From Animal Place

An eyewitness account of how hens are killed on many California egg farms. The account below is from a rescue we did in 2013. The photo to the left is from a rescue we did in 2012 – the metal canisters are gas chambers. During that rescue, they failed and workers used garbage bins instead to funnel gas in. Farms in other states often transport “spent laying” hens to slaughterhouses where their fractured bodies are dis-assembled and sold for human and nonhuman consumption.

The hen in my arms is downy white and soft. Her eyes are wide with fear and confusion. Despite soft coos of reassurance, I cannot calm her. She does not know I am here to help, that she will no longer be a prisoner in a wire tomb. Carefully, I hand her off to a volunteer who deposits her gently into an awaiting transport carrier. What greets her at the end of this trip is something she has never experienced – freedom. Sunlight. Grass beneath her toes. A nest. Perches. Dust-baths. Life, enriched and varied and beautiful.

A large commotion distracts me. Hens squawking and screaming. We knew that while we carefully rescued 2,000 hens, another 48,000 were being killed. I could have avoided watching. I could have focused on the birds we could save. I witnessed the gassing anyways.

A few sheds down is where the gassing happens. Workers wrench birds violently from cages. These hens experience freedom too, a brief, horrific tilting and twisting and tossing freedom that ends as they are callously slammed into a large garbage bin. Yes, a garbage bin. It’s not even a metaphor for how hens are viewed by consumers and the egg industry! It’s a simple reality – when the bodies of hens can no longer handle pumping out four times more eggs than their bodies should, they are literally trashed.

Around 50 hens are shoved into each garbage bin, the birds on the bottom slowly suffocating. Carbon dioxide is funneled in through a hole crudely cut in the cover. It is important to know that chickens do not rely on lungs to breathe. They rely on sensitive air sacs. Chickens become quite irritated when inhaling gas – it is not a kind process. It is terrifying and painful to be crushed to death while your only means of breathing diminishes to nothing.

This is not an accurate process. I saw several hens pop up alive and groggy from the dead pile. Insufficiently gassed but woozy, the birds stumbled across the corpses of their flock-mates. These birds were not re-gassed. No. When a hen survived the gassing, a worker would snap her neck.

And when it was all said and done, the hens bodies were dumped onto a year’s worth of chicken feces and then trucked to a landfill. All for eggs.

Gassed and trashed.

-Marji Beach, Education Director at Animal Place

For more on this story go to: http://www.henrescuers.org/gassed-and-trashed.html