Killing chickens
Chickens, originally descended from Asian red junglefowl, are the most farmed animals in the world. Picture: Unsplash.
I sit in hen rescuer Mary Barton’s garden, a dish of grapes in my hand. Within seconds, the ‘girls’ run out from beneath the trees, puffed up and clucking enthusiastically for their favourite snack. Once the grapes run out, they change purpose - and the full extent of their curious minds begins to show. They peck at everything; testing for taste and texture. My rucksack is an object of particular interest. Four hens scratch at it tentatively, leaving pale claw marks along the fabric. I stroke one hen along her back, but she dips courteously away, as if to say, ‘this is not something I’m used to.’ The rest of them tut gently around me.
This summer, chickens have been hitting the headlines. In June, campaign group Open Cages released the results of undercover investigations into three Lincolnshire factory farms supplying well known supermarkets. Footage showed dirty, injured birds, crammed into huge sheds; unable to eat or drink, panting from heat and stress. In August, animal rights organisation Animal Justice Project uncovered equally disturbing scenes at the euphemistically named Sunny Farm, an ‘enriched’ colony cage egg farm - similar to the ones Barton’s hens have been rescued from - run by East Anglia's Bird Bros. “Hens were left trapped and dying in the cage mesh, gasping for air, being trampled on by other hens,” says the group. “We filmed dead hens left in cages to decompose, some so rotten and mangled that they were stuck to the cage mesh.”
Meanwhile, in the US, former law professor and founder of Direct Action Everywhere - or DxE - Wayne Hsiung is about to go on trial for rescuing birds from a farm in Sonoma County, California, in 2018. [1] “We walked into Sunrise Farms and found tens of thousands of birds, in cages; exactly the cages that [California state] had supposedly banned,” says Hsiung, in a video. “So we’re going to trial on September 8th, for exposing this abuse and for rescuing birds. But I don’t regret it one bit. The reality here is, we’re not the ones breaking the law. The industry is breaking the law. We’re here to make the law, to vindicate the idea and the legal right that every living being on this earth deserves to be treated like a living being.” [2]
Over 100 activists from Direct Action Everywhere and Liberation T.O. join forces on August 19, 2019, to block traffic and shut down Maple Leaf Foods’ processing plant in Toronto, Canada. Picture: We Animals Media.
Hsiung’s trial raises - once again - what has become one of the key moral questions of our time: why do we treat the animals we eat so badly? Often sidelined for the more obviously charismatic animals locked into animal agriculture - cows, pigs, etc - chickens, once descended from Asian red junglefowl, have the dubious honour of being the most farmed animal in the world; the appetite for their small bodies driven by their classification as, variously, ‘cheap’, ‘healthy’, ‘lean’ [3]. Every year, 50 billion birds are slaughtered, a figure that excludes unwanted male chicks, unproductive hens and other casualties along the way. [4] In the EU alone, around 20 million chickens a year are dead before they even get to the slaughterhouse [7].
In the US, chickens represent 95 percent of all land animals killed for food in the country [5]. The vast majority live and die in factory farms, an egregious method of food production strengthening its grip across the world. Factory farms are sweaty, poisonous places, with no natural light and floors thick with droppings; tens of thousands of birds in each unit. By the standards of Red Tractor, a UK assurance scheme widely recognised as a very minimal improvement on the norm, chickens are allowed the space of just over a single A4 piece of paper each [6].
Alongside terrible conditions, the birds regularly face brutal mistreatment. “From day one, I learned that these animals are carelessly run over by forklifts every time they're transported to the slaughterhouse,” says Open Cages investigator ‘Tom’, who posed as a farm worker. “I saw the bodies … the tyre marks … and the blood. I found most of the birds had been crushed to death under the wheels, dying from their injuries.” Animal Justice Project filmed one chicken being ‘necked’ by a farm worker with his bare hands. “She was seen still trying to lift her head after having her neck wrung, likely still alive and suffering. This worker was also filmed viciously hitting hens with a shovel,” wrote the group.
In Barton’s gardens, the hens nest under foliage, content and quiet, and I think about the birds in those farms: enduring violence, pain and death; their love for roosting on branches, their curiosity about rucksacks, their penchant for sweet grapes, everything denied. Occasionally, in the footage from the farms, you see a chicken shake herself down, in an attempt to re-arrange sparse feathers over her bare body; as if, after the shake, she will find herself in a different place altogether, one with grass, light and air. One that makes sense. Instead, for the entirety of their short lives, the chickens wander, dazed and sick; their eyes, respiratory systems and legs scorched by the ammonia from their own droppings.
Bodies of chickens after being run over. Picture: Open Cages.
And those lives are so very short: intensively farmed chickens - or “Frankenchickens”, as activists have come to call them - are bred to grow 400 times more quickly than natural, reaching slaughter weight in just 12 weeks (a fraction of the five to seven years chickens could live, if healthy). The speed puts so much pressure on their bodies that many can no longer walk by the time they’re killed. By any stretch of the imagination, we are feeding ourselves on deformed juveniles. Their ends are no easier: hung by their feet on shackles whilst conscious before being dipped, head first, into electrified water baths to stun them. Then, throats are cut. Birds struggling to ‘right’ themselves, to get away, may raise their heads and miss the water, which means they’re fully conscious when their throats are slit. [8]
Knowing this should make the Sunday roast harder to swallow. Even resolutely carnivorous chef Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall has spoken out. In 2008, he filmed Hugh’s Chicken Run, a Channel 4 series, specifically to address what he’d seen on factory farms. “I’ve seen and smelled what it’s like when you cram thousands of desperate birds into a shed. It’s something I never want to experience again,” he wrote in a recent article for The Guardian [ 9]. “Many people, including people who regularly bought factory farmed chickens for dinner, broke down in tears when I showed them in person how these birds really lived – how a billion British birds still live every year.” Fearnley Whittingstall hoped that ‘beaming footage of these abused chickens into people’s living rooms might make them think twice about their dinner, and shop differently forever.’
Clearly, it didn’t. Chicken is still one of the most popular foods on any menu.
Each group has a different call to action. Animal Justice Project is demanding that Lidl, one of the supermarkets supplied by Bird Bros, break relations with the farm. Open Cages is asking that brands sign up to the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC), a certification which should allow slower growing breeds - that is key - more space and access to more humane slaughter [10]. “The suffering that farmed animals face is usually systemic, rather than related to a specific supplier or farm,” reflects founder Connor Jackson. “This is why we're asking retailers to sign the BCC and adopt better standards across their entire supply chain so that all the farms that supply them will have to raise standards.” Hsiung goes further, agitating for what he now sees as the most effective way to challenge the way we see animals in animal agriculture and beyond: open rescue.
Patty Mark. Picture credit: We Animals.
He stands on the shoulders of giants. Founder of Animal Liberation Victoria Patty Mark first encountered footage from inside a battery cage unit in the early 1990s. “Hens would somehow get out of their cages then fall down into this pit, where there was no food and water, and they would slowly starve to death,” she said in an interview with The Unbound Project [11]. “There in front of me, clear and painfully sharp, were dead and dying hens sinking in their own feces; hens with their combs drooped over their eyes unable to hold their heads up, waiting to die; piles of dead birds sinking into a liquid slush of feces where a water source from above had been leaking. They had obviously tried very hard to get a drink. It was beyond heartbreaking, it was beyond unjust.”
Mark went on to pioneer the concept of open rescue, in which activists openly remove animals from factory farms, because “I had an overwhelming gut reaction to go there myself, to hold them, help them, give them some water,” she explained. Since the 1990s, when Mark started taking animals from factory farms, other groups taken action, including Compassion Over Killing, Animal Protection and Rescue League, Mercy for Animals and Compassionate Action for Animals; scooping sickly animals out of the hellholes created for the food system. Last year, activists from UK right groups Animal Rising snatched beagles from a facility that breeds pups for scientific experiments. The movement has become so significant that, this month, the National Geographic published an article on it [12].
Open rescue in the 2020s has a potential that Mark could only have dreamt about in the 1990s. Social media can now broadcast images from both the rescue and the reality of what the animals endure across the world in minutes, as well as heart-lifting stories of rehabilitation, of love, of safety and care. The transparency of open rescue - the sense that, “by standing strongly right there with these animals, we are openly acknowledging for all to see that what is happening to them is wrong and needs to stop” - resonates strongly with Hsiung.
Even removing just one animal from harm has impact, he argues. “The reason is threefold,” he writes [13]. “The first is that stories are crucial to garnering attention, and the rescue of a single animal — when done effectively — is among the most powerful stories in animal rights. The second is that open rescue has the power to embed the animal rights story into our institutions - despite enormous obstacles that usually prevent this sort of embedding from happening. And the third and most important reason is that open rescue has the power to mobilize a movement because it embraces both anger and hope - the two crucial emotions that have fueled movements through history.”
Anger is familiar to Co Op members who saw the results of Open Cages’ investigations. Jointly owned by millions of individuals and independent co-operative societies, the supermarket is one of several supplied by the Lincolnshire units. In May, a hefty 96 per cent of membership voted for the chain to “improve welfare standards for chickens and request the board to consider adopting the Better Chicken Commitment in full” - to which the store partially agreed. The footage must have been a kick in the teeth. ‘Seeing the bins overflowing with dead chickens, looking at the birds’ twisted legs and bleary eyes – it makes me ashamed to be a member [of the Co Op],” Aaron Browning said bitterly. [14]
The store’s response was predicably formal: “Ensuring the animals in our supply chain are looked after is a priority for us, and all our fresh chicken meets or exceeds Red Tractor or RSPCA Assured standards, supported by our new commitment, to improve and lower stocking density to give the chickens 20% more space and a healthier life.” Red Tractor’s statement was more chilling, offering that it “does not believe there is cause for concern or a re-audit of the farm is required.” [14] In the online version of the article, just above these words, sits an image from Open Cages - of a wheelie bin filled with distorted, lifeless birds; their white feathers soiled with dirt and blood. No cause for concern, apparently.
One of Mary Barton’s hens. Picture: Bel Jacobs
Back in Mary’s garden, a hen climbs into my lap and pecks at my glasses. I can’t tell who she is. Sky, Polly, Gloria, Bella, Paula and Yolanda? Or Willow, Barbara, Maggie (the monster), Broccoli, Noisy Parsnip, Chicory - or ageing matriarch Goldie? In a field nearby, a pheasant clacks. The hens stop, heads cocked, before continuing to meander across the lawn. I want to gather them up, like big pouffy flowers. By some awful coincidence, later that week, I walk past white polystyrene boxes in the Poultry Market in London’s Smithfield and see inside them other hens, only headless and plucked, arranged in rows. It can’t go on - and it won’t. Tides are turning, says Hsiung. “Animal liberation is guaranteed within a generation,” he reflects, in an upcoming episode for a new podcast series by Animal Rising. “This is a hard headed scientific prediction.”
What’s at stake, argues Hsiung (and DxE and Animal Rising and almost every group fighting for animal rights today, even if it’s not overt in the messaging) is greater, even, than the terrible lives and deaths of billions of animals. “There’s nothing on this planet that creates more ugliness than factory farms,” says Hsiung, who has since left DxE to head a new movement called The Simple Heart Initiative. “Factory farms are responsible for turning some of the most beautiful creatures in this planet’s history into living zombies.
“But it’s not just animals who are being turned into something ugly; we are, too,” he continues. “Factory farms encourage us to become hateful and cruel. That’s why I’m going to court on September 8th. We need to recognise that we were not meant to torture these living creatures. We were meant to protect them, to rescue them. This is the moral stress test. How does society treat the least powerful among us?” [15]
The more one considers animal rights, the more one could consider them a battle for some attempt at ethical consistency. Many of those who profess to love animals also appear to love them on a plate. Hsiung would find an unlikely ally in Fearnley Whittingstall: “It may take another 15 years to make the BCC welfare improvements fully mainstream in the UK,” wrote the chef. “But if supermarkets see the light and throw their weight behind welfare reforms now, it could take a fraction of that time. Until we get there, the treatment of our farmed animals will remain a blot on our farming culture, and our collective moral conscience.”
References
[1] McWilliams, James. How chicken activists in California broke the law to start a reasonable debate about animal cruelty. Pacific Standard, June 18, 2018. https://psmag.com/environment/why-did-the-chicken-activists-cross-the-road-to-start-a-debate-about-animal-cruelty
[2] Hsiung, Wayne. Restoring beauty in the world begins with fighting factory farms. August 30, 2023. https://youtu.be/_M9X3Xds52k?si=rEOxRdmYcOymUpp7
[3] Welfare of Meat Chickens. RSPCA, October 2022. https://www.rspca.org.uk/documents/1494939/7712578/FAD-Meat-Chickens-Information-Sheet-2022.pdf/78c5de7e-a4e0-90cf-f75a-22e27baa81af?t=1673621417579#:~:text=Meat%20chickens%20(also%20known%20as,the%20exception%20of%20farmed%20fish).
[4] Crow, Russell. How Many Chickens are Eaten in a Day (Almost 200 million). Chickens and Chicks Info, Aug 23, 2022. https://chickenandchicksinfo.com/how-many-chickens-are-eaten-a-day/
[5] The Difficult Lives and Deaths of Factory Farmed Chickens. https://www.britannica.com/explore/savingearth/the-difficult-lives-and-deaths-of-factory-farmed-chickens
[6] What is a Battery Hen? RSPCA Assured. https://www.rspcaassured.org.uk/farm-animal-welfare/egg-laying-hens/what-is-a-battery-hen/
[7] Kevany, Sophie. More than 20 million farm animals die on way to abattoir in US every year. The Guardian, June 15, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/15/more-than-20-million-farm-animals-die-on-way-to-abattoir-in-us-every-year
[8] Chickens Farmed for Meat, Compassion in World Farming https://www.ciwf.org.uk/farm-animals/chickens/meat-chickens/
[9] Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh. I’ve campaigned for decades against the horrific lives factory-farmed chickens lead – but now there’s hope. The Guardian, May 19, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/19/factory-farmed-chickens-horror-supermarkets
[10] Better Chicken Commitment, https://betterchicken.org.uk/better-chicken-commitment/
[11] Cronin, Keri. Fierce and Fearless: Patty Mark’s Unique Approach to Animal Liberation. The Unbound Project, Oct 3, 2016. https://unboundproject.org/patty-mark/
[12] Fobar, Rachel. Activists call it rescue. Farms call it stealing. What is Open Rescue? National Geographic, August 7, 2023. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/activists-call-it-rescue-farms-call-it-stealing-what-is-open-rescue?loggedin=true&rnd=1692112416300
[15] Hsiung, Wayne. How Saving One Hen Can Save Billions. Simple Heart, August 18, 2023. https://blog.simpleheart.org/p/how-saving-one-hen-can-save-billions?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
[14] Speare-Cole, Rebecca. Co-op under fire as footage shows ‘sick and suffering’ chickens at supply farms. The Independent, August 7, 2023. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/co-op-video-chicken-supply-farms-b2389097.html
[15] Hsiung, Wayne. How Saving One Hen Can Save Billions. Simple Heart, August 18, 2023. https://blog.simpleheart.org/p/how-saving-one-hen-can-save-billions?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
