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In 1994, a researcher at an international symposium
on the artificial insemination of poultry joked to his colleagues
that his talk on Beyond Freezing Semen should be titled “The Night
of the Living Dead.” He was discussing his creation of bird chimeras—birds
with genes from other species inserted into their embryos. Of birds
hatching in his laboratory with no outward sign of the desired change,
he said: “We simply throw them away.” (Robert Etches 2001)
Millions of Birds Are Used in Research and More Will Be Used in
the Future
“The numbers of birds, rats and mice being used
in research is expected to grow exponentially with use of transgenics
and other new avenues of research.”
—Christopher J. Heyde, AWI Quarterly, Summer
2002, p. 15.
Although no one really knows how many birds suffer
and die in experimental laboratories worldwide, because no one is
counting, birds are among the 95 percent of warm-blooded sentient
animals who are now being used in all kinds of invasive research.
Birds and farmed animals alike are excluded from the federal Animal
Welfare Act in the United States, and while no precise figures are
available, it is estimated that at least 25 million birds, rats
and mice are experimented on each year in U.S. biomedical research
facilities, a figure that is expected to grow (Heyde, p. 14).1
Millions of birds suffer miserably each year in
government, university, and private corporation laboratories, especially
considering the huge numbers of chickens, turkeys, ducks, quails,
and pigeons being used in agricultural research throughout the world,
in addition to the increasing experimental use of adult chickens
and chicken embryos to replace mammalian species in basic and biomedical
research. For example, Colgate-Palmolive sponsored the development
of the CAM (Chorioallantoic Membrane) Test, an eye irritation test
in which vivisection of fertilized chicken eggs is necessary to
expose the egg’s interior membrane to the materials being tested.
In 1993, a workshop on The Production of Avian
Antibodies, held in Berlin, Germany, focused on the use of chickens
instead of mammals to produce monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies
(used in diagnostic testing). Instead of collecting blood from mammals
to obtain antibodies (which causes pain and distress to animals),
antibodies are extracted from the yolks of eggs laid by caged laboratory
chickens who must endure painful immunization injections and ultimately
be disposed of. According to the publisher of The Laboratory
Chicken (2002), within the last five years, “the chicken
has found increased use in biomedical research, principally for
production of polyclonal antibodies to be used in a wide variety
of research efforts” (Fulton).
Birds are Used in Pharmaceutical and Genetic Engineering Research
Multinational pharmaceutical companies such as
Merck, Bayer, and Pfizer maintain permanent laboratory flocks of
chickens and other avian species to test their products on.2 Companies like AviGenics and Embrex in the U.S.
and Shanghai Fudan Xinyang Biological Technology Corporation in
China are among the growing number of biotechnology firms that are
being funded through government and university programs to develop
genetically modified chickens for a wide array of projected uses
in medicine and agribusiness (Shanghai). A typical “breakthrough”
article proclaims that genetically modified chicks “could become
drug factories.” According to one article, two U.S. biotechnology
companies have already produced genetically modified birds who can
lay eggs containing specific drugs, proteins, and antibodies targeting
human medical problems. With hens laying an average of 200 eggs
per hen each year, both companies say yields could be “large and
lucrative” (Reuters).
Birds are Used in Agricultural Research
In addition to spending millions of dollars on
experiments funded by its corporate trade organization, the US Poultry
& Egg Association, the poultry industry receives indirect government
funding in the form of research conducted by the U.S. Department
of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) and its
numerous university extension programs. Tillman notes that “Agricultural
studies are fundamental to the production agriculture departments
of U.S. Land Grant Colleges” (p. 29). Studies of the effects of
food deprivation, artificially-induced diseases, and heat stress
are among the many types of experiments that are repetitively conducted
on birds at taxpayers’ expense. Slaughter experiments are also routinely
performed on live chickens, turkeys, ducks, ostriches, and emus,
in which these birds are subjected to varying levels of electric
shock in order to test the effect of various voltages on their muscle
tissue for the meat industry. For example, the Spring 2002 issue
of the Journal of Applied Poultry Research has an article
in which USDA researchers describe shocking 250 hens in a laboratory
simulation of commercial slaughter conditions to show that “subjecting
mature chickens to electrical stimulation will allow breast muscle
deboning after 2 hours in the chiller with little or no additional
holding time” (Dickens et al.).
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