“Chickens are great companions. If only people knew how smart and lovable they can be.”
Rooster Lincoln, hen Sno-Pea and chick Luv-Bug
Chickens enjoy being together in small flocks, sunning, dustbathing, and scratching in the soil for food. A mother hen will tenderly and even fiercely protect her young brood, driving off predators and sheltering her little chicks beneath her wings.
The rooster proudly keeps watch over the flock. He alerts the hens if he senses danger, and when he finds a tasty morsel for his family to share, he calls them excitedly. Roosters often join in the hen’s egg-laying ritual, which is an extremely important and private part of a chicken’s life.
 CHICKENS RAISED FOR MEAT:
Their Life is Not “For the Birds”
In the U.S., each year, 9 billion “broiler” (baby) chickens, both males and females, are raised and killed for food. Worldwide over 50 billion chickens are now being slaughtered every year. As a result of genetic manipulation for overgrown muscle tissue (meat) of the breast and thighs, these birds suffer miserably from severe lameness causing them to crouch and hobble in pain, from gastrointestinal and blood diseases, and chronic respiratory infections. The parents of these birds are raised in darkness and kept on semi-starvation diets to reduce the mating infirmities caused by forcing chickens bred for meat to grow too large too fast.
During their 45 days of life, “broiler” chickens live in filthy litter, unchanged through several flocks of 20,000 or more birds in a single shed. In this atmosphere, excretory ammonia fumes often become so strong that the birds develop a blinding eye disease called “ammonia burn.” So painful is this disease that afflicted birds rub their hurting eyes with their wings and let out cries of pain.
“Broiler” chickens are crowded by the thousands into filthy, closed sheds contaminated with poisonous salmonella bacteria. In addition to sickening the birds, such bacteria often remain on the meat when chickens are consumed, a common cause of food poisoning.
People who know chickens as friends know that chickens are not “all alike.” They know that, like all species with certain traits in common, chickens have individual personalities, distinctive identities, and unique ways of expressing themselves.
 
THE “EGG-LAYING” HEN:
Her Eggs are Laid in Pain
The modern hen used for egg production is far removed from the active Southeast Asian jungle fowl from whom she derives and from the barnyard birds of the more recent past. She is a painfully debeaked, tortured bird who is jammed in a wire cage for a year or two, squeezed together with 8 or 9 other tormented hens in sheds holding 50,000 to 125,000 terrified, bewildered birds.
The egg industry deprives hens of all food or severely restricts their rations from one to three weeks straight to manipulate egg laying and market prices, and to “save feed costs.” This practice is called Forced Molting.
Being cooped for life without exercise while constantly drained of calcium to produce egg shells, laying hens develop osteoporosis, a mineral depletion and breaking of the bones from which many hens die miserably in their cages. This disease of imprisonment is called Caged Layer Fatigue. Over 300 million hens are caged for egg production in the United States each year.
THE MALE CHICK OF THE EGG INDUSTRY:
He is Treated Like Trash
What happens to the 250 million male chicks born to the U.S. egg industry each year?
Along with defective and slow-hatching female chicks, they are trashed as soon as they hatch. Upon breaking out of their shells, instead of being sheltered by a mother’s wings, the newborns are ground up alive or thrown into trashcans where they slowly suffocate on top of one another, peeping to death while a human foot stomps them down to make more room for more chicks.
Why is the male chick treated this way?
The male chicken of the egg industry cannot lay eggs, and he has not been genetically manipulated for profitable meat production, so the industry has no use for him. Destruction of unwanted male chicks is a worldwide practice.
CATCHING, TRANSPORT, AND SLAUGHTER OF CHICKENS
At 6 or 7 weeks old, baby “broiler” chickens and “roaster” chickens, who are a few weeks older, heavier, and more crippled, are cornered and grabbed by catching crews and carried upside down by their legs, struggling, flapping, and crying, to the transport truck coops. Jammed inside these coops they may travel up to 12 hours to the slaughterhouse through heat, wind, rain, sleet, and snow without food, water, or protection from the weather.
Spent laying hens are simply flung from the battery cages to the transport crates by their wings, feet, legs, head, or whatever is grabbed. Many are buried alive in landfills. Half-naked from feather loss caused by crowded caging, and terrorized by a lifetime of abuse, hens in transport experience such intense fear that many are paralyzed by the time they reach their final destination –the rendering company, the slaughterhouse, the landfill. Starved for 4 days before catching, they are a skeletal mass of broken bones, oozing abscesses, bruises, and internal hemorrhaging. They are covered with the slime of broken eggs and pieces of shells. When not buried alive, these hens are shredded into human food, pet food, mink feed and poultry feed.
THERE ARE NO FEDERAL LAWS REGULATING POULTRY RAISING, TRANSPORT, OR SLAUGHTER IN THE UNITED STATES OR CANADA
At the slaughterhouse, after being held in the trucks for 1 to 12 hours, chickens are torn from the cages and hung upside down on a movable rack. BIRDS MOVE TOWARD THE KILLING KNIFE WITH THE SENSATION OF SEVERE ELECTRIC SHOCKS ADDED TO THEIR OTHER AGONIES. MILLIONS OF BIRDS ARE ALIVE, CONSCIOUS, AND BREATHING NOT ONLY AS THEY MOVE TOWARD THE KNIFE BUT AFTERWARD, UPON ENTERING THE SCALD TANK. The industry calls these birds “redskins” – birds who were scalded while they were still alive.
 “The argument that a group of individuals is ‘all alike’ has been used throughout human history as a justification for the oppression of that group. If all the individuals are alike, then they become impersonal and killing them seems less wrong or horrendous. Chickens, whether intelligent or stupid, individual or identical, are sentient beings. They feel pain and experience fear. This, in itself, is enough to make it wrong to cause them pain and suffering.” – Jennifer Raymond.
What Can I Do?
- Please remove chickens and eggs from your diet and discover the variety of vegetarian alternatives. Our cookbook Instead of Chicken, Instead of Turkey: A Poultryless “Poultry” Potpourri has delicious, easy recipes. $12.95 from UPC.
- Contact your federal and state senators and representatives. Urge them to pass laws banning battery cages, debeaking, and forced molting. Urge them to include poultry under the Federal Humane Slaughter Act.
- Stick up for chickens. Tell your family and friends how badly chickens are treated. Contact your newspaper editor and TV and radio stations, using the information in this brochure to educate people. Urge everyone to join you in making a better life for chickens.
- Write to United Poultry Concerns, PO Box 150, Machipongo, VA 23405 (or call 757-678-7875, or visit our website at www.upc-online.org) for more information.
- Distribute copies of this brochure. Order 20 for $4 or 50 for $7.
United Poultry Concerns, Inc.
PO Box 150
Machipongo, VA 23405-0150
757-678-7875
FAX: 757-678-5070
www.upc-online.org |
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