In The News

Videotapes Show Living Conditions of U.S. Laying Hens

For These Birds Every Day is a Terrorist Attack

"The investigation uncovered countless sick and injured hens suffering from raging eye and sinus infections, mechanical feather damage, pasteurellae, paralysis, vitamin deficiency, vent peritonitis, hernias, wing hematomas, and blindness." Mercy for Animals Press Release, October 17, 2001

In June, the Washington DC-based animal rights group Compassion Over Killing (COK) revealed at a press conference the horrible conditions their investigators surreptitiously videotaped earlier this year at a battery hen complex owned by ISE-America in Cecil County, Md. outside Washington, DC. (ISE-America, a subsidiary of the Japan-based agribusiness company ISE, is the 10th largest egg producer in the U.S.).

Then, in October, an Ohio animal rights organization, Mercy for Animals (MFA), held a press conference in Columbus at which they presented the findings of their month-long investigation into the condition of hens at Buckeye Egg Farm and Daylay Egg Farm, Ohio's two largest egg producers.

What the investigations show is the horror that millions of hens are living through every single day in this country in order to produce eggs for human consumption-a product that nobody needs and that no informed humane person can justifiably buy or consume.

These and similar investigations in Colorado, Minnesota and elsewhere in the U.S. make it clear that it not just in "other countries" that modern egg production defies description it is so diabolical: close your eyes and pick any caged hen facility in the U.S., and there you'll find debeaked hens with tumors the size of your fist trapped in the wires of their cages, dead birds left to rot next to their cagemates, mounds of feces stretching as far as the eye can see, manure crawling with maggots, beetles and other insects, flies swarming everywhere, featherless hens starving in manure pits and stuck, half-dead, in rivers of manure molasses.

For more information about these investigations, availability of videos, and what you can do to help, please contact:

Paul Shapiro, Director
Compassion Over Killing
Phone/Fax: 301-891-2458.
Email info@cok-online.org
www.ISECruelty.com

Nathan Runkle, Director
Mercy For Animals
Phone: 937-652-8258. Fax: 937-663-0617
Email: NathanR@bright.net
www.EggCruelty.com