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California: Grisly Hen Video Shows Why We Need Prop 2 10-15-08
Comment:
This issue is not just for those living in CA, it is an issue for everyone who eats eggs. You may not know how commercial eggs are gathered. Even organic eggs can be gathered this way. You need to be sure your eggs are organic cage free. But even this is not good enough. Find local farmers or hobbyists ho have hens and know your hens. Because this video is nice, most laying hens are have their legs and wings cut off at a young age to prevent movement. You need to email egg companies as well as talk to farmers. Not eating eggs or becoming vegan is a personal choice but will not effect this situation at all because egg factories only know how much they are selling. When they here from their regular customers and more gage free sell at stores or new cage free farms crop up in their areas, this will change things.
When Nancy Reimers, a
veterinarian working for the United Egg Producers-supported
Californians for Safe Food told California newspapers that, "Modern chicken
houses are heated, cooled and monitored in every possible area," she didn't mean
monitored by humane investigators with cameras.
When she swore, working against the November 4 California ballot initiative
Proposition 2 that would outlaw battery egg cages, that "non-caged birds have
more contact with their own droppings and are therefore at a higher risk of
infecting their eggs" than caged birds, she did not expect videotaped images of
blood and insect covered eggs from the farms she defends to be available for
voters to make up their own minds. LINK
http://www.mercyforanimals.org/norco/
And when Reimers contends
that caged hens' very ability to lay eggs proves their wellbeing since stressed
"chickens quit laying eggs," she did not expect full color, videotaped footage
of their bleeding, prolapsed vents to surface--showing how much pain the hens
are actually in.
As the egg industry and agribusiness trot out "experts" to defend California’s
$337 million egg industry against Prop 2's humane changes, the diary of "Aaron,"
who worked at the Norco Ranch egg farm in Menifee, CA in August and September of
this year stands in sharp contrast.
Sunday, 9/7/08
I found a live hen with her body trapped under her cage’s front wall and draped
over the egg belt with eggs backing up against her head. I picked up the hen and
took her to a worker, saying, "She’s not dead." The worker immediately grabbed
the hen by the head and spun her in circles for several seconds before throwing
her on the concrete floor, where she gasped, twitched her legs, and convulsed
for nearly two minutes.
Aaron was hired to maintain the egg conveyor belts in 11 barns at Norco Ranch in
Menifee, CA for $8.50 an hour, 12 hours a day, six days a week with no
overtime--one of the "jobs for working families" the egg industry boasts about.
His non English speaking coworkers remove manure--toxic with pink fly poison
pellets--and depopulate spent hens in carbon dioxide chambers for considerably
less an hour.
Thirty barns constitute Norco Ranch's Menifee facility holding 30,000 hens each.
Two employees work seven barns; another is responsible for six barns.
Of course it is not pleasant to enter the mice and maggot infested 100 degrees
barns where you can't breathe without a face mask or hear without yelling thanks
to the distress calls of panicked, packed birds.
But it is even less pleasant to live there.
Live hens in dead piles and failed "euthanasia," dying birds unable to get to
food and water and decomposed hens on whom live ones stand are clearly seen in
the video Aaron shot at Norco Ranch for Chicago-based Mercy For Animals.
While egg industry veterinarians work the news show circuit, no veterinarian
care is given to laying hens like those in the video who suffer from orbital
lesions occluding their eyes, debeaking mutilations hampering their eating and
severe trauma around their cloacas or vents.
"Several of the video shots show birds suffering from what appears to be cloacal
prolapse. The production of large eggs by small birds is one factor that may
predispose laying hens to this condition," says researcher and animal welfare
consultant Sara Shields upon viewing the Norco Ranch footage.
"Laying hens confined to battery cages are not able to lay their eggs in the
privacy of an enclosed nest box. Without a secluded, protected space in which to
lay her egg, a hen is exposed to potential vent pecking and cannibalism by
cage-mates, and this may be a cause of the cloacal hemorrhage depicted in the
video."
In fact that is exactly what Aaron encountered on Sunday, August 24.
"I found a hen in a top cage with a large prolapse dripping blood. There was one
other hen in her cage who had a bloody beak, indicating that this bird had been
cannibalizing the prolapse," he wrote in his diary.
When factory farms like Norco Ranch are exposed--Mercy For Animals has released
videos from House of Raeford in North Carolina, Ohio Fresh Eggs in Croton and
Gemperle in Turlock, CA--management usually vows to "investigate" the "bad
apples"—while simultaneously accusing documenters of permitting or staging
cruelty.
Yet Aaron repeatedly pointed out suffering animals to other employees and
oblivious supervisors.
"I told one woman who had worked at Norco for 27 years that the birds had
prolapsed egg vents which were bleeding and painful," Aaron told a reporter.
"You mean their insides are coming out?" she asked in Spanish, recounts Aaron,
conveying she had never heard of the condition before. "You should kill them but
first act the supervisor."
The supervisor said to kill them if "it wasn't too many."
Nor are the hygienic black holes known as modern egg farms even capable of
animal welfare with one employee assigned to from 180,000 to 330,000chickens.
And while agribusiness says the incredible, edible egg comes from a "science
based" system--at least after the blood, manure and mites are removed-- how do
you know "unless you've seen it for yourself?" asks Aaron.
"I could not personally give someone information unless I saw it myself."