Letters
Morning Edition
National Public Radio
Via fax: 202-513-3329
Dear Morning Edition:
How appalling that the egg industry has come up with the idea of
manipulating hens' genes to make them all blind, as you informed us
in recent days. Only slightly less appalling was your failure to
include in your broadcast the voice of someone dedicated to
protecting hens and other birds used for food, like Karen Davis,
Ph.D., president of United Poultry Concerns and author of the leading
books on chickens and turkeys: Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An
Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry and More Than a Meal: The
Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality.
Already, hens at today's enormous egg factories live eight or nine to
a tiny cage, unable to spread their wings, barely able to move,
toenails sometimes curling around the floor wire and fixing the birds
in place. Forget about veterinary care: With hundreds of thousands
of hens to each football-field-sized aluminum shed, owners and
workers treat individual birds as virtually worthless. Severely
injured feet, bruised bodies with feathers rubbed off against cage
wire, respiratory ailments from concentrated fumes and dust-all such
problems will disappear in a few months when the buildings are
emptied of their avian inhabitants who have never, even for a week,
felt the joy of being alive.
To all of that some in the industry would add blindness? Chickens
have full-spectrum color vision. To compound the cruelty of their
captivity by depriving them of their most important sense and their
ability to experience some orientation to their chaotic world is to
say, Make no mistake about it: Compassion and decency have no place
in the egg industry. When you next update your audience on this
pathetic achievement, please be sure to make that announcement loud
and clear.
Sincerely,
David J. Cantor
Correspondent
United Poultry Concerns
United Poultry Concerns, Inc.
PO Box 150
Machipongo, VA 23405-0150
757-678-7875
FAX: 757-678-5070
www.upc-online.org
(UPC Letter Re: NPR Story on Birds Genetically Modified for Blindness)
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