From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000--

Million hens killed in Ohio--twister hits like forced molt

COLUMBUS, Ohio--An estimated one million battery-caged laying hens
died slowly from thirst, exposure, and starvation or were reportedly
crushed by bulldozers on October 2 and 3 after two weeks of suffering,
following a September 20 tornado which destroyed the water-and-feed systems
serving twelve 85,000-hen barns at the Buckeye Egg Farm complex in Croton,
Ohio.
The Croton complex is the biggest of four owned by Buckeye, the
fourth largest egg producer in the U.S., formerly known as AgriGeneral LP.
Ohio Department of Agriculture spokesperson Mark Anthony told Mike
Lafferty of the Columbus Dispatch on September 21 that the trapped hens
would have to be killed and buried, burned, or rendered as promptly as
possible.
"And the process has to be done humanely, too," Anthony insisted.
"These chickens are not going to die of thirst."
But finding any humane way to kill the hens proved impossible.
Humane Society of the U.S. regional representative Sandy Rowlands,
of Bowling Green, Ohio, "recommended tenting the broken barns and pumping
in gas, as opposed to throwing the birds into a truck and gassing them
there," posted Protect Our Earth's Treasures president Ritchie Laymon on
September 24 to Internet newsgroups via Franklin Wade of United Poultry
Concerns. "Terminex [an exterminating company] came to try the tent
killing, and it was a total flop. The barns are the size of airplane
hangars. Terminex just couldn't manage such a huge undertaking. That
means the birds will just starve in their cages, because the truck/gas
method is too slow to get them all."
Buckeye chief financial officer Bruce Collen told Jane Schmucker of
the Toledo Blade that although a 16-member crew normally culls 30,000 hens
per day, structural damage to the barn roofs and to walkways over the deep
manure pits beneath the cages prevented any hen removals before September
22.
About 400,000 hens were pulled from their cages, killed, and sent
for rendering during the next week. Joining the paid Buckeye staff in the
work were about 50 volunteers from nearby Mennonite villages and countless
animal rescuers who came and went. The greatest number of hens recovered
alive apparently went to the Ooh-Mah-Nee Sanctuary in Hunker,
Pennsylvania, the first to gain permission from Buckeye to take any.
Ooh-Mah-Nee acknowledged receiving 1,200 but according to some
media reports received as many as 2,000.
Reportedly taking about 1,000 was Farm Sanctuary of Watkins Glen,
New York. United Poultry Concerns founder Karen Davis, of Machipongo,
Virginia, reportedly took 25. Allen Geise of the Willows Farm Sanctuary
and Shannon Lentz of Grateful Acres drove together from Michigan to claim
130.
"We had our own disaster when loading the birds into the first
truck [to Ooh-Mah-Nee]," Laymon said. "It was cold and rainy, and we
left the heat on. The birds, who were wet and cold themselves, piled
into one corner of the truck, and the hens on the lowest level suffocated.
We had to pull the living birds off the dead birds, and discard the dead.
It was devastating. What were we, their saviors, or tormenters? We
then turned on the air conditioning, which was completely
counterintuitive, but it worked. These poor creatures, who were at first
terrified by the straw bedding we laid out, soon started nesting and
clucking. From factory robots, they turned into 'The Girls,' and we fell
in love with them."
Buckeye spokesperson Collen on September 25 claimed, "These birds
are in their last chapter."
Buckeye then halted the rescue effort on September 28, claiming
that American Humane Association representative Jack Sparks had "determined
that the work being performed to rescue the hens had become physically and
emotionally dangerous."
Responded Sparks, "It's unfortunate that our role has been
characterized in this way." Sparks told Associated Press that he had
merely recommended to Buckeye that the rescuers and Buckeye staff should be
issued safety equipment such as hard hats, so that they could reach more
hens without risk of injury to themselves.
Some rescuers suspected Buckeye was just trying to run them off
before the bulldozers arrived to clear away the barn rubble--and bury alive
the last surviving hens.

Anton Pohlmann

The tornado was only the most recent of many controversial
incidents associated with Buckeye. Owner Anton Pohlmann, 60, and his son
Marcus developed the Buckeye egg factories beginning in 1982, parallel to
operations in Lower Saxony, Germany. They were cited for their first
water quality violations just a year later.
Anton Pohlmann had already become the top egg producer in Europe,
despite a string of convictions between 1971 and 1987 for causing pollution
and violating the German juvenile worker protection law.
But the German-based Pohlmann empire began to collapse in 1992,
recounted Kelly Lecker of the Toledo Blade in a November 1999 investigative
series, when Pohlmann "used an illegal drug to treat salmonella in his
chickens because the commonly used drug was too expensive, court records
state. In 1994 he sprayed nicotine sulfate on the chickens because they
had mites, which caused one worker to become gravely ill and endangered
940,000 young hens. Court documents state that Pohlmann removed the
warning label that said the substance was a strong poison. The court
records state that when the worker went to the hospital, Marcus Pohlmann
did not at first tell doctors what had happened. Records state that the
worker could have died from damage to the diaphragm, heart failure, or
aspiration."
In addition, Anton Pohlmann was in September 1994 convicted of
cruelly killing 60,000 hens who had salmonella, by cutting off their
water, food, and air conditioning.
Pohlmann was briefly jailed, fined $2 million, placed on
probation for two years, and barred for life from participating in any
German animal-related enterprise.
This encouraged Pohlmann to emigrate to the U.S. and expand his
American holdings. Buckeye now has annual sales exceeding $100 million,
and Pohlmann has amassed a personal fortune of more than $80 million, but
the company was sued by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency in
December 1999 for allegedly failing to comply with clean-up orders and
failing to pay civil penalties totaling $750,000.
Buckeye also incurred $425,000 in civil penalties from the U.S.
Occupational Safety and Health Adminstration, while still known as
AgriGeneral, for allegedly hiring illegal aliens and underaged workers,
housing workers in substandard conditions, and improperly withholding
wages from workers.
The company changed names in 1997 after the TV magazine expose
series Dateline aired undercover footage of employees packaging "expired"
eggs together with fresh, at alleged instruction from management.

Forced molts

As disturbing as the suffering inflicted on the Buckeye hens as
result of the tornado was to those who observed it, the conditions for the
hens were almost normal.
By the time they are killed, more than 90% of the 447 million
laying hens raised in the U.S. this year will have endured a forced molt.
This means they will be deprived of food and get only limited water for 10
days to two weeks.
That includes the 15 million laying hens raised by Buckeye, among
them the six million at the Croton site whose barns escaped the tornado.
The hens will be starved after their egg production falls off at
the end of their first laying cycle. Eventually they will drop their
feathers, refeather, and begin a second egg-laying cycle, just as if
they had endured a harsh winter and then responded to spring.
By the end of the hens' second egg-laying cycle, their bodies will
be so depleted of calcium and other essential minerals that according to
poultry industry surveys, about one hen in six or seven will suffer broken
bones en route to slaughter, and one in three dozen will not survive the
trip.
Hens subjected to forced molting are especially vulnerable to
salmonella and other infections which may pass to humans with eggs or meat.
Egg producers often try to prevent the infections by dosing whole flocks
with antibiotics. But this practice is believed to have stimulated the
recent rapid evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including strains
of campylobacter and salmonella that sicken thousands of humans per year.
Citing the human health risk, McDonald's Restaurants on August 22
ordered its 27 egg suppliers to stop inducing forced molts by the end of
the first quarter of 2001.
McDonald's also ordered a gradual phase-out of debeaking, done to
keep chickens kept in close confinement from injuring each other, and
further ordered that egg producers by the end of 2001 increase the floor
space allocated per hen in caging from the present average of about 50
square inches to 72 square inches--still less than the size of a standard
sheet of typing paper.
Purchasing about 1.5 billion eggs per year, or roughly between 2%
and 3% of all U.S. egg production, McDonald's won from PETA a promised
year-long suspension of its "Unhappy Meals" protest campaign.
"Unhappy Meals" amplified a June 1997 ruling by Justice Roger Bell
of the British High Court in the so-called "McLibel" case brought against
London Greenpeace protesters David Morris, then 43, and Helen Steel,
then 31, that McDonald's Restaurants are "culpably responsible" for
cruelty toward factory-farmed poultry and hogs.
"Unhappy Meals" asked McDonald's to enforce the provisions of
McDonald's and the Humane Treatment of Animals, a code of ethics for
suppliers adopted in February 1994 under pressure from Simon Billenness of
the Franklin Research and Development Corporation and the late Henry Spira,
founder of Animal Rights International and the Coalition for Non-Violent
Food. Spira died in September 1998.
The McDonald's code asks suppliers to adhere to the 1991 American
Meat Institute guidelines drafted by livestock handling consultant Temple
Grandin, of Colorado State University. The AMI guidelines are much
tougher than any present provisions of law.

Michaels seeks more

Susan Michaels, cofounder of the Pasado's Safe Haven sanctuary in
Sultan, Washington, on October 2 marked World Day for Farm Animals by
asking Washington-based egg producers to adopt a somewhat stricter code of
ethics which would incorporate the McDonald's standards and also forbid
debeaking.
Michaels, 43, is an ex-TV reporter and talk show host who in 1978
was shocked into vegetarianism by what she saw during a broadcast about an
Illinois slaughterhouse. Michaels was instrumental in obtaining Pasado's
Law, the Washington felony anti-cruelty statute, named for a donkey who
was tortured to death by intruders in 1992 at the Kelsey Creek Farm petting
zoo in Bellevue. She was deeply disappointed that the lawmakers exempted
farm animals from coverage.
Michaels and husband Mark Steinway founded Pasado's Safe Haven in
1998 to help farm animals. They became especially active on behalf of
chickens after rescuing about 150 hens in February 1999 from a flock
allegedly left to starve by egg farmer Keith E. Amberson, 51, of Lake
Stevens, Washington--and then rescued another 1,500 from the Amberson farm
in March 2000, working with numerous other groups including the Pigs Peace
sanctuary, the Humane Farming Association, and Farm Sanctuary. More than
1,000 hens were reportedly found dead at the Amberson farm in deep filth,
but Amberson was charged with just one count of misdemeanor second-degree
cruelty. His trial is set for November 13.
Michaels told ANIMAL PEOPLE that she offered to take up to 1,000 of
the Buckeye hens, but that safe transportation for them could not be
arranged.
Meanwhile, she persuaded the Sultan High School animal sciences
program to make permanent an agreement she secured last spring--over the
militant opposition of many locals--that chickens raised as part of class
projects will be brought to Pasado's Safe Haven instead of being killed.

AHA guidelines

The American Humane Association on September 20, just before the
tornado hit Buckeye, unveiled a "Free Farmed Certificate Program" for
poultry, dairy, and cattle producers.
"I've spent the last three years of my life making this a reality,"
AHA Washington D.C. office director Adele Douglass told ANIMAL PEOPLE.
Douglass undertook the Free Farmed Certificate Program at the
request of Henry Spira, who was a close friend for many years, and has
been appointed executive director of Farm Animal Services Inc., a new
"stand-alone nonprofit organization" formed by the AHA to run the program.
"The Free Farmed Certificate Program," according to the AHA
announcement, "is a voluntary, user-fee-based service available to
producers, processors, and haulers of animals raised for food," intended
"to provide independent verification that the care and handling of
livestock and poultry on enrolled farms meets the AHA animal welfare
standards."
Douglass drafted the standards, covering cattle, dairy cows,
chickens, and laying hens, in collaboration with a six-member scientific
committee.
The USDA "is to verify FAS' inspection process" by visiting 25% of
the Free Farmed Certificate Program participants, the AHA said.
Among the first Free Farmed Certificate Program participants are
the Clover-Stornetta Farms dairy company of northern California; Egg
Innovations, of Ozaukee County, Wisconsin, a free-range producer of
about 92 million eggs per year, whose hens are not subjected to forced
molts; and several cattle ranches that feed into one Montana
slaughterhouse.
Farm Animal Services is modeled after Freedom Food Ltd., begun by
the Royal SPCA of Great Britain in 1993 and formally introduced in 1994.
Despite a shaky start, Freedom Food now certifies 4,000 farms,
120 livestock haulers, 47 slaughterhouses, and 6,000 retail outlets,
whose collective market share includes the sale of 70 million eggs per
month.
But Freedom Food is not universally seen as significantly advancing
farm animal welfare. From inception it has been bitterly criticized for
allowing participants to debeak hens, dock pigs' tails, and keep sows in
farrowing crates.
RSPCA farm animal division chief Martin Potter, DVM, told the
London Observer in June 1995 that these practices were allowed because
forbidding them might cause other animal welfare problems, including
cannibalism among hens, tail-biting among pigs, and the crushing of
piglets when sows roll over.
The Freedom Food standards are, however, significantly stronger
than the AHA welfare standards.
For instance, Freedom Food farmers were not allowed to keep hens
in battery cages even before the European Parliament in June 1999 agreed
under British pressure to phase out battery caging throughout the European
Union by 2012.

Appeal to consumers

Associated Press farm writer Philip Brasher told the world on
September 19, before the AHA standards were officially announced, that
they "are so stringent that few farmers initially can meet them."
Specified Brasher, "To qualify for the Free Farmed seal, farms
would have to eliminate cages for laying hens and stop using forced
molting. Dairy cattle would have to have access to pastures."
The AHA would like to see all this, but the standards are not
quite that strong yet.
Douglass wrote them, she explained, with the intent that enough
farmers should be able to meet them right now to give consumers a choice at
their supermarket between bad conditions and better.
"We have to realize that anything we do to help farm animals will
have to be done by consumer pressure," Douglass told ANIMAL PEOPLE,
"because with agribusiness owning Capitol Hill, it isn't going to get done
by legislation."
What the AHA standards actually say about pasturing dairy cattle is
that, "All cattle, regardless of location, should have access to
turn-out lots for four hours per day, weather permitting."
Farmers are not required to furnish grazing, either. The AHA
standards state that, "When pasture quality is poor, nutritional
maintenance through feeding of quality forage and concentrate is
appropriate."
If strictly followed, the AHA standards might forbid veal crating.
Calves may be housed singly, but must be able to turn around, see and
hear other calves, and spend four hours a day in either natural daylight
or equivalent lighting.
The AHA standards also forbid almost all routine use of
electroshock to move cattle.
However, laying hens may be caged, at half the density allowed by
McDonald's: three to a cage now holding six.
The hardest part of drafting the standards, Douglass said, was
finding an egg producer who does not put hens through forced molts.
At that, the written AHA standard, in allowing leeway for
veterinary care, almost had a loophole:

FW2: Hens must have free access to nutritious food each day,
except when required by the attending veterinarian.

The loophole is that forced molts are usually done under
supervision of an egg company vet--not for the hens' own sake, but because
starved hens may develop infections which can be passed to people.
After ANIMAL PEOPLE pointed out the loophole in a draft copy of the
standards, Douglass rushed to restore a lost line to the next passage, to
reinforce the intent:

FW3: Producers must have a written record of the nutrient content
of the feed and make it available to the Free Farmed Assessor. Withdrawal
of food to induce a molt is not permitted.

Serving on the AHA Standards Scientific Committee were Pennsylvania
State University dairy expert Brenda Coe; Pamela Hullinger, DVM, of the
California Dept. of Food and Agriculture Animal Health Branch; University
of California at Davis poultry expert Joy Mench.; livestock behavior
expert Julie Morrow-Tesch.; Washington State University poultry and hog
expert Ruth Newberry; and U.C. Davis veal expert Carolyn Stull.
--M.C.