in event of emergencies are at issue in continuing controversy over efforts to contain an outbreak of Newcastle disease that spread from fighting cocks to laying hens slightly more than a year ago in southern California.

“When a horrified neighbor saw ranchers cramming live chickens into a wood chipper, animal advocates thought they had a winning [anti-cruelty] case. Karen Davis of United Poultry Concerns led the push for prosecution,” wrote Peter Singer and Karen Dawn.

“ Unfortunately, a San Diego deputy district attorney found no criminal intent by the ranchers. She concluded that they ‘were just following professional advice’ from two veterinarians. The ranchers named Gregg Cutler as one,” Singer and Dawn continued. “Cutler denies directly authorizing the use of a chipper, but says he has no problem with it. He is on the animal welfare committee of the AVMA.”

Said Cutler to Jia-Rui Chong of the Los Angeles Times, “If it is done properly with correct equipment, it is a humane way of disposing of birds in an emergency.”

United Poultry Concerns has been demanding since March 2003 that Cutler be removed from the AVMA animal welfare committee, and unsuccessfully asked the American Association of Avian Pathologists to rescind an award it gave Culter for “outstanding contributions to avian medicine.”

AVMA executive vice president Bruce Little said at the AVMA web site that, “It is absolutely absurd and ludicrous to believe that any veterinary medical association...could or would advocate throwing live chickens into a wood chipper.” But Little has defended Cutler.

Veterinary Practice News reporter Lori Luechtefeld wrote in January 2004 that according to Little, “The AVMA is gathering facts concerning the complaints” against Cutler, “and will hold a judicial hearing no earlier than February. If acquitted, Cutler will remain on the animal welfare board. If Cutler’s AVMA membership is suspended or revoked, he will be removed from the welfare committee. If Cutler is censured or put on probation, it will be up to the judicial committee to decide whether he remains on the welfare committee.”

Peggy Larsen has little hope that the AVMA hearing will result in anything good for chickens.
“The AVMA does not address the treatment of animals in factory farms,” Larsen reminded ANIMAL PEOPLE. “They support battery caging hens and keeping sows in gestation crates. They have had many chances to change their policies,” Larsen continued. “For years, [Albany, New York veterinarian] Holly Cheever has presented scientific evidence that forced molting causes the needless death of many hens at egg factories. I have twice presented information on the injuries and deaths inflicted on calves during rodeo roping. The Animal Welfare Committee has never responded. This year the American Association of Equine Practitioners, under the AVMA umbrella, gave their annual humane award to the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association.”

Still, Larsen believes the effort to hold Cutler responsible is worthwhile. “Because of the wood chipper killing,” Larsen said, “there are now many more people who know what happens to spent hens. It was the first time I heard about it,” she acknowledged, even though she was once a USDA meat inspector.

While the woodchipper furor raged, Ohio authorities lauded a series of business-as-usual resolutions of problems involving spent hens at Buckeye Egg Farms.

Begun in 1982 as Agri-General Inc. by German egg baron Anton Pohlmann, Buckeye changed names in 1998, but failed to shake a reputation as perhaps the most notÄorious of all factory egg farms.

Starting factory egg production in Lower Saxony in 1971. Pohlmann became the biggest egg producer in Europe, but was barred from further production in Germany in 1997 due to repeated violations of pollution and occupational laws.
In September 1994 Pohl-mann also became one of the few factory farmers ever convicted of cruelty, for killing 60,000 hens who had salmonella at one of his German facilities by cutting off their water, food, and air conditioning.
The Pohlmann record in Ohio was little different. At peak as many as 14 million chickens produced up to 2.6 billion eggs per year at sites in four counties, amounting to about 4% of the total U.S. egg production volume––but Buckeye was fined nearly $1 million during the 1990s for a variety of air and water quality offenses. Pohlmann retired in 2002, and put his facilities up for sale. The problems continued. In July 2003 Ohio authorities at last ordered Buckeye to close each barn it “depopulated” of spent hens, beginning in August, to achieve a complete shutdown by July 2004.

Warning that this might mean killing as many as 576,000 chickens per week, Buckeye appealed, managing to delay implementation of the order until mid-November 2003, with a new shutdown deadline of October 2004.

Animal advocates meanwhile recalled how about one million hens died from dehydration, hunger, and exposure after a tornado hit some of the Buckeye barns in September 2000. The Ooh-Mah-Nee Sanctuary in Hunker, Pennsyl-vania rescued more than 1,000 hens from the wreckage, about 400,000 were rendered, and the rest––living or dead––were bulldozed and buried, local news media reported.

In early August 2003 Ooh-Mah-Nee was allowed to rescue 1,048 hens. Buckeye operations director Bill Leininger told Clevel-and Plain Dealer reporter Fran Henry that the company might have to bulldoze or burn millions of others alive to meet the shutdown deadline. But it was essentially theatre. In early February 2004 the Ohio Department of Agriculture granted operating permits for the Buckeye barns to Ohio Fresh Eggs Inc., owned by Orland Bethel and Don Hershey, who bought the operation from Pohlmann. They are to invest $60 million in improvements to reduce environmental hazards at one of the four Buckeye sites. All of the barns may be restocked.

Not restocking the “depopulated” barns was, all along, the only evident departure from the Buckeye routine.

--M.C.