Egg industry grinds millions of baby chicks alive

09/07/2009

A "sexer" working at Hy-Line in Iowa separates out male from female chicks, tossing males down the chute to be macerated or ground up alive/ Copyright (c) 2009 Mercy for Animals

Sometimes you see something that makes your jaw drop and stuns you into silence, which is quickly followed by outrage. When I watched this Youtube video, I had that experience. Everyone who eats eggs should know about this and watch this video (also below). It’s not bloody or gory, but shows a bunch of very adorable fuzzy chicks dropping into a machine that the narrator explains grinds them up alive. Warning: It is probably hard for most people to watch this and not cringe.

Here’s the scoop. Someone from the Chicago-based nonprofit Mercy for Animals went undercover to work for Hy-Line’s Iowa egg factory for two weeks and secretly recorded video. The most ghoulish scene involves baby chicks moving down a conveyer belt, where workers separate out the males and toss them into a chute where they are ground up alive in a meat grinder or macerator. The video itself only shows one meaty chick at the opposite end of the grinder, but the narrator says he saw bloody pulp coming from it. The industry euphemistically calls it “instantaneous euthanasia” and get this - this is not unusual. It’s apparently legal and widely used in the egg production industry. Even with cage-free eggs.

Apparently, this happens to an estimated 200 million male chicks per year, industry-wide, with Hy-Line alone producing 33.4 million chicks per year according to their website. After the Associated Press got hold of the video, Hy-Line confirmed that “instantaneous euthanasia” of male chicks is industry standard, and said it’s “supported by the animal veterinary and scientific community” including the American Veterinary Medical Association (their guidelines on euthanasia here).

Hy-Line confirmed the video shows violations of its own animal rights policy, though the grinding is legal and they say, the most “instantaneous” way of killing the chicks. (Certainly it is not the most humane). The ground-up baby chicks apparently go into dog food or fertilizer. The male chicks serve no purpose to egg companies - alive - because they don’t lay eggs, and don’t grow fast enough to be sold for meat.

I’m confounded at how the public could not have known about this. Mercy for Animals’ Executive Director, Nathan Runkle, questioned in a news conference in Des Moines: would it be acceptable if it were puppies or kitties?

On Mercy for Animals website they list statements from four experts about the practice. Dr. Karen Davis, the founder and president of United Poultry Concerns, says, "Given that the nervous system of a chicken originates during the 21st hour of incubation, and that a chick has a fully developed nervous system at the time of hatching, it is reasonable to conclude, as a fact of neurophysiology, that the chicks are suffering extreme pain as they are being cut up by macerator blades."

Female chicks don’t escape pain and suffering. They go to the debeaking machine, which burns off the beak with a laser to prevent hens from pecking one another. In a normal life, the chicks would be sheltered and comforted by their mother’s wings for the first part of their life. The video shows the chicks hanging by their beak from the machine as they squirm and flail about.

It certainly makes a person think twice about eggs. I pay $1 or more per carton extra for cage-free eggs but according to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Tails of the City blog, the Humane Society of the United States said even companies selling cage-free eggs engage in “instantaneous euthanasia.”  In grocery stores, only eggs “certified Humane” come from companies that don’t kill baby chicks or debeak, though they can still trim beaks to prevent cannibalism. One can also find local individuals who raise and sell eggs, though the practice is unregulated. Mercy for Animals promotes veganism.

After all this egg talk, curiosity got the better of me and I researched cage-free egg production conditions overall. Turn out, a journalist from the Arizona Republic compared a regular egg farm to one that sells cage-free eggs, and found the cage-free conditions worse. The chickens ran around in their own feces, and the chickens pecked one another and had lost feathers around their neck as they fought to establish pecking order. This was just two specific farms, but I may have to research and write more about this in the future.

Mercy for Animals sent letters to 50 of the nation’s largest grocery chains asking them to put the following label on eggs: "Warning: Male chicks are ground-up alive by the egg industry." Somehow I don’t think that will happen voluntarily, but regardless, it seems to me that all consumers should know about this standard industry practice.

We got dolphin-safe tuna several years back because of public pressure and boycotts, and I believe that if people care about this, they can also demand the industry engage in humane egg production.

Comments

[Terri]

thank you for bringing this to my attention. i don't think enough where the food I eat comes from, this eye opener will change that. i'm especially interested in future articles addressing so-called cage free & free range conditions.

[sockyee]

I just don’t understand how we could be so cruel because all these were done at the expense of human survival. I’m not a full time vegan yet, but given every chance, I try to avoid eating meat. When I recall and view back those images, only gloomy feeling and sadness fill my mind and it gives me even more reason to turn to vegan. After all, we have a choice to make and obviously those poor little creature do not have.

[Wendee Holtcamp]

I think that free range is actually a better option than cage free. If you click on the link at the end of the post "certified Humane" it has a story defining the terms and explaining what each term (free range, cage free, certified Humane etc) means in real terms. It's avery helpful resource. Thanks to both of you for your comments!

[Rick Woosley]

As long as we continue to view any animals as commodities, here for our use and benefit only, there will never be an end to this type of torture and downright sickening cruelty. The only answer is to go vegan. After all, how hypocritical is it to say that exploiting companion animals in this way is wrong, but that doing it to so-called "livestock" animals is okay? As if chickens, cows, pigs, sheep, geese, ducks and other animals don't feel as much as dogs & cats?

[Daniel Hauff with Mercy For Animals]

In the end, we need to realize that the egg industry is inherently inhumane, no matter what marketing label is put on the cartons (and be critical of if and how well such labels are monitored).

Virtually all egg producers still get their chicks from hatcheries such as the one that Mercy For Animals investigated, where the male chicks are ground-up alive, gassed, slammed into metal plates or suffocated because they can't produce eggs and can't profitably be used for their flesh. The females are mutilated, causing both acute and chronic pain - countless starve to death because it hurts too much to eat - by having their beaks painfully severed. When the hens' egg production slows and they are no longer profitable to keep (it's cheaper to replace them with a new young hen from a hatchery whose brother was just killed), they are usually sent to the same slaughterhouses to become low-grade chicken meat or gassed at the facility. Eggs do not a kind, benign industry - they are produced at the cost of hundreds of millions of individual animals' suffering every year in the U.S. alone.

And please, make no mistake - "beak trimming" is still painfully severing off part of the birds' sensitive beaks which are filled with nerve endings. It just sounds nicer than "debeaking" to consumers who are duped into supporting one type of cruelty over another. Experts compare the procedure to cutting off the tip of a person's finger - suddenly it's OK because we didn't cut off the entire finger?

As compassionate individuals in a civilized society, we must prevent animals from needless cruelty and suffering. You can learn how to cook and bake without eggs or supporting any other type of violence toward animals at ChooseVeg.com.

[Sass]

Everyone who eats should read the book "Omnivores Dilemma" -- what an eye-opener! I'm lucky enough to have a local source for home-grown eggs. Now I need one for pork. I use free-ranged buffalo instead of beef (and not too much of that). But what do you do about eating out?

[Mackerel]

Being thrown into a grinder looks like a pretty much instant death.

How is this anymore cruel than how the adults are killed?

[Wendee Holtcamp]

I am sure the death is relatively quick, but the question is, is it humane? Is it as painless as possible? I can't imagine that a vertebrate with a highly developed neurological system doesn't experience excruciating pain being ground up. The company says it's the most "instantaneous" way of death which probably translates to cheap n easy...

[Gabriela]

No words...

[Christine Heinrichs]

This is another horrifying practice of the commercial poultry industry. Traditionally, male chicks had value as meat birds and were raised for some months before becoming fryers and roasters. Exposing these practices helps us understand what it takes to bring cheap food to the table.

[zahid]

i want 2 know how much is chek mashin n where i can finf thanx alot

[reggie]

Curious how the writer uses the word "humane" in reference to how animals are treated. I think shock of situations like this is attributed to those in a rather removed, middle class background. Animals do not receive "civil" rights because they are not "civilians." Does that make any sense? Humanitarianism is by its very etymology only applicable to humans. This is not torture or barbarianism; this is industry, something that everyone in civilized society is a part of and has a hand in. Animal welfare, taken in light of the greater issues of the world, is a petty and distracting outcry of those who either are ignorant of the tenants and virtues of modern civilization or have ulterior motives. I suppose those opponents of the meat industry would have us go back to living in caves and fighting off polio as well.

[Wendee Holtcamp]

I assume by writer you mean me, the blogger, rather than one of the other commenters? At any rate Merriam-Webster defines humane as "marked by compassion, sympathy, or consideration for humans or animals." despite the common root "human" it does not only refer to having compassion ON human beings but rather on how humans, unlike animals, are capable of having compassion in the first place. I do not have time for a length discussion on this but it's a fascinating one! I do not personally discourage all animal research, or eating of animal meat. However, I think that humane treatment of animals, which we choose to subject to our whims, should at minimum be given humane treatment - absolutely. And it's those who fight for it and demand it why we have laws that protect our pets, research animals, and other animals. Farm animal welfare has lagged behind, though.

[reggie]

The protectorate laws you hint at are a very dangerous and slippery slope. While no level-headed person would advocate sick, Michael Vick-like behavior, to suggest that industry is torture or inhumane in these circumstance and should be ever-regulated would not cease similar activities (even in small scale operations) but would only bring up cost and complication to the consumer and farmer by further bureaucracy. Like MANY of the other practices that involve raising animals for food this is obviously not an aesthetically pleasing scenario but I fail to see how it is an immoral one, considering animal testing involves far more painful processes, or even how the tilling of soil for vegetable crops decimates huge vole populations; any alternatives you may suggest, which you don't, would be ludicrous. While I understand that an outsider might consider these practices the result of rampant greed and waste, it is only in terms of scale that this seems worse than any "horrors" you would find on any small farm operation.

The implications of the regulation you hint at (and I am applying it to medical research as well as factory farming, as the animal welfare issue is obviously a universal one in these respects, and to cherry pick issues is unrealistic in terms of the policy animal rights advocates seek to institute) result in the elimination of large sectors of human society. Innocent people will die. Period. No level-headed, fully informed citizen would advocate human suffering or starvation. Furthermore it would not stop the killing of animals for food or from people rationally advocating it. This is coming from someone who was a strict, ethical vegetarian for 5 years, so I do fully understand how these scenarios are repugnant to those who have the PRIVILEGE of living in the very industrialized society they seek to undermine. Indeed, I understand the concern but i think articles like this are very dangerous in their implications to influence policy.

[Arthur Killings]

As long as we view animals as things that don't feel pain this cruelty towards animals incoulding chicks will go on.

[yasmine]

without the boy chicks you won't have any more hens!