United Poultry Concerns
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6 January 2015
The End of Hens:
Inside a “Spent Hen” Slaughterhouse,
an HSUS Investigation.

Watch: Spent Hen Slaughter Exposé

What this new undercover video shows is what happens to ALL commercial egg-laying hens. In or out of cages, this is how they die unless they get sent to a live poultry market or die before the catchers come. If you care, stop eating eggs and foods with egg ingredients. Don’t be fooled by “organic,” “cage-free” and other labels. Hens whose commercial life is over go to “spent fowl” plants just like in this video. Because spent fowl plants are few and far between – because “spent” hens are considered worthless, they travel hundred even thousands of miles. All the while their bodies are forming and pushing out eggs so that, in addition to no food or water or space in the transport cages and being trucked often naked of feathers in every weather, they are covered in egg slime. All over the world, egg-laying hens are treated just like in this video.

Two hens in battery cage
Photo by Mercy for Animals, Weaver Brothers Egg Farm in Versailles, Ohio


Megaphone, please.

"I am battery hen. I live in a cage so small I cannot stretch my wings. I am forced to stand night and day on a sloping wire mesh floor that painfully cuts into my feet. The cage walls tear my feathers, forming blood blisters that never heal. The air is so full of ammonia that my lungs hurt and my eyes burn and I think I am going blind. As soon as I was born, a man grabbed me and sheared off part of my beak with a hot iron, and my little brothers were thrown into trash bags as useless alive.

My mind is alert and my body is sensitive and I should have been richly feathered. In nature or even a farmyard I would have had sociable, cleansing dust baths with my flock mates, a need so strong that I perform 'vacuum' dust bathing on the wire floor of my cage. Free, I would have ranged my ancestral jungles and fields with my mates, devouring plants, earthworms, and insects from sunrise to dusk. I would have exercised my body and expressed my nature, and I would have given, and received, pleasure as a whole being. I am only a year old, but I am already a 'spent hen.'

Humans, I wish I were dead, and soon I will be dead. Look for pieces of my wounded flesh wherever chicken pies and soups are sold."

From “Thinking Like a Chicken: Farm Animals and the Feminine Connection


See also

Hens roaming free
“This is how we want to live.” – UPC sanctuary hens. Photo by Karen Davis, November 20, 2014

 

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