Chicken producers are misleading consumers with misinformation.

On June 13, the animal advocacy organization Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) rescued and reported their removal of nineteen chickens from trucks delivering the 6-week-old birds to a slaughterhouse in Sonoma County owned by Petaluma Poultry, a subsidiary of Perdue Farms. Petaluma Poultry markets its chickens as “free-range” and “organic” under brand names like Rocky and Rosie.

A report covering several investigations of Petaluma Poultry published by DxE on the same day shows scenes of sick, crippled, dying, and dead chickens living in filth and being subjected to extreme acts of cruelty by workers. The report includes veterinary diagnoses of Petaluma Poultry chickens from several locations infected with zoonotic bacteria (transmissible to humans) in their blood and body parts.

Petaluma Poultry is not an isolated case in an otherwise truthful industry targeting customers willing and able to pay high prices for “humanely-raised” chickens as opposed to “factory-farmed” birds.

Los Angeles-based Jidori Chicken provides yet another example of misleadingly marketed chickens “raised free range, humanely, at small farms in California.” From 2020 to 2022, slaughterhouse investigators for Slaughter-Free Network documented what they described as some of the worst animal abuse and filthy conditions we’ve ever seen,” in what surely must violate California’s sanitary and animal cruelty statutes.

U.S. egg producers, like poultry meat producers, have similarly been shown by investigators to misrepresent how the hens—whose high-priced eggs they market as humane, free-range, and organic—are housed and treated.

An example is Nellie’s Free Range Eggs. Owned by the New Hampshire-based company Pete and Gerry’s Organics, Nellie’s Eggs, which can cost up to $8 a dozen, are labeled “Certified Humane.” In 2019, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals filed a lawsuit alleging that Nellie’s Eggs falsely depicts hens ranging on open pastures and being cuddled by children, when in fact, Nellie’s hens are crammed inside long confinement sheds each holding 20,000 hens with little more than a square foot of living space.

In 2009, I became involved with a farm called Black Eagle, which portrayed itself as “the largest organic, free-range, egg producer in the state of Virginia.” The farm president said the hens had “places to roost inside, exposure to natural light and air, and access to the outside with an average of five feet of space per bird within a fenced yard.”

Meanwhile, that same year, documents obtained by an attorney in the course of investigating a complaint about malnourished dogs at Black Eagle Farm revealed an absentee owner, unpaid bills, and malnourished pigs and sheep. Unexpectedly, a veterinarian from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services discovered a building with 25,000 hens described in her report as “thin to emaciated,” with many dead and dying birds on the floor. Farm personnel told her the hens had been unfed for seven days in November, five days in December, and for two straight weeks earlier in the year.

Lest it is thought that the conditions I’m describing are rare or are no longer practiced by the majority of alternative egg producers, I must point out that, while some businesses may treat their hens better, investigations of alternative poultry and egg farms typically reveal practices and attitudes that do not meet consumer expectations—expectations that are cultivated not only by the companies and retailers they do business with but also by animal welfarists who employ “humane” farming language that glosses over the facts with nebulous assertions and omissions. Omissions include but are not limited to, showing hens foraging in a field while never showing them being grabbed upside down by their legs and thrown into gas-killing carts or transport crates. More often than not, the difference between “humane” farms and factory farms is moot.

In part, the deception arises from the popular notion that free-range, cage-free, and organic farming is essentially a collection of small, local enterprises, distinct from industrialized operations like, say, Tyson Foods and Perdue Farms in the meat industry, or Cal-Maine and Rose Acres in the egg industry.

But as a 2019 report on the organic food industry in the Washington Post explains, contrary to the pristine image of organic egg production, “many conventional egg producers have organic subsidiaries that operate on a vast scale, 100,000 laying hens housed in a huge building, their federally mandated access to outdoor space winkingly fulfilled by screened porches.”

The fact is that constricting and diminishing the life of animals is built into raising them for food. Their own food is chosen; their social, familial, and physical environment is controlled; their reproductive organs and activities are manipulated; and how long they live is determined by humans. They can be abused and killed at will based on economic “necessity.” An example in poultry and egg production is the routine culling—removal from the flock for killing—of birds who are not gaining weight fast enough or laying enough eggs. Whatever compassion a person may initially feel for birds slated for commercialization, once they become a business, the business mentality takes over.

The business mentality prioritizes a commitment to soothing rhetoric over harsh reality, shielding the customer from the practical facts of animal farming with palliative platitudes and pretenses. All agribusiness companies claim “high animal welfare standards.” But at best, it is only by comparison with the worst conditions and practices of industrialized animal farming that any commercial animal farm can claim to be “humane.”

[Author’s note: For a closer look at the issues presented in this article by a range of contributors, see the new book The Humane Hoax: Essays Exposing the Myth of Happy Meat, Humane Dairy, and Ethical Eggs, edited by Hope Bohanec and published in 2023 by Lantern Publishing and Media.]

Veterinarians have an opportunity to uphold medical ethics—and give the nation’s factory-farmed animals a small bit of mercy when they are killed.

The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) is holding its annual convention in Philadelphia starting on July 29. This is an opportunity for the group to formulate a policy statement opposing a method of killing farmed animals that epitomizes the inhumane treatment of millions of birds on factory farms. The method, known as “ventilation shutdown plus (VSD+),” has become the main practice employed by the poultry and egg industries to address avian influenza outbreaks among chronically stressed and disease-prone birds.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

This method “requires farmers to cut off airflow and heat their barns to 104 degrees Fahrenheit until the animals die from heatstroke,” states an article in Sentient Media. The “plus” means that, in addition to shutting down the ventilation system during VSD+, the barns are also exposed to extreme heat, humidity, and carbon dioxide (CO2) to suffocate the animals and bake them alive.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza is a recurring phenomenon in the poultry and egg industries. The current outbreak in the U.S., which began in February, has antecedents in 2015, 2006, and 2003. Low pathogenic avian flu outbreaks in chicken and turkey flocks are routine events involving the mass culling of millions of birds.

On July 21, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service reported that since February, 40 million birds from 391 flocks in 37 states have had the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus. Taxpayers fund the killing of these infected birds through USDA indemnity programs like the Commodity Credit Corporation.

Understandably, most people do not envision the slaughter of thousands of birds dying together in a single facility from suffocation and heat stroke. The occasional glimpse of a truckload of dead chickens on their way to burial or a rendering plant seldom registers unless we are poultry workers, animal advocates, or investigators at an affected farm site.

This year, two separate investigations exposed the gruesome process of VSD+ and its effect on individual birds subjected to the method.

In April, the animal advocacy group Direct Action Everywhere released an investigative video showing the killing of 5 million caged hens by ventilation shutdown at Rembrandt Farms in Iowa following an outbreak of avian influenza there. Investigators found hens “being literally roasted alive—still in their cages, running loose in the facility’s industrial sheds, even buried alive.”

Also in April, the advocacy group Animal Outlook released a video based on 10 hours of footage taken by researchers at North Carolina State University of a 2016 experiment funded by the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association to study the effects of VSD+ on chickens. The footage shows hens enclosed individually in ventilation shutdown boxes with windows to observe each hen as she died. Animal Outlook attorney, Will Lowrey, who obtained the footage through public records requests, said the suffering of the hens in the boxes was “extremely profound,” according to an article in the Intercept.

These revelations have swelled the number of veterinarians and animal welfare groups urging the AVMA to stop condoning ventilation shutdown, in keeping with the Veterinarian’s Oath from AVMA’s website, to protect animal health and welfare, prevent and relieve animal suffering, and uphold the principles of veterinary medical ethics.

So far, the AVMA has equivocated by condoning the use of VSD+ “in constrained circumstances,” effectively abandoning the birds to commercial expediency. Many chickens, turkeys, and ducks have died of the avian flu virus on factory farms; millions more have been killed without evidence of infection.

Although the AVMA cannot mandate or prohibit any method for exterminating farmed animals, the AVMA’s recommendation against a particular procedure carries industry weight. We believe the AVMA has a moral responsibility toward these trapped and helpless animals, and that this responsibility should transcend an accommodation of commercial priorities.

With guaranteed government indemnities to the industries added to the AVMA’s current approval of VSD+, poultry and egg producers and their trade groups have no incentive to mitigate the squalor and debilitate breeding practices that enable flu viruses to spread among the thousands of birds crammed together in the mammoth industrialized sheds.

In “Prevention of Avian Influenza at Its Animal Source,” the World Organization for Animal Health observes that “good hygiene practices are essential to prevent avian influenza outbreaks, because of the resistance of the virus in the environment and its highly contagious nature.”

In reality, industrialized animal farms cannot, by their very nature, be hygienic, although hygienic practices could be vastly improved. As of now, avian influenza epidemics are built into the heavily subsidized poultry industry with no accountability. These epidemics will continue if no action is taken, especially by the organization that has sworn to protect animals from preventable suffering.

Accordingly, we are urging the AVMA to oppose ventilation shutdown and ventilation shutdown plus. This should be a priority topic at the AVMA’s convention in Philadelphia, with a tangible moral result.

Author Bio: Karen Davis, PhD, is the president and founder of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. Davis is an award-winning animal rights activist and the author of numerous books, including a children’s book (A Home for Henny); a cookbook (Instead of Chicken, Instead of Turkey); Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs; More Than a Meal; and her latest book, a series of essays called For the Birds.

Chickens are indeed native to the earth. Despite centuries of domestication—from the tropical forest to the farmyard to the factory farm—the call of the wild has always been in the chicken’s heart. Far from being “chicken,” roosters and hens are legendary for their bravery. In classical times, the bearing of the rooster—the old British term for “cock,” a word that was considered too sexually charged for American usage—symbolized military valor: the rooster’s crest stood for the soldier’s helmet and his spurs stood for the sword. A chicken will stand up to an adult human being. Our tiny Bantam rooster, Bantu, would flash out of the bushes and repeatedly attack our legs, lest we should disturb his beloved hens. (Although we do not allow our chickens to hatch chicks, in 2018 a hen and a rooster rescued from a cockfighting operation produced a surprise family, the hen having camouflaged herself in a wooded area of our sanctuary).

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

An annoyed hen will confront a pesky young rooster with her hackles raised and run him off. Although chickens will fight fiercely, and sometimes successfully, with foxes and other predators to protect their families, with humans, however, this kind of bravery usually does not win. A woman employed on a chicken “breeder” farm in Maryland, berated the defenders of chickens for trying to make her lose her job, and threatening her ability to support herself and her daughter. For her, the “breeder” hens were “mean” birds who “peck your arm when you are trying to collect the eggs.” In her defense for her life and her daughter’s life, she failed to see the similarity between her motherly protection of her child and the exploited hen’s courageous effort to protect her own offspring.

In an outdoor chicken flock, similar to the 12,000 square feet, predator-proof sanctuary my organization United Poultry Concerns has in rural Virginia, ritual and playful sparring and chasing normally suffice to maintain peace and resolve disputes among chickens without bloodshed. Even hens will occasionally have a spat, growling and jumping at each other with their hackles raised; but in more than 30 years of keeping chickens, I have never seen a hen fight turn seriously violent or last for more than a few minutes. Chickens have a natural instinct for social equilibrium and learn quickly from each other. An exasperated bird will either move away from the offender or aim a peck, or a pecking gesture, which sends the message: “Back off.”

Bloody battles, which usually take place when a new rooster is introduced into an established flock, are rare, short-lived and usually affect the comb—the crest on top of a chicken’s head—which, being packed with blood vessels, can make an injury look worse than it usually is. It is when chickens are crowded, confined, frustrated or forced to compete at a feeder that distempered behavior can erupt. By contrast, chickens allowed to grow up in successive generations, unconfined in buildings, do not evince a rigid “pecking order.” Parents oversee their young, and the young contend playfully, and indulge in many other activities. A flock of well-acquainted chickens is an amiable social group.

Sometimes chickens run away, however, fleeing from a bully or hereditary predator on legs designed for the purpose does not constitute cowardice. At the same time, I’ve learned from painful experience how a rooster who rushes in to defend his hens from a fox or a raccoon usually does not survive the encounter.

Though chickens are polygamous, mating with more than one member of the opposite sex, individual birds are attracted to each other. They not only “breed”; but they also form bonds, clucking endearments to one another throughout the day. A rooster does a courtly dance for his special hens in which he “skitters sideways and opens his wing feathers downward like Japanese fans,” according to Rick and Gail Luttmann’s book, Chickens in Your Backyard. A man once told me, “When I was a young man I worked on a chicken farm, and one of the most amazing things about those chickens was that they would actually choose each other and refuse to mate with anyone else.”

Sadly, the eggs of these parent flocks are snatched away and sent to mechanical incubators, so the parents never see their chicks. “Breeder” roosters and hens are routinely culled for low fertility, and also because “if a particular male becomes unable to mate, his matching females will not accept another male until he is removed,” explains the book Commercial Chicken Meat and Egg Production.

Little more than a year later, the parents who have survived their miserable life are sent to slaughter just like the chicks they never got to see, raise or protect, as they would otherwise have chosen to do if they were free.

To afford this chance for chickens to live a cage-free life along with their chicks, we should show compassion to chickens in May in honor of International Respect for Chickens Day, which falls on May 4, 2022. Most of all, we need to respect the lives of chickens beyond this day by ensuring that chickens are treated humanely, and by making better food choices, which involves a shift away from a meat-based diet toward a plant-based diet.

Author Bio: Karen Davis, PhD, is the president and founder of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. Davis is an award-winning animal rights activist and the author of numerous books, including a children’s book (A Home for Henny); a cookbook (Instead of Chicken, Instead of Turkey); Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs; More Than a Meal; and her latest book, a series of essays called For the Birds.