6) Cruel and Unhygienic "Depopulation"
Unlike meat chickens that are hung upside-down and eviscerated at slaughterhouses, laying hens, which do not usually provide meat, are too cheap to spend money killing. Undercover video shows laying hens twirled by the neck, tossed into garbage cans where they suffocate, kicked into manure pits to drown and put into kill carts workers push through to be gassed, when they're lucky. As many as 30,000 unwanted hens were fed live into a wood chipper at Ward Egg Ranch in San Diego County, CA i n 2003. And fires, like one at the DeCoster-tied Ohio Fresh Eggs operation in Harpster in March that killed 250,000 hens are frequently allowed to consume the hens.
7) Killing Zones Called Hatcheries
Even when laying hens are "free range" and not confined in battery cages, the egg industry is predicated on the death at birth of half of the chicks. Since male chicks are of no use to the egg industry, newly born males are ground up alive at hatcheries. Video at Hy-Line in Spencer, Iowa clearly shows healthy male chicks peeping and bouncing as they are fed live into rotating blades like so much litter, coming out a bloody slush used for dog food. "If someone has a need for 200 million male chicks, we're happy to provide them to anyone who wants them," says UEP spokesman Mitch Head. "But we can find no market, no need."
8) Blight on Workers, Neighbors and the Environment
When Labor Secretary Robert Reich viewed a DeCoster egg factory in the '90s he said, "The conditions in this migrant farm site are as dangerous and oppressive as any sweatshop we have seen.'' Federal investigators found DeCoster workers living in rat and cockroach-infested housing with unsanitary drinking water, their children often pressed into work. In addition to abuse of migrant workers, egg operations have been sued by neighbors for their odors, black flies and environmental pollution. One grandfather who lives near Ohio Fresh Eggs says he has to hold a fly swatter when his grandchildren visit. Inside the house!
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