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?