United Poultry Concerns' Letter to Canandaigua Academy principal Lynne Erdle
July 11, 2008
Mrs. Lynne Erdle, Principal
Canandaigua Academy
435 East Street
Canandaigua, NY 14424
Dear Mrs. Erdle:
I am writing to request that you honor your pledge to eliminate the chicken slaughter project from the curriculum of Canandaigua Academy. I speak for many people when I tell you how disappointed I am, and disgusted, by your failure to stand by your decision. Adding to this disgust, I see that the Canandaigua Academy’s “Controversial ‘Chicken Project’” includes a pathetic attempt to remake the slaughter process rhetorically into something other than it is. This whitewash attempt certainly does not justify claims of “commitment to excellence.”
As well as the animal abuse being practiced and sanctioned at Canandaigua Academy, if you choose to resume this ugly, pitiless classroom killing, there is also the question of why an ecology course is so irresponsibly oblivious to the reports being issued by the United Nations, University of Chicago, and PEW Foundation (among others) about the enormous contribution of mass consumption/production of animal products to global warming. The United Nations calls raising animals for food “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global” (“Livestock’s Long Shadow,” a report by the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization, November, 2007).
In addition, for those unfamiliar with the modern science of avian cognition and neurophysiology: it has been confirmed by the Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium, in Nature Neuroscience Reviews, Feb. 2005, that the avian brain is “an intricately wired mass that processes information in much the same way as the human cerebral cortex.” Moreover, as summarized by Dr. Michael Gentle in “Pain In Birds”: “It is clear that in terms of discharge patterns and receptive field size, nociceptors [pain receptors] found in the chicken are very similar to those found in a variety of mammalian species” (Animal Welfare, 1992: 234-247).
I request that you drop the slaughter project from Canandaigua Academy and develop more constructive teaching. If you do not, the administration has an ethical obligation to record and make publicly available a complete audio-visual tape of the slaughter of each bird conducted by each student. This is an accountability issue, and we will not drop it. Let the public decide how “humane” and “beneficial” throat-cutting by high school students is. Otherwise, we recognize that your school seeks to hide the reality, and we will make the most of that fact.
Enclosed is a copy of the Summer issue of Poultry Press. And we have placed the Canandaigua Academy slaughter topic on our homepage at www.upc-online.org. Thank you for your attention.
Sincerely,
Karen Davis, PhD
President
United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. www.upc-online.org
United Poultry Concerns, Inc.
PO Box 150
Machipongo, VA 23405-0150
757-678-7875
FAX: 757-678-5070
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