On May 8th, mothers in Jacksonville and all around savored the beauty and love of motherhood on Mother's Day. Sadly, on a factory farm, there is no joy for mothers. Instead, there is only heartbreak. This is part 1 of a 3-part series about those babies and mother's for whom there is no celebration. While life for all sentient beings on factory farms is a nightmare, this series will focus on the babies born to factory farms.
The video, "A Mother's Love" by Evolve! Campaigns shows animal mothers with their babies. The love and adoration felt by those mothers and their offspring is almost palpable. A mother's love is so deeply ingrained and undeniable, and yet the exploitation of animals raised for human food extends almost beyond comprehension when you think about what those mother's must endure.
When you think of baby chicks or poults (as baby turkeys are called), you usually envision cute fluffy little creatures hatched from a nest in the barn, running around behind their mother hens. By nature, hens' maternal instincts are very strong. They will open their wings wide and snuggle their babies underneath during sleep. They teach them how to scratch for feed and take dust baths in the dirt and how to build nests. Chickens have a highly evolved communication system. Mother hens make distinctive sounds, communicating whatever it is she wants to tell her babies. Mother hens break up larger pieces of food with their beaks and teach their chicks how to eat it.
On a factory farm, there is no mother hen. Eggs are incubated in huge warmer drawers until they hatch. The chicks and poults never see their mothers at all, but instead hatch into a huge unnatural metal prison. Immediately after they hatch, the sorting process begins. The newly-hatched chicks or poults are brought out to the sorting table in huge masses. There, they are "sexed". This is done by someone who roughly grabs the tiny bird and looks to see if it's a male or female. The females are kept to replace the "spent" egg laying hens in the "battery cages" and the males are an "unwanted byproduct" of the industry.
The females are then hung into a machine that slices the tips of their beaks off with a hot blade. This is done to prevent the hens from injuring other hens that are crammed into the battery cages with them when they begin their egg laying process. There are numerous nerve endings in their tiny beaks, and this procedure is excruciating for them. It's like having the tips of your fingers cut off with a hot knife with no anesthetic. It's so painful that the chicks find it difficult to eat for a long time until their beaks heal up, and then they are deformed for the rest of their short egg-laying or fattening-up-for-slaughter lives.
Depending on the facility where they hatch, the method of disposing of the male chicks varies, but all are brutally inhumane. Many large-scale farms utilize a huge meat grinder. The male chicks are thrown from the sorting table onto the conveyor belt of this monstrous grinding machine, where they move quickly into the blades of the grinder. There they are ground up while still alive and aware. Some of the chicks get caught in the machine, having wings or legs stuck while they writhe around in agony. At other facilities, the male chicks are packed into plastic garbage bags, where they are suffocated to death. These bags are filled to the brim with living chicks, whose weight eventually crushes the ones on the bottom. Those closer to the top that are still alive are then sealed alive in the plastic bag and slowly gasp for air until there is none, dying a slow and agonizing death. Either method of death is vile and both are excruciating.
These chicks and poults never see the sunlight, never breathe in clean air, and never feel their mother's love while hiding under her wings for comfort. They are born into the glaring light of the sorting facility, only to meet their ghoulish death sometimes within hours of coming into the world.
Mercy For Animals conducted an undercover investigation into Hy-Line International in Spencer, Iowa. It's a highly graphic, deeply disturbing video about the reality for chicks on factory farms.
Think of these tiny chicks and poults the next time you purchase eggs. Please do what you can to stop perpetuating the nightmare these innocent babies endure on factory farms. The compassionate choice is yours to make.
Mercy for Animals has also produced video entitled "Farm To Fridge – The Truth Behind Meat Production". If you wish to see the entire nightmare of the lives of food animals, this video will enlighten you to those horrors. However, this video is extremely graphic, so watch it only if you feel you can.
Click here for Part 2 - (Piglets).
Click here for Part 3 (calves).
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