It only took a few hours Tuesday for the undercover video showing baby chicks being mutilated in an Iowa hatchery to go viral.
Now animal advocacy groups are urging the public to pass the video along to anyone who will watch.
"No matter how these products are labeled - "free range," "cage free," "natural, "certified humane" - this Iowa hatchery exemplifies the conditions under which the life of commercially farmed birds begins," said Karen Davis, who runs the non-profit United Poultry Concern. "This is a standard mass-production hatchery."
The video was shot with a hidden camera and microphone by a Mercy for Animals undercover investigator, who worked at Hy-Line North America's chick hatchery, in Spencer Iowa, for two weeks in May and June 2009.
Male chicks - which are deemed useless because they don't lay eggs - are dropped alive into a grinding machine. Female chicks are brutally hooked up to a spinning debeaker that mutilates their sensitive beaks with an infrared laser, said Davis, whose opinion of the suffering of the chicks at the hatchery appears in the "Experts" section of www.mercyforanimals.org/hatchery.
Mercy for Animals executive director Nathan Runkle told the Associated Press, "the whole system is inherently flawed. The entire industrial hatchery system subjects these birds to stress, fear and pain from the first day."
United Egg Producers agrees the situation is hopeless and estimates roughly 200 million male chicks are killed a year. The female chicks face a life in hell.
"There is, unfortunately, no way to breed eggs that only produce female hens," said UEP spokesperson Mitch Head. "If someone has a need for 200 million male chicks, we're happy to provide them to anyone who wants them. But we can find no market, no need."
Baby chicks are shipped from hatcheries when they are only one day old. Immediately after being hatched from the egg, they're separated by gender, tossed into bins, then the female chicks are put into boxes to be shipped out.
The male chicks are often used as "packing material" to keep the female chicks warm and so they don't slide around on their stressful journey. They are shipped by US Postal Service, just like that book you ordered off Amazon, and can only survive without food or water for 72 hours. As we all know, packages often arrive late - and oftentimes the chicks arrive dead on arrival.
You can read about adopting the shipping process and adopting vs. buying egg laying chickens in the NY Daily News.
To learn more about free-range eggs read the new brochure, "Free-Range" Poutry and Eggs - Not All They're Cracked Up to Be."
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Comments
Amy- thanks for covering this sad story! People need to know what is going on every day in these inhumane factory farms/hatchery. Your title is brillant....could not be better.
It is cruel, but soon when WW3 begins (inevitable) you will wish you could eat these animals (as the circle of life continues) alive when there is no food for humans left.
You can educate humanity but everything is extreme is bad and what you sew into the ground will grow to haunt you too. Dont be dumb, expose but dont impose! Learn!
Point is John......we don’t need to eat them NOW. So why inflict more suffering that’s so easily preventable?! In addition eggs are high in fat and cholesterol...As of 2007, Heart Disease it is the leading cause of death in the United States. Pull you head out of the sand…and deal with the inconvient truth! “The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That is the essence of inhumanity." -George Bernard Shaw
And the spokesman for the company just whines that there is no commercial use for the male chicks. All that matters to them is the bottom line,how much money can be made. And then he tries to denigrate the group that did the work to expose this atrocity by saying they are a group that wants all egg consumption to cease. Well, If you have to grind baby chicks alive in order to get eggs -- then maybe no one should eat eggs! Hello!!!! And we think the bank CEO's are immoral -- these egg-producers take the cake.
The problem with america is that people have become distanced from their food.Most american don't know where their food comes from. Now all the wacos like PETA and Mercy for Animals have to do is associate some animal with a pet and OH no thats just terrible. The truth is that animal have no souls and no fealings. They are here for us to use. Should be tourture them and kill them for no reason. No, but animal are there for us to eat and to a leser extent make money from. Animals are stupid and the people that freak out over animals "feelings" are ether crazy radicals or missinformed!!! I find no problem with this practice.
till people become more tolerant of farm animals and livestock. I do not see much changing. Too many people do not like the sound of farm animals so they have these matrix farms to supply the demand for the demand for food consumption. The government does not support local farming, neither do many communities. Till there is a change towards local farms and more tolerance towards livestock.
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