1341.The Life of Industrial Farm Chicken

By Farm Sanctuary, March 2014

Chicken Used for Egg

Chickens used for egg production are among the most abused of all farm animals. In order to meet the consumer demand for eggs, 280 million hens laid 77.3 billion eggs in 2007. From hatching to slaughter, egg-laying hens are subjected to mutilation, confinement, and deprivation of the ability to live their lives as the active, social beings they are.

• Because male chicks will not grow up to lay eggs and, therefore, have little value to the egg industry, 260 million are killed each year upon hatching. Methods include being sucked through a series of pipes onto an electrified “kill plate,” being ground up alive and fully conscious in a “macerator,” or being gassed.

• Female chicks are “debeaked” at a young age, most commonly having a portion of their beaks seared off with a hot blade. Debeaking is meant to prevent the abnormal feather-pecking that can result from the stress of confinement in a battery cage. A chicken’s beak is filled with nerves, and debeaking can result in severe and possibly chronic pain.

• 95% of egg-laying hens spend their lives in battery cages. Battery cages commonly hold 5–10 birds, and each chicken may be given an amount of floor space equivalent to less than a sheet of letter-size paper. Constantly rubbing against and standing on wire cages, hens suffer severe feather loss, and their bodies become covered with bruises and abrasions.

• Today’s hen, selectively bred and artificially induced to yield high egg production, will produce more than 250 eggs annually, compared to 100 eggs annually a century ago.

• In order to shock their bodies into another egg-laying cycle when production declines, hens are sometimes starved and denied any food for up to two weeks — a process known as “force molting.”

• The lifespan of an industry chicken would be 5–8 years. However, when egg production declines after 1–2 years, hens are considered “spent” and sent to slaughter. Chickens and turkeys are exempt from the Humane Slaughter Act, a federal law that requires some animals to be rendered insensible to pain before slaughter.

• Due to a declining market for “spent” hens, producers often elect to kill them by gassing them with high concentrations of carbon dioxide. In some cases, the gas does not kill the birds, and there have been reports of live hens found at landfills crawling out from piles of decomposing chickens.

Chickens Used for Meat

Every year, 9 billion chickens are slaughtered for meat in the United States. Called “broilers” by the industry, these curious, social birds are treated simply as production units, selectively bred and fed for abnormally fast growth without consideration for their well-being. The resulting large size contributes significantly to suffering, disease, and early death.

• Chickens raised for meat are selectively bred to grow to “market weight” at an alarming pace. In the past 50 years, the amount a chicken used for meat grows each day has increased by more than 300%.

• Chickens in the meat industry typically spend their lives confined to warehouse-like buildings, each packed with as many as 20,000 chickens. On average, the space per chicken is only slightly larger than a sheet of letter-size paper. This crowding can result in scratches and sores from the birds being forced to walk all over each other.

• A 2006 study found that 55% of uncooked chicken purchased from supermarkets contained arsenic, which is known to cause cancer in humans. Arsenic is added to the feed of approximately 70% of the broilers raised each year.

• Since more than one flock is sometimes kept on the same litter before the floor is cleaned, floors can be covered in the waste of tens of thousands of chickens. Excessive ammonia levels that can result from the waste breaking down can lead to health problems for chickens, including difficulty breathing.

• The lights are kept on nearly constantly in the buildings where chickens raised for meat are confined. This can stimulate eating and unnaturally rapid growth and limits the opportunity for chickens to sleep and rest, all of which leads to serious health problems.

• Studies have consistently shown that approximately 26–30% of broiler chickens suffer from difficulty walking because their skeletons have trouble supporting their rapidly growing bodies. This can also lead to deformities and lameness.

• The rapid growth of broiler chickens is often associated with acute heart failure. The hearts and lungs of the rapidly growing birds are not able to effectively get oxygen circulated throughout the body. This problem is the leading cause of death in chickens as they reach “market weight.”

• With bodies taxed beyond belief, chickens who survive their time in production are often slaughtered at just 42 days old. They are still “peeping” the sound of baby chicks when they are killed – even though their bodies have ballooned to the size of giant adult chickens in this short time due to industry practices.

• At the slaughterhouse, there is no law in place requiring chickens to be rendered unconscious before slaughter, and the electrified water bath stunning used has been shown to cause painful shocks before it stuns the birds.

1340. California New Law Gives Egg Laying Chicken Room to Stretch Their Wings

By Stephanie Storm, The New York Times, March 3, 2014

The location and size distribution of the chicken egg industry in the U.S. Credit: The New York Times.

ATWATER, Calif. — Hens in California are living the good life. Many can now lay their eggs in oversize enclosures roomy enough to stand up, lie down — even extend their wings fully without touching another bird.

Hens in most other states don’t have it so good. Their conditions, as the head of California’s egg trade group explained, are “like you sitting in an airplane seat in the economy section all your life.”

So if you’re a hen, you want to live in California. Short of that, you want California-size leg room. And that’s precisely what lawmakers in California are demanding of out-of-state farmers who sell eggs in California — setting off a feud over interstate commerce that has spilled over into the farmyard at large.

The Missouri attorney general has filed a lawsuit to block the California egg rules, and at least three other states are considering doing the same. The beef and pork lobbies are also lining up against the California rules in an effort to prevent any new restrictions on raising livestock.

“This is bigger than a case about egg production and bigger than a case simply about agriculture,” said Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster. “These laws raise an important commerce clause question that affects many, many industries nationally, and I believe the courts need to respond.”

A chicken egg farming business. The birds never leave these cages until they are cease producing eggs. At that point, they are slaughtered for their meat. 

California voters set new standards for hen housing in 2008 when they approved a ballot measure that imposed more generous living conditions for egg layers in their state. When producers complained that the measure created a competitive disadvantage, the Legislature tacked on a law that mandated imported eggs be produced under the same standards.

Those provisions, as well as similar laws going into effect in Michigan, Oregon and Washington State and under consideration elsewhere, inspired a national proposal to require more space for laying hens across the country, but Congress dropped it from the recently passed farm bill. Lawmakers and some companies have been responding to consumer pressure (including from several colleges) for better treatment of animals raised for food.

The state’s egg producers have already spent millions of dollars installing “colony cages,” like those in two of the six barns at JS West & Companies’ Dwight Bell Ranch here. On a recent visit, white leghorn hens craned their necks out of the cages to stare and cluck at strangers, then withdrew to the safety of perches or the privacy of the laying nest, neither of which is available in conventional cages. There are about 60 hens in each cage.

The colony cages are about the size of a Ford F-150 pickup truck’s flatbed, while about 90 percent of the nation’s roughly 280 million laying hens are still in battery cages about as big as a filing-cabinet drawer. California’s egg producers have interpreted their state’s laws, which go into effect Jan. 1 next year, to require 116 square inches per bird, compared to the industry standard 67 square inches.

JS West & Companies, a family-owned business that features a “Hens Live” camera feed on its website so customers can view their birds’ living conditions, has spent more than $6 million installing the new cages. Jill Benson, senior vice president, said she believed eventually all chickens across the country would be raised in such conditions. “For us, it was a decision to invest in the future,” said Ms. Benson, whose great-grandfather, James Stewart West, founded the company. “We looked at moving production out of the state or even out of the country, but in the end decided that this is where the market is heading.”

Missouri, however, contends that California is trying to force the market in that direction, and at least three other states — Nebraska, Arkansas and the nation’s largest egg producer, Iowa — are considering supporting its lawsuit, according to representatives of their attorneys general.

Egg producers are warning that Californians, who consumed an estimated nine billion eggs last year, will almost certainly face higher prices as a result of the rules’ import restrictions and effect on in-state producers. “Come Jan. 1, I’m fairly convinced there is going to be a fairly large shortage of eggs in California,” said David Cisneros, chief operating officer of Dakota Layers, a large egg production company headquartered in South Dakota.

Mr. Cisneros, who is based in Los Angeles where the company has its cage-free and other specialty egg business, previously worked for MoArk, the egg division of Land O’ Lakes, which has closed down its California facilities. He said smaller egg farms were closing their doors because they could not afford the new housing systems.

Larger California producers also are reducing their flocks. JS West, for instance, is reducing its flock to 1.4 million birds from 1.8 million, which will cut production to 12 million eggs from 19 million.

Today, there are roughly 26 million laying hens in the state, about 12 million fewer than it needs to meet demand — which is why it imports eggs from states like Missouri. According to Attorney General Koster’s lawsuit, about 540 million of the state’s approximately 1.5 billion eggs end up in California.

Already, Arnie Riebli, head of the Association of California Egg Farmers, and other producers, said retailers insisted on pricing eggs from hens living in colony cages as if they were cage-free and specialty eggs, even though the new systems are estimated to add only about a penny to the cost of producing an egg — the hens eat more but are slightly more productive and have a somewhat lower mortality rate.

“We have no influence over what they charge, but if more eggs are produced this way, then the price is going to come down,” Mr. Riebli said. “It’s simple supply and demand.”

He is pulling conventional cages out of the barns at Sunrise Farms in Petaluma where he is a partner, and either replacing them with colony cages or simply converting the barns into housing for cage-free and organically raised hens, which are becoming a bigger part of his business.

He fought the new standards initially but had a change of heart after inviting people into his barns to see conditions there first hand. “I brought people in for tours and showed them what we did — and women would break down sobbing,” Mr. Riebli said. “The producers in other states don’t want to hear about animal welfare, but they’re ignoring what’s going on among the public.”

He noted that federal courts in California in general have ruled in favor of animal welfare advocates in other cases challenging state laws aimed at the humane treatment of livestock. Most recently, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld a California law prohibiting sale in the state of any foie gras produced by force-feeding birds, which was challenged as a violation of the interstate commerce clause by Hudson Valley Foie Gras L.L.C. and a group of Canadian producers.

But Mr. Koster is undaunted by those precedents. “I recognize that the California district courts and the Ninth Circuit have not been particularly friendly to this sort of assertion we’re making here, but I also have confidence that will not be the last word on this analysis,” he said. “The U.S. Supreme Court is unlikely to allow a state to put this type of trade barrier in place in the agricultural arena or any other arena.”