The Life and Death of a Bird

It is always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to asleep.

(From: Eating Animals - Jonathan Safran Foer)

The second farm I saw with C was set up in a series of twenty sheds, each 45 feet wide by 490 feet long (ed. 14 by 150 metre), each holding in the neighborhood of 33,000 birds. [...] It's hard to get one's head around the magnitude of 33,000 birds in one room. You don't have to see it for yourself, or even do the math, to understand that things are packed pretty tight. In its Animal Welfare Guidelines, the National Chicken Council indicates an appropriate stocking density to be eight-tenths of a square foot (ed. 0.07 m2) per bird. That's what's considered animal welfare by a "mainstream" organization representing chicken producers, which shows you how thoroughly co-opted ideas about welfare have become - and why you can't trust labels that come from anywhere but a reliable third-party source.

It's worth pausing on this for a moment. Although many animals live with far less, let's assume the full eight-tenths of a square foot. Try to picture it. (It's unlikely you'll ever get to see the inside of a poultry factory farm in person, but there are plenty of images on the Internet if your imagination needs help.) Find a piece of printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football will legs on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. [...] Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating and ventilation systems. This is a farm.

Now to the farming.

First, find a chicken that will grow big fast on as little feed as possible. The muscles and fat tissues of the newly engineered broiler birds grow significantly faster than their bones, leading to deformities and disease. Somewhere between 1 and 4 percent of the birds will die writhing in convulsions from sudden death syndrome, a condition virtually unknown outside of factory farms. Another factory-farm-induced condition in which excess fluids fill the body cavity, ascites, kills even more (5 percent of birds globally). Three out of four will have some degree of walking impairment, and common sense suggests they are in chronic pain. One out of four will have such significant trouble walking that there is no question they are in pain.

For your broilers, leave the lights on about twenty-four hours a day for the first week or so of the chick's lives. This encourages them to eat more. Then turn the lights off a bit, giving them maybe four hours of darkness a day - just enough sleep for them to survive. Of course chickens will go crazy if forced to live in such grossly unnatural conditions for long - the lighting and crowding, the burdens of their grotesque bodies. At least broiler birds are typically slaughtered on the forty-second day of their lives (or increasingly the thirty-ninth), so they haven't yet established social hierarchies to fight over.

Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms. Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. [...] Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine bath are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria.

Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don't taste quite right - how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? - but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. [...]

The farming done, it's now time for "processing".

First, you'll need to find workers to gather the birds into crates and "hold the line" that will turn the living, whole birds into plastic-wrapped parts. You will have to continuously find the workers, since annual turnover rates typically exceed 100 percent. Illegal aliens are often preferred, but poor recent immigrants who do not speak English are also desirable employees. By the standards of the international human rights community, the typical working conditions in America's slaughterhouses constitute human right violations; for you, they constitute a crucial way to produce cheap meat and feed the world. Pay your workers minimum wage, or near to it, to scoop up the birds - grabbing five in each hand, upside down by the legs - and jam them into transport crates.

If your operation is running at the proper speed - 105 chickens crated by a single worker in 3.5 minutes is the expected rate according to several catchers I interviewed - the birds will be handled roughly and, as I was told, the workers will regularly feel the birds' bones snapping in their hands. (Approximately 30 percent of all live birds arriving at the slaughterhouse have freshly broken bones as a result of their Frankenstein genetics and rough treatment.) [...]

Load the crates into trucks. Ignore weather extremes and don't feed or water the birds, even if the plant is hundreds of miles away. Upon arrival at the plant, have more workers sling the birds, to hang upside down by their ankles in metal shackles, onto a moving conveyer system. More bones will be broken. Often the screaming of the birds and the flapping of their wings will be so loud that workers won't be able to hear to person next to them on the line. Often the birds will defecate in pain and terror.

The conveyer system drags the birds through an electrified water bath. This most likely paralyzes them but doesn't render them insensible. Other countries, including many European countries, require (legally, at least) that chickens be rendered unconscious or killed prior to bleeding and scalding. In America, where the USDA's interpretation of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act exempts chicken slaughter, the voltage is kept low - about one-tenth the level necessary to render the animals unconscious. After it has travelled through the bath, a paralyzed bird's eyes might still move. Sometimes the birds will have enough control of their bodies to slowly open their beaks, as though attempting to scream.

The next stop on the line for the immobile-but-conscious bird will be an automated throat slitter. Blood will slowly drain out of the bird, unless the relevant arteries are missed, which happens, according to another worker I spoke with, "all the time". So you'll need a few more workers to function as backup slaughters - "kill men" - who will slit the throats of the birds that the machine misses. Unless they, too, miss the birds, which I was also told happens "all the time". According to the National Chicken Council - representatives of the industry - about 180 million chickens are improperly slaughtered each year. When asked if these numbers troubled him, Richard L. Lobb, the council's spokesman, sighed, "The process is over in a matter of minutes."

I spoke to numerous catchers, live hangers, and kill men who described birds going alive and conscious into the scalding tank. (Government estimates obtained through the Freedom of Information Act suggest that this happens to about four million birds each year.) Since feces on skin and feathers end up in the tanks, the birds leave filled with pathogens that they have inhaled or absorbed through their skin (the tank's heated water helps open the birds' pores).

After the birds' heads are pulled off and their feet removed, machines open them with a vertical incision and remove their guts. Contamination often occurs here, as the high-speed machines commonly rip open intestines, releasing feces into the birds' body cavities. Once upon a time, USDA inspectors had to condemn any bird with such fecal contamination. But about thirty years ago, the poultry industry convinced the USDA to reclassify feces so that it could continue these automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, feces are now classified as a "cosmetic blemish". As a result, inspectors condemn half the number of birds. Perhaps Lobb and the National Chicken Council would simply sigh and say, "People are done consuming the feces in a matter of minutes."

Next the birds are inspected by a USDA official, whose ostensible function is to keep the consumer safe. The inspector has approximately two seconds to examine each bird inside and out, both the carcass and the organs, for more than a dozen different diseases and suspect abnormalities. He or she looks at about 25,000 birds a day. [...]

Next the chickens go to a massive refrigerated tank of water, where thousands of birds are communally cooled. Tom Devine, from the Government Accountability Project, has said that the "water in these tanks has been aptly named 'fecal soup' for all the filth and bacteria floating around. By immersing clean, healthy birds in the same tank with dirty ones, you're practically assuring cross-contamination." While a significant number of European and Canadian poultry processors employ air-chilling systems, 99 percent of US poultry producers have stayed with water-immersion systems and fought lawsuits from both consumers and the beef industry to continue the outmoded use of water-chilling. [...]

What I've described is not exceptional. It isn't the result of masochistic workers, defective machinery, or "bad apples." It is the rule. More than 99 percent of all chickens sold for meat in America live and die like this.