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2. BRAVE NEW CHICKEN

Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.

—BRADLEY MILLER

The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

—GANDHI

Like most people, I would like to minimize the unnecessary suffering in the world. I want to eliminate needless violence and pain, and I give my support, wherever I can, to a positive approach to this goal. But like most people I never gave much of a thought to the impact my way of eating had on the world. Sure, I knew animals were killed for meat, but isn’t that the way of nature? Isn’t that the way of life’s food chains?

But I’ve learned that the animals used for food in the United States today are not just killed; something else happens to them. And finding out about it has changed me forever.

The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve felt that if people knew what really goes on they would make major changes in their food choices. Major changes that would go a very long way, not only toward improving their own health, but toward reducing the suffering in the world as well.

Let’s start with chickens. In order to understand what happens to these animals, it helps to have a feeling for what kinds of beings they are. Unfortunately, most of us have rather stereotyped visions of them.

The word “chicken” is often used as a synonym for “coward.” But that is a human moniker. Chickens, while high-strung and quick to startle, are anything but gutless, timid creatures. Roosters are renowned for their pride and ferocity and the adamant assertion of their power. Many cultures have exploited this fact in the so-called sport of cock fighting. And throughout the world a wide variety of cultures have acknowledged the potent spirit of the cock by using his name as a synonym for the male penis.¹ In languages all over the world the word for the male chicken is also used to signify human male sexual potency.²

Female hens are likewise not the craven creatures we’ve been conditioned to think they are. They can be absolutely fierce in defending their little ones, even against terrible odds and much larger predatory birds. A scientist who studied chickens for years, E. L. Watson, watched a mother hen defend her little chicks against the awesome attack of the dreaded raven.

I have known one little old hen who reared chicks on the far western coast of Scotland near cliffs where ravens built their nests. On ordinary occasions, ravens are the terror of domesticated fowls, that fly to shelter at the first sight of the black wings. They dare not face beaks so much stronger than their own. (But) this little mother of a brood of ten would stand her ground with her hackles up, eyes glaring defiance. Such was her courage that she lost but one of her brood when two ravens came against her. ³

Chickens are not the fearful creatures we have been conditioned to think. And the generally agreed-upon idea that they are stupid is equally ungrounded in fact.

Now, I’m not saying that chickens are the most brilliant of animals. But I do know that our understanding of what constitutes intelligence is utterly relative. If an aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, for example, all of Western civilization would probably flunk. We have a very convenient and self-serving way of defining intelligence. If an animal does something, we call it instinct. If we do the same thing for the same reason, we call it intelligence.

Personally, I wouldn’t be too quick to try to define the intelligence of chickens. I’d be afraid of judging them by standards that are irrelevant to them. For the more I’ve learned about the kinds of creatures they are and what they have been known to do, the more I’ve been impressed by their unique kind of intelligence.

One naturalist gave a chicken hen 21 guinea fowl eggs he had found, just to see what would happen. These small, hard-shelled eggs are a far cry from a chicken’s eggs. But the hen took the task to heart and somehow managed to tend to all 21 of the eggs without a sign of protest. As a product of our conditioned conventional notions about chickens, I originally thought she did this simply because she was too stupid to notice they weren’t her own eggs. When the chicks hatched, she didn’t seem at all perturbed by the fact that they weren’t chickens. Their small partridge-like appearance and unfamiliar ways evidently presented no problem to her. Again, I thought she was simply too stupid to notice they were not chickens. But I was wrong. She was far more tuned in to reality than I knew. After a few days of brooding the little guinea fowl, she took them away out into the cover of some bushes. Instead of asking them to feed on the ordinary mash that was given the chickens, she scratched in some ants’ nests for the white pupae. Chickens don’t eat such food, but guinea fowl do! The little ones took to it with instinctive relish.⁴

How could she have known? What form of intelligence was she displaying? Was she perhaps sufficiently tuned in to have received some sort of message from their collective psyche? That’s more than man can do!

On another occasion, a naturalist gave a chicken hen some duck eggs. She tended them and hatched them as if they were her own, yet wasn’t fazed at all when ducklings emerged from her labors instead of chicks. Utterly undaunted by the situation, she proceeded to do something neither she nor any other chicken in the area had ever done before. She walked up on a plank bridging a stream. Then, clucking, she invited the little ducklings into the water.⁵

It is a mystery to me how these mother hens knew what to do for the babies they hatched who were of another species. But somehow they did. It appears that when we speak of being taken under someone’s wing we are correctly referring to a remarkably caring and sensitive kind of nurturing.

Living as divorced from nature as most of us unfortunately do, we may not have much personal experience with chickens anymore and so may not know what wonderful mothers they are. But throughout recorded history the hen has been a supreme symbol of the best kind of mothering. In fact, the Romans thought so much of the maternal qualities of the hen that they frequently used the phrase “son-of-a-hen” to mean a fortunate and well-cared-for man.⁶

Naked amid the Ruins

Although the experiences and memories most of us have of chickens are colored by ill-founded biases, it is hard to forget the feeling of seeing freshly hatched baby chicks, their little yellow heads pushing out from under their mother hen’s feathers, their tiny yellow beaks just beginning to peck about. To many of us, freshly hatched baby chicks are the very picture of innocence and adorability. Yet perhaps they also speak of something deeper, something inspirational. In pecking their way out of the egg, they can seem as well to symbolize our ongoing need to outgrow old limitations, our deep need to push against and expand beyond boundaries that have served a needed purpose but that now must be left behind. In this, the little ones stand for the very opposite of the gutlessness we have been conditioned to think of as “chicken.” They stand for courage. They peck their way out, not knowing what will await them. And when they emerge, they stand naked and new amidst the ruins of a past to which they can never return, having undertaken an irreversible journey into the unknown, simply because it is their destiny to do so.

Somehow these little chicks remind me of the bravery of the human spirit and, as well, of our situation as a species. Are we not also driven by an evolutionary imperative, by the call of our own growth and potential for expansion? Are we not, as a race, standing now amidst the slime and eggshells of our primeval past, not knowing what will become of us yet already dreaming of the stars?

One thing’s for sure. Chickens are far more sensitive than most of us give them credit for. A study at Virginia Polytechnic Institute found that chickens flourished when treated with affection. Researchers there spoke and sang gently to a group of baby chicks. As a result the chickens were friendlier and put on more weight for the amount of feed consumed than did chickens who were ignored. The well-treated birds were also more resistant to infection than the other chickens.⁷

Welcome to Chicken Heaven

The raising of chickens in the United States today is not, however, a process that overflows with compassion for these animals. Nor is it anything like the barnyard operation that comes to most of our minds when we imagine the lives of chickens. Fundamental changes have taken place in the past 30 years. Formerly, chickens were free-range birds, scratching and rooting around in the soil for grubs, earthworms, grass, and larvae. They knew the sun and the wind and the stars, and the rooster crowing at the break of day was only one of many signs that showed they were deeply attuned to the natural cycles of light and dark.

But today this has all changed. The raising of chickens in the United States has become completely industrialized. We no longer live in the day of the barnyard chicken. We live now, I’m sorry to say, in the day of the assembly-line chicken.

There is a story behind today’s poultry and eggs that we would never know from the clean little packages for sale in brightly lit modern supermarkets. It all looks so neat, comfortable, and dependable, so carefully wrapped and labeled. As I stand in a tastefully decorated supermarket, serenaded by piped-in music, looking at egg cartons and poultry packages with happy drawings of smiling chickens, I find it hard indeed to imagine anything could be amiss. Every attempt is made to assure us that the chickens of today couldn’t be happier or better cared for, and that no expense is spared in bringing us quality eggs and produce. Advertisements for Perdue, Inc., one of the nation’s largest producers of chickens for meat, are typical. In them, the company president, Frank Perdue, tells us that his chickens live in “a house that’s just chicken heaven.”⁸

But it turns out there’s not a great deal of truth in describing contemporary chicken accommodations as “chicken heaven.”

To begin with, today’s chicken farms are not really farms anymore, but should more accurately be called chicken factories. Factories, because the chickens live their whole lives inside buildings entirely devoid of natural light. The day of the barnyard is long gone. There are no barns and no yards in today’s mechanized world of poultry production, only assembly lines, conveyor belts, and fluorescent lights. Factories, because these proud and sensitive creatures are treated strictly as merchandise, with utter contempt for their spirits, with not a trace of feeling or compassion for the fact that they are living, breathing animals. Factories, because the chickens are systematically deprived of every conceivable expression of their natural urges.

Today’s chicken factories are not farming as most of us conceive it. They are living expressions of the attitude that animals are things, raw materials to be consumed however we might wish.

I wish I were exaggerating. I wish I were describing isolated cases of negligent management. But I’m not. I’m describing the standard operating procedures of the egg and poultry industries today. I’m describing the operations that produce 98 percent of our eggs and poultry. I’m describing techniques and practices that are outlined and discussed every day of the week in trade journals such as Poultry World, Poultry Tribune, Poultry Digest, Farmer and Stockbreeder, and Farm Journal.

In the assembly-line world of today’s chicken factories, chickens aren’t called chickens anymore. If they have been bred for their flesh, they are called broilers. If they have been bred for their eggs, they are called layers. Now, not calling animals by their animal names, but giving them new names according to their food value to humans, may not seem like a big deal in itself, but it is part of a process that deeply conditions us all into forgetting the spirit of the animals as living beings with their own dignity. In fact, the industry makes a deliberate point of not seeing the animals as animals.

The modern layer is, after all, only a very efficient converting machine, changing the raw material—feedstuffs—into the finished product—the egg—less, of course, maintenance requirements.

—FARMER AND STOCKBREEDER9

Happy Birthday Factory Style

Male chicks, of course, have little use in the manufacture of eggs. So what do you think happens to the males? How are the little fellows greeted when, having pecked their way out of their shells, expecting to be met by the warmth of a waiting mother hen, they look around and seek to begin their lives on earth?

They are, literally, thrown away. We watched at one hatchery as “chickenpullers” weeded males from each tray and dropped them into heavy-duty plastic bags. Our guide explained: “We put them in a bag and let them suffocate.”10

It’s not a picture to bring joy to a mother’s heart, but over half a million little baby chicks are “disposed of” in this fashion every day of the year in the United States. In the seconds it takes you to read this paragraph, over 2,000 newborn male chicks will be thrown by human hands into garbage bags to smother among their brothers, without the slightest acknowledgment that they are alive.

And they are, perhaps, the lucky ones. Because for those chicks allowed to live, the “life” that follows is truly a nightmare.

In today’s modern factories, chickens, exquisitely sensitive to the earth’s natural rhythms of light and dark, never see or feel the light of the sun. Broiler chicks arrive at the producers via conveyor belt, in batches of tens of thousands. Fresh from the incubators and mechanized hatcheries, only a few hours old, the fluffy yellow babies peep constantly in frail little voices for their missing mothers. But they will never know the sound of their mother’s voice, nor the warmth of her body, nor the comfort of her protection. There will be no scratching in the dust for tasty bugs, no strutting and preening, no crowing to announce the dawn.

These little chicks come equipped with a God-given life expectancy of 15 to 20 years. But under the conditions of modern factory farming, modern broilers might make it to the ripe old age of two months. In comparison, the layers are veritable Methuselahs—the longest lived among them might possibly live as long as two years.

The more I’ve learned about these factories, the more ironic it has seemed to call them chicken heavens. Consisting of windowless warehouses, with tiers of cages stacked on top of one another from floor to ceiling, like shipping crates, the environment has been systematically designed to maximize the profits of the agribusiness corporations that own the sheds and the birds. It has not been designed with any concern whatever for the chickens’ natural urges, minimum comfort, or even health.

Inside the windowless warehouse, every aspect of the birds’ environment is totally controlled, in order to make them grow as fast as possible or produce as many eggs as possible, at the least possible cost to the company that owns the operation. Incidentally, the companies that own our nation’s chicken factories are not generally agricultural enterprises, as you might have imagined. As Peter Singer has shown in his excellent Animal Liberation, they are companies like Textron Inc., a manufacturer of pencils and helicopters. These companies go into the business simply because it looks like a profitable venture.¹¹ Accordingly, they apply to chickens the business practices that work with pencils and helicopters, thus treating these breathing, passionate animals with the same consideration they use for pencils.

The Social Life of Hens

The renowned English ethologist Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape, has written about today’s methods of raising hens in cages (also called batteries).

Anyone who has studied the social life of birds carefully will know that theirs is a subtle and complex world, where food and water are only a small part of their behavioral needs. The brain of each bird is programmed with a complicated set of drives and responses which set it on the path to a life full of special territorial, nesting, roosting, grooming, parental, aggressive and sexual activities, in addition to the feeding behavior. All of these activities are totally denied the battery hens.12

Chickens are by nature highly social animals. In any kind of natural setting, be it a farmyard or the wild, they develop a social hierarchy, often known as a pecking order. Every bird yields, at the food trough and elsewhere, to those above it in rank and takes precedence over those below.

The social order is extremely important to these birds. According to studies published in The New Scientist, chickens can maintain a stable pecking order, with each bird knowing all the others individually and aware of its place among them, in flocks with up to 90 chickens.¹³ Beyond 90 birds, however, things can get out of hand. Of course, in any kind of natural setting, flocks would never get nearly that large. But in today’s “chicken heavens,” flocks tend to be larger than the 90-bird limit.

How much larger? Poultry Digest reports that the flock size in a typical egg factory is 80,000 birds per warehouse!¹⁴

Just Like a Mother Hen

In such a situation the birds are completely unable to satisfy one of the most basic and intense priorities of their nature, which is to develop a sense of social order and their place within it.

The results aren’t very pretty. Unable to establish any kind of social identity for themselves, the cooped-up animals fight constantly with one another. They are driven berserk by the lack of space and the complete frustration of their primal need for a social order. In their frustration they peck viciously at one another’s feathers, frequently try to kill one another, and even try to eat one another alive. The industry takes note of these developments, but only in terms of their effect on profits.

Feather-pecking and cannibalism easily become serious vices among birds kept under intensive conditions. They mean lower productivity and lost profits.

—THE FARMING EXPRESS15

Any behavior among chickens that threatens profits is known in the trade as a vice, a term that truly gives me pause. Where is the virtue in keeping birds in these conditions?

Since the animals insist on behaving like the proud and sensitive creatures they are, and trying even under these bizarre conditions to express their natural urges, the experts who manage today’s factory farms have to respond. They have to do something, because if very many of the birds kill one another, money is lost, and that is the one thing they can’t let happen. They know that the birds’ berserk behavior arises out of the unnatural ways in which the birds are kept. So what do the factory managers do? Make the conditions even more unnatural, of course.

The preferred method in the industry today is to cut off part of the chickens’ beaks, a process known as de-beaking.¹⁶ This does nothing to reduce the conditions that drive the chickens so mad that they attack one another viciously. But it renders them incapable of doing much harm to company profits.

The people who run today’s poultry factories are not concerned that the process of cutting off part of the chickens’ beaks requires cutting through highly sensitive soft tissue, similar to the tender sensitive flesh under human fingernails, and causes the animals severe pain. Nor do they mind the fact that they are crippling the animals and cutting off the animals’ most important member. Today’s poultry producers are highly satisfied with de-beaking. Employed almost universally in the industry today,¹⁷ this practice helps the producers to keep the chickens alive under the stressful, inhumane, and overcrowded conditions that are the cause of the animals’ unnatural aggression and cannibalism in the first place.

Even from a strictly dollars-and-cents viewpoint, however, there are a few drawbacks to the procedure. As one farm publication noted:

Sometimes the irregular growth of beaks on a de-beaked bird makes it difficult or impossible to drink where a normal bird would have no trouble.18

The factory experts are not pleased with the tendency of ungrateful young de-beaked birds either to die of thirst because they are unable to drink from nipple-type watering devices or else to starve to death within inches of their food supply because they can’t manage to eat. Nor are they happy with the birds who survive but can’t gain weight according to schedule because they have trouble eating. This is not something they want to see, because chicken flesh is sold by the pound.

Not ones to be defeated by the deaths and disabilities of de-beaked birds, however, today’s producers have sought to counter such losses and increase profits through advertising. They simply tell the public that their chickens couldn’t be happier. One huge broiler producer, Paramount Chickens, has aired TV commercials in which a smiling Pearl Bailey (who probably doesn’t know the truth any more than most of us) reassures us that Paramount looks after their chickens “just like a mother hen.”¹⁹

This is a remarkable statement. How many mother hens have been known to cut the beaks off their babies and force them to live under conditions in which they cannot establish a social identity and so are driven berserk?

Enlightened?

You have probably heard the magnificent trumpeting of roosters at daybreak, the passionate, full-throated announcement that dawn has come. The sound with which they welcome the day testifies, not only to their proud and passionate spirits, but also to how sensitive chickens are to light. This is a fact that modern poultry men know and do not hesitate to exploit.

In the windowless warehouses we are asked to believe are chicken heavens, the artificial lighting is manipulated in the most unnatural ways to maximize profits and minimize costs. Broilers are often subjected to bright light 24 hours a day for the first two weeks. Then the lights may be dimmed slightly and go off and on every two hours.²⁰ At about six weeks of age, the animals have gone so completely crazy from all this that the lights must be turned off completely in an attempt to calm them down. But even then the absence of any outlet whatsoever for the birds’ natural energies and drives leads to a great deal of fighting, with the de-beaked birds pecking painfully at one another in the dark, often managing despite the mutilation of their beaks to kill one another. It’s at times like this that farm managers will sometimes reveal the depth of their compassion for the animals in their care.

It’s a damn shame when they kill each other. It means we wasted all the feed that went into the damn thing.

—HERBERT REED, POULTRY PRODUCER²¹

The lighting conditions for young layer hens (called pullets) are a little different from those provided for broilers, though not exactly what you’d call natural. These youngsters are kept in “grow-out” buildings that are usually kept completely dark except at feeding times.²² Then, when the young hens reach the age at which they can begin to lay eggs, everything suddenly changes. Having lived their entire lives in complete darkness, except at feeding times, the hens now find themselves subjected to harsh and continuous light.

At one farm, a period of 23 hours lighting a day has been tested.23

Agribusiness Lays an Egg

The folks who design what the industry tells us are chicken heavens are real virtuosos when it comes to manipulating the environment of the animals for maximum profit. When a layer hen’s production begins to slacken, the producers do not just sit back and let her output wane. Not when they have found it possible to bolster her egg production by a procedure known in the trade as force-moulting.²⁴ The already panicked and exhausted hen will suddenly find herself plunged into complete darkness. The artificial lighting, which heretofore had been on for upward of 17 hours a day, is now completely cut off, and at the same time her food and water are removed. After two days of starving without even water in the dark, the bird, still without food or light, is allowed water. Eventually lighting and food will be returned to what passes for normal. Those hens who survive this ingenious procedure will have been shocked into physiological processes associated, under natural conditions, with the seasonal loss of plumage and growth of fresh feathers. After the forced moulting, those hens who survive the ordeal may be sufficiently productive to be kept around for another two months. Then they join those who did not survive the procedure in the first place in our chicken soup.

Hopefully, the hen will have learned something from the days without food or water, because the farm managers certainly have. During her last 30 hours before slaughter she will again receive no food. A headline in Poultry Tribune reminded poultry producers: “Take Feed Away from Spent Hens.”²⁵ The trade journal brilliantly calculated that food given to hens during the last 30 hours of their lives doesn’t have time to turn into flesh. It stays in the digestive system and so, counsel the experts, is nothing but a waste of feed.

The Panic Button

Despite being treated consistently as machinery in today’s chicken factories, the chickens still stubbornly refuse to settle down and devote themselves single-mindedly to producing as many eggs as possible and growing as fat as they can, in the shortest possible length of time. Instead, they insist on thinking of themselves as animals, with drives and needs.

But today’s chickens are allowed no expression of their natural urges. They cannot walk around, scratch the ground, build a nest, or even stretch their wings. Every instinct is frustrated. The bizarre lighting manipulations allow these light-sensitive creatures no vestige of a natural sleep cycle. They cannot establish a pecking order, or any sense of social identity. They cannot keep out of one another’s way, and weaker birds have no escape from the stronger ones, already maddened by the grotesque conditions in which they live.

The result is that these passionate creatures live in a state of perpetual panic. They fly into an uproar at the slightest disturbance and show every sign of having been driven completely out of their minds. One naturalist noted:

The battery chickens I have observed seem to lose their minds about the time they would normally be weaned by their mothers and off in the weeds chasing grasshoppers on their own account. Yes, literally, the battery becomes a gallinaceous madhouse.26

Another reporter states:

The birds in the laying house are hysterical… Birds squawk, cackle and cluck as they scramble over one another for a peck at the automatically controlled grain trough or a drink of water. This is how the hens spend their short life of ceaseless production.27

Another account, this one from a scientist who has spent his whole life observing animal behavior, tells us that today’s chickens are prone to stampedes.

With no apparent cause, a wave of hysteria sweeps over the whole battery; wild, unnatural chirps, jumbled screams, and a fluttering as if every feather on every chicken had become possessed and frantic.28

In their panic, the birds will sometimes pile on top of one another and some will smother to death. Poultry producers are not by and large what you would call sentimental types, but since smothered birds represent a waste of feed, this is the type of thing that will definitely spur them into action. Not to be outsmarted, they have found the piling problem can be decreased by crowding the chickens so tightly into wire cages they can hardly move. This way, when they panic, they can’t pile on top of one another as readily.

The cages produce a few problems of their own, however, that make the calling of them chicken heavens even more deceitful: the caged hens still try to behave as if they were designed by Nature to live on the earth, instead of in wire cages. For instance, their toenails continue to grow. With no solid ground to wear the nails down, they become very long and can get permanently entangled in the wire. The ex-president of a national poultry organization wrote in the Poultry Tribune about the many times when, on removing a batch of hens from a cage,

we have discovered chickens literally grown fast to the cage. It seems the chickens’ toes got caught in the wire mesh in some manner and would not loosen. So, in time, the flesh of the toes grew completely around the wire. ²⁹

Needless to say, those birds who get stuck in the back of the cage, where they cannot reach food or water, starve to death.

Once again, however, the minds that created this whole situation have come up with an ingenious solution to prevent such a distressing waste of feed. The idea is simply to cut off the toes of the little chicks when they are a day or two of age.

In most cages, there is at least one poor bird who has undergone these grotesque conditions and has entirely lost the will to live. These sad creatures no longer resist being shoved aside, pushed underfoot, and trampled by the other birds. They are probably the birds who, in a natural flock, would be low on the pecking order. Although they would defer to the others and not have much status, they would nevertheless play a needed part in the life of the flock. They would mate, have chicks to care for, and live out their lives. In the cages, however, life is not very kind to the little guy. The results are pathetic.

These birds can do nothing but huddle in a corner of the cage, usually near the bottom of the sloping floor, where their fellow inmates trample over them as they try to get to the food or water trough. ³⁰

Space for Rent

I have met quite a few people who seem to think that chickens are vegetables. When someone says he or she is a vegetarian, these people reply with something like, “Yes, but you do eat chicken, don’t you?” I feel reasonably confident that most of today’s poultry producers know their stock well enough to realize that chickens aren’t vegetables. But they seem unable to grasp the fact that they are animals, and as such have profound territorial needs.

At the Hainsworth Farm in Mt. Morris, New York, naturalist Roy Bedichek found four and even five hens squeezed into cages 12 inches by 12 inches.³¹ Under these conditions, the birds are unable to lift a single wing. In fact, they are squeezed together so tightly that they have a great deal of difficulty even turning around in place. This is not seen by the factory managers as a bad thing, though. With their bodies in forced contact at all times on all sides with other chickens, they absorb heat from their fellow inmates, so this cuts down on heating costs.

The Hainsworth farm is an extreme example. But the industry norm isn’t much better. A surprisingly large percentage of the eggs eaten in Los Angeles come from the 345-acre “Egg City” in Moorpark, California.³² Here, some 2,200,000 eggs are laid daily by three million hens. The hens are housed five to each 16-by-18 cage.³³

To get a chicken’s-eye view of these conditions, picture yourself standing in a crowded elevator. The elevator is so crowded, in fact, that your body is in contact on all sides with other bodies. Even to turn around in place is difficult. And one more thing to keep in mind—this is your life. It is not just a temporary bother, until you get to your floor. This is permanent. Your only release will be at the hands of the executioner.

By the way, in your picture of the elevator, you may have imagined the other people trapped with you as doing the very best they can to hold still and not make things difficult for you. But what if all the others do not have the ability to understand what is happening? What if they react to the terror of it all with raw instinct, without even a trace of a civilized veneer? What if, like you, they have powerful territorial needs, and the utter frustration of the situation has driven them literally insane, prone to erupt into violence with or without provocation?

Now imagine further that the floor of the elevator is slanted sharply, so gravity tends to push you all in one direction. The ceiling is so short that you and the others can only stand upright toward one side, and the floor is made of a wire mesh that is terribly uncomfortable to everyone’s feet. And to complete this approximation of the living conditions in today’s factory farms, what if some of the others trapped with you in the elevator have, in their madness, become cannibalistic?

These are the conditions that the industry tells us are a chicken heaven.

This is the actual living situation of the chickens whose flesh and eggs Americans eat.

Breeding a “Better” Chicken

Chicken breeders have been hard at work developing a “better” chicken, which to their way of thinking is the heaviest possible one. (Remember, profit is per pound.) The result is a bird whose skeleton becomes, every year, less able to support his increasingly massive weight. The fleshy bodies of broilers today grow so fast that their bones and joints can’t keep pace. The trade journal Broiler Industry reports that the chickens raised for meat today can hardly stand under their weight, so they spend most of their time huddling “down on their haunches.”³⁴

Skeletal disorders are common. Many of these animals crouch or hobble about in pain on flawed feet and legs.35

Problems like these are not considered particularly noteworthy by the industry that tells us they take care of their chickens “just like a mother hen,” because lameness affects only the living animal, not the price to be had for his flesh. Animals can be sold for meat whether or not they are crippled.

The same breeders who brought us these grossly top-heavy birds are hard at work to accomplish other grotesque feats of genetic engineering. You may have thought, as I did, that God pretty much knew what He was doing when He designed animals. But the folks at the Animal Research Institute of Agriculture, Canada, have a better idea. The director of the institute, R. S. Gowe, enlightened me on the subject when he spoke at a conference in Ottawa in December 1978 on “Livestock Intensive Methods of Production.” Said Gowe, proudly:

At the Animal Research Institute, we are trying to breed animals without legs, and chickens without feathers.36

I must admit it took me a while to comprehend why anyone would want to breed a chicken without feathers. But I finally came to understand why at least six universities in the United States and Canada are presently trying to do so.³⁷ If only chickens didn’t have feathers, then the folks who care for them “just like a mother hen” would be spared the bother of plucking them out.

Flipped Out

There are many other ways, besides having feathers, that chickens make themselves difficult to their caretakers. Poultry Digest describes the growing problem of “flip-over syndrome.” This condition

is characterized by birds jumping into the air, sometimes emitting a loud squawk, and then falling over dead.38

Postmortem exams show the birds’ hearts are full of blood clots, but it is not known whether this is a result or a cause of their deaths. The problem of “flip-over syndrome” has the experts stymied. They don’t have any idea what makes the birds suddenly jump into the air and die. I don’t know, either, but I think it is probably safe to say that the birds are not jumping into the air because they cannot restrain a spontaneous upsurge of joy and delight.

The Fine Cuisine of Chicken Heaven

What do you think the lucky residents of today’s chicken heavens dine on before we dine on them? Researchers who wrote an article titled “Poultry Production” in Scientific American investigated contemporary chicken cuisine, and they were seriously concerned with its quality:

The modern fowl thrives on a diet almost totally foreign to any food it ever found in nature. Its feed is a product of the laboratory.39

A poultry man summarized the matter this way:

Virtually all chickens raised in the United States today are fed a diet laced with antibiotics from their first day to their last. Without antibiotics, the industry could not maintain the intensive farming practices. An awful lot of them die anyway, before we can get our profit out of them. Without antibiotics, why, we’d be back to the backward practices of yesteryear. ⁴⁰

Heaven forbid! Why, back then the chickens were deprived of a steady supply of sulfa drugs, hormones, antibiotics, and nitrofurans.⁴¹ And what on earth did the poor birds ever do without the arsenicals? Over 90 percent of today’s chickens are fed arsenic compounds.⁴²

I had assumed that the diet fed to chickens would be one chosen for its ability to keep the animals healthy. But such, I have found, is not the case. Broilers fetch a price according to their weight, not according to their health, so their diet is selected purely for its ability to maximize their weight as cheaply as possible. Similarly, the diet fed to layers is selected strictly for its ability to stimulate egg production at the lowest possible cost.

As a result, these are not the healthiest animals you could find. According to Poultry Digest, an increasing number of today’s chickens suffer from “caged layer fatigue.” These birds undergo the withdrawal of minerals from their bones and muscles and eventually are unable to stand.⁴³

Caged layer fatigue is actually only one of many health problems that flourish among modern chickens, whose diet is not designed with their health in mind. In the classic work on contemporary animal agriculture Animal Factories, Peter Singer and Jim Mason report:

Vitamin deficiencies common in poultry factories… result in a variety of conditions, including retarded growth, eye damage, blindness, lethargy, kidney damage, disturbed sexual development, bone and muscle weakness, brain damage, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, and deformed beaks and joints. Dietary deficiencies and other factory conditions can cause a variety of bodily deformities. In poultry, fragile bones, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs, and swollen joints are among the symptoms of mineral deficient diets … Some poultry diseases can leave birds with malformed backbones, twisted necks, and inflamed joints.44

These poor animals are riddled with disease. In fact, due to the danger of humans’ contracting diseases from chickens, the Bureau of Labor has listed the poultry-processing industry as one of the most hazardous of all occupations.⁴⁵

Many of the health problems that occur regularly to these sad creatures were unknown only a few years ago. It is common today for caged birds to lose their feathers. It isn’t known whether this is from rubbing constantly against the wire, from feather-pecking by other birds, or because of the totally unnatural diet and lack of sunlight. But whatever the cause, the result is that without their feathers the chickens’ skin begins to rub directly against the wire.⁴⁶ When I first saw these birds I was startled by the sight and didn’t even recognize they were chickens. Their skin is raw and sore and bright red. They look more like a walking wound than a bird.

It is hard to underestimate the health of today’s chickens. Driven to a state of hysteria, their raw skin rubbing constantly against the wire cages in which they are packed like living sardines, a staggering percentage of these animals contract cancer. A government report found that over 90 percent of the chickens from most of the flocks in the country are infected with chicken cancer (leukosis)!⁴⁷

You and I may wonder at the level of health in food produced by a system that so totally disregards the health and well-being of its animals. But today’s poultry producers are rarely hampered by such considerations. They are a dedicated group, with a steadfast single-mindedness of purpose. Only their purpose is not, as you might have thought, to produce healthy food. As Fred C. Haley, president of a 225,000-hen Georgia poultry firm put it:

The object of producing eggs is to make money. When we forget this objective, we have forgotten what it is all about.48

The money Mr. Haley is talking about is not made by the farmer who spends his day with the animals. It is made by agribusiness oligopolies. The actual chicken farmer amounts to a mere hired hand who virtually works for the huge “integrated chicken processors” and “amalgamated poultry producers.” He is the one in daily contact with the birds; he is the one who sees and lives with the animals; and he may very well have feelings about what is being done to them. But if he protests, well, he can always be replaced by someone better suited to the job. He is not the one who has devised the production strategies that prevail in the industry today, and though he may have to implement them, he is not the one who profits by them. A study by the director of the Agribusiness Accountability Project, Jim Hightower, showed that in 1974, when chicken prices were running 80 to 90 cents a pound in the supermarket, the chicken farmers themselves were getting just two cents a pound.⁴⁹ Of course, the corporate managers who are making the money love to portray themselves in the public eye as old-fashioned farmers. In one case, a number of the top executives of one of the international cartels that control the nation’s poultry production testified before Congress dressed in overalls.

An Assembly-Line Chicken in Every Pot

We are a nation with an assembly-line chicken in every pot. We do not know that we eat the bodies and eggs of tortured creatures. We do not know they have been inoculated, dosed with hormones and antibiotics, and injected with dyes so that their meat and yolks will appear to be a “healthy-looking” yellow. How far out of touch we have become, not only with animals but with our own taste buds, to be susceptible to being so deceived.

Some people are beginning to suspect, however, that today’s poultry products aren’t what they should be. The comedian George Burns spoke of the first time he ate scrambled eggs without ketchup.

I never knew they tasted like that. They tasted like the chicken wasn’t getting paid.

Needless to say, with money at stake, the industry isn’t taking the matter of tasteless chicken lying down. The trade journal Broiler Industry has come up with an idea they think will remedy the situation. It is an idea that exemplifies their whole approach to food production.

We’ve been accused of selling a chicken with less flavor than the “old-time” chicken… Attempts are being made at overcoming the flavor problem by injection.50

That should take care of everything!

In another issue, Broiler Industry saliently proposes:

It should be possible to uncover a material, or materials, that could impart that “old-fashioned flavor” to chickens.51

And if that doesn’t do the trick, don’t think for a moment that the agribusiness experts are going to admit defeat. In spite of the universal use of ever more chemicals and drugs in egg production today, one industry leader tersely advises a marketing strategy designed to take care of the problem once and for all. His suggestion?

Slant egg carton copy along this line: “Eggs are a health food. A natural human food. No additives, no preservatives.”52

I find the latest developments in poultry production truly disturbing. The huge multinational conglomerates, and those who must compete with them or be forced out of business, in their utter disregard for the suffering of innocent animals, have lost touch with something very basic.

Today’s egg and poultry consumers know nothing of this. We have been deliberately kept in the dark about what modern poultry production has become and have no idea of the relentless and systematic misery in which the chickens live. Every day people eat the flesh and eggs of these poor creatures, utterly unaware of what they have suffered.

What are the consequences of eating the products of such a system? Could it be that when we consume the flesh and eggs of these poor animals, something of the sickness, misery, and terror of their lives enters us? Could it be that when we take their flesh or eggs into our bodies, we take in as well something of the kind of life they have been forced to endure? Instinctively, I can’t help but believe this is so.

In Search of the Natural Bird

You may wonder whether you’d be better off eating turkey. Sorry, but the methods applied to the factory production of poultry and eggs are also applied today to other birds, such as turkeys, geese, and ducks.⁵³ These birds are treated with equal disdain for their natural urges and needs, and equal fixation on using them for profit. Turkeys are de-beaked, stuffed into wire cages, and fed the same sort of unnatural diet as chickens, complete with chemicals, drugs, and antibiotics.⁵⁴

There are, however, alternatives. One is to consume only free-range, organic, or natural poultry products. Natural food stores often carry items so labeled, but you have to be awfully careful. Words like “organic” and “natural” and “free range” mean different things to different people, and much money has been made by people lying about such terms. The USDA has regulations governing the use of the word “natural,” but these regulations are so loose that virtually anything can be so labeled. There are no restrictions at all on the use of antibiotics or on the housing conditions the animals must endure.

Some health food store owners are more scrupulous than others, but even the best of them may not know all the facts. Many in California carry “Happy Hen Ranch Fresh Eggs,” which come in a carton with a picture of a cheerful hen in the midst of luxurious fields. However, I’ve seen the socalled happy hens of the Happy Hen Ranch (near San Jose, California), and they do not look very happy to me. They do not live in the spacious fields depicted on the egg carton. They are kept in cages.

In 1986, East-West published a conscientious report titled “In Search of the Natural Chicken.” Their research found that almost all the poultry products currently sold in the United States as “natural” or “organic” come, unfortunately, from chickens whose living conditions are hardly better than the industry norm. Summarizing the investigation, the author noted, none too encouragingly:

Some eggs sold as “fertile, laid by free-range hens” are produced by hens that actually are kept in barns in a space no greater than those kept in cages…(With only two exceptions) no sellers of natural poultry products that we contacted suggested that their chickens enjoyed anything resembling a free-range existence.55

The best bet, if you really want to eat poultry products, is to raise them yourself or buy them from someone you know personally. A distant second would be to buy them from a natural food store, but you had better be willing to make a nuisance of yourself with lots of uncomfortable questions. The people who run the store should know the details of how the chickens whose eggs and flesh they sell have been raised and fed. If they don’t know, or if their answers are vague or evasive, then, unfortunately, the truth is likely not what you would wish it to be.

The Farm Animals Concern Trust (FACT) has established humane standards for keeping layer hens without cages. Farms complying with these standards are given use of the FACT trademark—NEST EGGS®. Though this is not yet widely available, if you buy eggs bearing this trademark, you can be sure you are not partaking of, or contributing to, the conditions described in this chapter.

An alternative many informed people are taking is to stop eating poultry products altogether. If you wonder whether you could satisfy your protein and other nutritional needs if you did not partake of the products of chicken factories, the answer, as chapters 6 through 10 will show, is an emphatic yes. The most rigorous scientific research has determined that these foods are far from the ultimate nutritional cornerstones the industry would like us to believe. In fact, they contribute mightily to the ravages of heart disease, cancer, strokes, and many other serious diseases.

I have too much respect for the human journey to take it upon myself to decide for you what you should or shouldn’t eat, and where you should draw the line. We are each unique. We have different needs, different emotional associations to different foods, and different biochemistry. We have our individual life situations to deal with, and our individual paths to forge. We are each of us responsible for our own choices and for the consequences of our choices. However, the better informed we are, the more intelligently we are able to make food choices that serve our true needs.

Now What?

The poultry producers consider themselves innocent of any wrongdoing. They say they do what they do to bring down the price we pay for our eggs and poultry. To that end, they claim they are simply people committed to a well-defined sense of purpose, which is to raise broilers for the slaughterhouse and layer hens for eggs by the most cost-effective means possible. That this should happen to involve the brutalization of billions of innocent animals is, as far as they are concerned, irrelevant.

The agribusiness companies have their eyes firmly set on the bottom line. But they cannot see there is yet a deeper bottom line. Although they cannot see the more far-reaching consequences of their actions, these consequences nonetheless exist. None of us is immune from the repercussions of our actions and choices. As we sow, so shall we reap.

There is a destiny that makes us brothers,

None goes his way alone–

All that we send into the lives of others

Comes back into our own.

—AUTHOR UNKNOWN

I don’t know what shall be the destinies of those responsible for the animal factories of today. But regardless of the future, it is already sadly true that they live in a heartless world. Treating animals like machines, they are profoundly separated from nature, deeply alienated from kinship with life. They are already in a kind of hell.

If we buy and eat the products of this system of food production, are we not colluding with them in creating this hell? Is that how we want to vote with our lives?