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After Baby Chick Video Goes Viral, Advocates Warn 'Free Range' Not All It's Cracked Up to Be
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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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