A new Mercy For Animals (MFA) undercover investigation takes you inside a typical modern industrial hatchery, where clanking machines mutilate, dismember and grind up newborn chicks.

The video was shot with a hidden camera and microphone by a Mercy For Animals employee, who worked at Hy-Line North America’s chick hatchery, in Spencer, Iowa, for two weeks in May and June, 2009.

Male chicks are dropped alive into a grinding machine. Female chicks are brutally hooked up to a spinning debeaker that mutilates their sensitive beaks with an infrared laser.

UPC president Karen Davis’s opinion of the suffering of the chicks at the hatchery appears in the Experts section of www.mercyforanimals.org/hatchery.

Please show www.mercyforanimals.org/hatchery to everyone you know who eats poultry and egg products. No matter how these products are labeled - “free range,” “cage free,” “natural,” “certified humane” - this Iowa hatchery exemplifies the conditions under which the life of commercially farmed birds begins. This is a standard mass-production hatchery.

Please order and distribute UPC’s new brochure “Free-Range” Poultry and Eggs - Not All They’re Cracked Up To Be. The brochure can be viewed and purchased in print by going to www.upc-online.org/freerange.html.

The hatchery system cannot be reformed. As MFA’s executive director Nathan Runkle told the Associated Press, “the whole system is inherently flawed. The entire industrial hatchery system subjects these birds to stress, fear and pain from the first day.”

United Egg Producers agrees the situation is hopeless. The female chicks face a life in hell. As for the male chicks, “If someone has a need for 200 million male chicks, we’re happy to provide them to anyone who wants them. But we can find no market, no need” (Associated Press, September 1, 2009).