Author: Sandra Kyle

In this article End Animal Slaughter Contributor Dr Lynley Tulloch remembers a newly hatched chick, and laments the cruel fate of industrially raised chickens the world over.

 

I have always had a special place in my heart for chickens. As a 14-year-old I was taken by a friend’s father for a trip through his poultry farm in Tuakau, situated in the North Island of New Zealand. That was about 40 years ago now, but it seems like yesterday. I was deeply shocked by the huge macerator which was presented as a killing machine for day-old chicks. As an animal lover I could barely believe what I was seeing and hearing, and my rescue instincts were instantly activated. Trailing behind my friend and her father I noticed a small late-hatching chicken on a tray among many empty egg shells. I asked what would happen to him or her and was told s/he would be killed.

 

Fifty percent of chickens born in a hatchery will die a frightening and painful death within 24 hours.  (Image source: Infovetdurgi.com)

 

Unwanted baby chicks travelling on a conveyor belt and dropping into whirling blades.  (Image source: Wikipedia)

 

Stuffing the baby chick under my jersey I took him home to this friend’s house where I was staying the weekend. Tentatively I showed her, suggesting we find some food for the chick. My friend betrayed me and told her father, who promptly took the chick outside and broke his neck. The legacy of that one chick is that I still carry him or her in my heart, and think of them on a regular basis. 

The current Code of Welfare for broiler (meat) chickens states that for chickens who require ’emergency humane destruction’ the following methods are applicable:

– Electrical stunning followed by neck dislocation and exsanguination

– Neck dislocation alone

– Gas, using a mixture of inert gases and carbon dioxide

– Immediate fragmentation/maceration for unhatched eggs and day-old chicks

So the great old maceration machine is still in action for ’emergency humane destruction’ of fragile day-old chicks who are not profitable and treated as ‘waste’. Welcome to the world little ones!

 

In some hatcheries one-day-old chicks, mainly males as they cannot produce eggs, are gassed as an alternative to maceration.   (Image source: kinderworld.org)

 

There are few more tragic animals on this planet than factory-farmed chickens. Whether bred for their meat (broiler chickens) or eggs, these chickens suffer immensely. For example, meat chickens are only between 32-42 days old when killed and processed, and they spend their entire lives in an artificial environment. They are bred to grow fast and will double in size every week. This often causes them to go lame and be unable to reach their food.   Many die of heart and/or organ failure even before slaughter weight.   From the very beginning to the very end, they live a tortuous life of suffering.

 

Many broiler chickens become lame, and some have organ failure, even before slaughter weight at 5 or 6 weeks old.  (Image Source: Direct Animal Action)

 

The vast majority of chickens bred for their meat in New Zealand and elsewhere live their entire lives in huge sheds. The sheds can be 150 metres long and 15 metres wide and hold up to 40,000 adult chickens. These hellish environments are maintained through artificial ventilation, lighting and temperature control.  If there’s a power cut, as there was a year ago in a huge chicken farm in West Auckland, tens of thousands of chickens can die of suffocation.

 

Bred to grow at a fast rate so they are more profitable for the farmer,  broiler hens have approximately the size of an A4 sheet of paper to live on. (Image Source: https://www.plantbasednews.org/)

 

The growth in production and consumption of chicken bodies since the 1980s is phenomenal.  Around 100 million are now raised and killed every year in New Zealand, while worldwide, the number tops fifty billion.  Recent news from the US is that the Biden Administration has officially withdrawn a pending rule by the previous administration that would have permanently allowed chicken slaughter lines to speed up from an already lightning-fast 140 birds per minute, to 175 per minute.  This is a small win for the chickens that barely got noticed, but then few people really notice these birds unless they are on their dinner plates.

The maceration machine killing method is known as ‘instantaneous fragmentation’. Basically, its like putting a wee chick in a blender and turning it on. It happens to all day-old male chicks in the laying hen industry on a daily basis. As you are reading this chicks are being thrown into industrial-size blenders so that people can have their eggs sunny side up.

The recommended ‘best practice’ for killing chickens as emergency humane destruction is as follows:

“Chickens should be humanely destroyed using a mixture of inert gases with a low concentration of carbon dioxide (i.e. up to 30%) to produce an atmosphere with less than 2% oxygen by volume.”

Does it sound humane to you?  To me it sounds like suffocation, which would be very painful and distressing to the chicks.

If a chicken bred for meat makes it through the first five to six weeks of life and ends up being slaughtered, it can expect a lot more distress. After the stress of being pursued by a ‘chicken catcher’ and stuffed into crates, birds are transported to the slaughterhouse where they are shackled onto an assembly line and hung upside down.  They then proceed to a water bath where an electrical current passes through their brain, intended to stun them.  Almost fully automated,  this is by no means a perfect process.  Mistakes and malfunctions occur.  I have seen videos of distressed birds entering the electric bath flapping their wings, and some are still flapping them when they exit the bath.    An ineffective stun means that the chickens will have their throats slit, and bleed out, while fully conscious. 

Birds can also be stunned in New Zealand with a mixture of inert gases plus up to 30% carbon dioxide to produce an atmosphere with less than 2% oxygen by volume. Birds undergoing this method gasp and flap their wings in distress.

These birds did not ask to be born. They were bred by humans with the sole intent of eating them and profiting from their bodies. It is a monstrous thing to do to animals.   Don’t be fooled by the SPCA ‘tick’ or the Free Range label. There is no humane way to raise and kill a bird in the industrialized systems of today.

For that little chick I failed to save forty years ago – please consider giving up eating chicken meat and eggs.

 

Lynley Tulloch is an academic, animal rights activist and writer. She has a PhD in sustainability education and ecocentric philosophy

 

Horse Racing is cruel to horses and must end,  writes End Animal Slaughter’s Sandra Kyle.

 

On my very first visit to a racetrack in the town I live in, a horse died in front of me.  Seven-year-old gelding Guy Fox had a horror fall when he collided with another horse during a Jumps race, and was euthanased on the spot because of his injuries.

Guy Fox, who was euthanased after a horror fall at Whanganui Racetrack in 2019. (Image Source: stuff.co.nz)

  

This was in 2019. Nineteen horses died on New Zealand horsetracks that year.  Australia, with many more race meetings than New Zealand, has on average one racehorse death every three days.  In the United States it is more like 10 every week.

 

An ‘equine athlete’ one moment; lying dead with a bullet in their head the next.  (Image Source : Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses)

 

If we read Steward Reports post-race we see that the horses die from ‘sudden cardiac events’.  They die from ‘pulmonary hemorrhage.’   They die from ‘head trauma’.   They die from shattered limbs, broken necks, crushed spines. However, the official figures do not tell the whole story of racetrack deaths. We do not know how many more are euthanased ‘back at the stables’ as a result of injuries that show up after the race.

 

Exercise-induced pulmonary haemorrhage occurs when a horse is galloped at full speed during a race.   About 90 percent of racehorses have lung bleeds after a race.  Photo Credit: © iStock.com / winhorse

 

All this is to be expected:  the result of putting 500kg animals with long, thin, easily-broken legs into a crowded field and belting them with a stinging whip to go faster, especially when they are tiring (which is when most of the whipping goes on).  Horses can feel a fly on their skin, and yet you often hear racing enthusiasts say ‘Oh, they hardly feel the whip!’ despite the Science that has proven to the contrary.   Jumps racing, including hurdles and steeplechase, is even harder on the horse than flat racing, and predictably leads to more injuries and deaths on the racetrack.

As if all this weren’t reason enough to ban horseracing, there are many other problems associated with this so-called ‘sport’.   Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses (CPR) states that when training, racehorses are kept isolated in stables for up to 22 hours a day, depending on the trainers.  They are not allowed to graze and are fed a high-energy protein diet where up to 90 percent of them suffer stomach ulcers.  Horses are a herd animal yet racehorses are prised away from their mothers at an early age and forced to live an unnatural life of isolation.  Sometimes they are only two years old when they start racing, even before their skeleton is fully strengthened, and they are pushed too hard, too far, and too often at the expense of their physical and psychological well-being and their natural instincts.   What’s more, to get to race meetings they often travel in floats for hours on end in stifling heat or bitter cold.  They undergo this treatment just so owners and trainers can get rich, and the public can ‘have a flutter’ by betting on their lives.

 

In New Zealand as elsewhere, horses are transported nationwide to compete in races.  (Photo credit, Sandra Kyle)

 

In October 2019 the ABC premiered a groundbreaking video exposing what happens to ex racehorses in Australia.  (Warning: Graphic Images)   It revealed how the vast majority of racehorses are brutally and violently slaughtered when they are no longer profitable.  The heartbreaking undercover footage, and the deliberate physical and verbal abuse of the slaughterers – ‘You’re going to die, you maggot!’ – shocked the world.   But the ABC ‘7:30’ report didn’t tell the whole sordid story about horseracing.  A year on from the ABC programme, Coalition For The Protection of Racehorses fills out the picture in this video.  (Warning: Graphic Images).

‘Wastage’ is a huge problem in this callous Industry.   Every year many more foals are bred by the thoroughbred racing industry than will make the final cut.  Recently CPR released a report demonstrating that over 3,000 horses a year ‘vanish’ from New Zealand. (Read the report here.)  In Australia it is estimated that only 300 of every 1,000 foals will ever start in a race because of unsuitability or temperamental reasons which means that in this country alone, approximately 9,000 will be considered useless and will end up at the knackery.

Will this beautiful being, photographed at a Whanganui race this week, also end up at the slaughterhouse if they show disappointing form?

(Photo Credit: Sandra Kyle)

 

There is nothing ‘sporting’ about the horseracing industry that involves bringing sentient beings into the world to suffer and die a painful and premature death.   This is 2021, and there are signs that public sensibility about horseracing is beginning to change – and change cannot come soon enough.  But there is no way to make horseracing OK, and it needs to be banned outright.

Coalition For The Protection Of Racehorses FAQ

 

 

 

 

In this article biologist, ethologist, behavioural ecologist and writer Professor Marc Bekoff discusses how ‘The Five Freedoms’ are just a nonsense when it comes to dairy cows and other animals raised for food, and the best thing we can do is leave animals and animal products out of our meal plans.

 

Read the Psychology Today article here

(Featured photo shows Caitlin Blake-Taylor of Taranaki Animal Save with a New Zealand dairy calf she recently rescued from slaughter)

 

Researcher, writer, teacher and animal activist Dr Michael Morris writes that what we do to chickens is one of the world’s worst injustices.

Main Points of the article:

 

Farmed chickens are genetic freaks, bred to be clinically obese and fast-growing.

 

A government report from 2006 found that in New Zealand 38 per cent of these Cobb and Ross chickens suffer from painful lameness.

 

Their hearts strain to pump blood through their bloated bodies, and this leads to heart attacks and abnormal fluid build-up. Up to 12 per cent of chickens collapse and die before reaching slaughter weight.

 

Any birds that survive until slaughter are scooped up and shipped to the slaughterhouse, where they face fresh torments, including shackling upside down by the legs. Researchers examining the pain receptors in the legs of broiler chickens conclude that shackling is a “very painful” procedure.

 

A combination of high line speeds, struggling chickens, and varying current means that stunning is missed in up to 60 per cent of cases.

 

 

Read the stuff.co.nz article here

Try veganism in January here

 

Humans have always used other animals harshly.  The maltreatment of animals in hauling carriages, vivisection, fox-hunting, bull-baiting and cock fighting were among matters debated by social reformers in the early nineteenth century, and that led to the formation of the RSPCA in London in 1824.^[5] 

 

Since then, the SPCA has been established in many places in the world including here in New Zealand, in 1872.

 

In this country, as elsewhere, the SPCA has been criticised for concentrating on domestic ‘pets’ and ignoring the plight of the millions of equally sentient animals suffering in factory farms. 

 

In an exciting development RSPCA members in the UK have called for a major cut in meat and dairy consumption.   Simultaneously, a legal case is being launched by the organisation Humane Being to force government ministers to address the cruelties and injustices of intensive animal agriculture.

 

In June last year, New Zealand’s animal rights organisation SAFE (Save Animals From Exploitation) partnered with the New Zealand Animal Law Association to challenge the use of cruel farrowing crates in the High Court.  This was the first time in New Zealand history that such a challenge had taken place, and resulted in a decision that farrowing crates to house mother pigs is a violation of the Animal Welfare Act.   

 

Hopefully mounting legal challenges to our governments to address these injustices will be increasingly common in 2021, and the RSPCA UK will have set a precedent for other SPCAs to start campaigning for all animals.  

 

Read the Independent article here