Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs

An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

BOOK REVIEW by Charles Patterson

Lines from "The Letter Writer," a short story by Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, kept coming back to me as I read Karen Davis' important new book about the poultry industry. After thinking about the relationship between human and non-human animals, the story's main character concludes that "all people are Nazis" in the way they treat other creatures and that for the animals it's "an eternal Treblinka."*

The mentality of the poultry industry as described in Karen's book can only be described as Nazi-like in its complete contempt for living beings.

The book paints a vivid picture of the natural needs and instincts of chickens which Davis knows about firsthand from her care of rescued chickens and contrasts it with the degradation and distress chickens suffer from hatchery to slaughter. The catalog of cruelties includes horrendous experiments conducted by poultry science university departments and the constant exposure of chickens to the excremental assault--the excremental universe – of the concentration camp. Thus Dr. Martin Blaser, MD, director of the division of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, speaks the truth when he says that bacterial poisoning is inevitable in eggs that are being formed and laid in what is "really a hen concentration camp."

Because of the low market value of "spent hen meat," researchers are working on "economical" ways to gas battery hens in portable gas units. The hens are then thrown into mass graves half dead and alive. During World War II the Nazis in their search for more efficient ways to kill "sub-humans" built vans which gassed their victims while the vans drove them to a mass grave.

Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs is a powerful wake-up call to a world in moral stupor. Nazism and community denial and complicity are not "history."

Charles Patterson, PhD is the author of Animal Rights, The Civil Rights Movement, and The Oxford 50th Anniversary Book of the United Nations.