| Machipongo, Va. – United Poultry Concerns mailed 2072
petition signatures yesterday to the U.S. egg industry trade group,
United Egg Producers, urging the industry to stop starving hens
from 5 to 21 days at a time until the birds lose a quarter to a
third of their bodyweight including body fat, feathers, liver tissue,
musculature, and skeleton. This makes a total of 9528 signatures
that we have gathered and mailed from U.S. citizens who are appalled
by the egg industry’s practice of depriving hens of food and
of falsely comparing this blatant cruelty to the natural molting
of birds to maintain good plumage.
According to the June 2003 issue of Poultry Science, of
the 240 million hens exploited for egg production each year in the
U.S., between 144 million and 168 million birds are force molted,
in spite of the fact that U.S. government experiments have shown
over and over that forced molting causes hens to develop virulent
Salmonella enteritidis (SE) infections in their ovaries
and their eggs. Force-molted hens, these experiments have shown,
“were 100- to 1,000-fold more susceptible to infection by
SE and therefore more readily transmitted the organism to uninfected
hens in neighboring cages” (p. 1008).
While the egg industry has sought to dismiss these findings as
merely experimental, comparable field studies of U.S. flocks have
found that the numbers of Salmonella enteritidis organisms
doubled in molted versus nonmolted flocks, and “the levels
of environmental salmonellae increased dramatically in commercial
flocks following a molt” (p. 1009).
Under natural conditions, hens spend 60% to 90% of their day foraging
for food. When these normally active birds are starved in their
cages for days and weeks, their immune systems are so weakened by
stress and lack of nutrients that Salmonella organisms
quickly invade their gastrointestinal tract and proceed “with
invasion of the spleen and liver” (p. 1003).
For a summary of “The Animal Welfare and Food Safety Issues
Associated with the Forced Molting of Laying Birds,” click
on
http://www.upc-online.org/molting/52703.htm
United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes
the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. www.upc-online.org
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