900,000 Chickens A Week

Yesterday I toured a poultry slaughterhouse. We followed along watching as the carcasses, hanging from hooks on a traveling assembly line, were defeathered, chilled, and sliced into meat cuts. It's very state-of-the-art with machines transferring and deboning the carcasses, and workers inspecting and slicing them up. I was OK seeing everything after the birds were dead, because after that point there's no suffering. It was a little eerie, kind of like a sci-fi thriller, watching the ranks upon ranks of thousands of carcasses, traveling across the ceiling and down into giant machines. They kind of looked like dead baby dolls, headless, hanging by their stubby legs.

We also visited the kill room, and that was hard for me. Seeing the live birds in crates ready to go onto the conveyer belt, seeing them strung up by their feet and flapping to try to get away, and seeing them continue to flap and struggle after their necks were slit, was pretty disturbing. I just felt like what was happening to them was so awful and so undeserved. And not even in aid of any fine or noble cause - just to make chicken nuggets. I wanted it to be over for them as soon as possible. Knowing as each second passed that they were still alive and suffering was the worst part. We saw chickens with blood all over their wings and breasts, still flapping and trying to get away. I couldn't tell if it was reflex, or if they were really conscious and experiencing every moment of that.

I think as slaughterhouses go, this was one of the better ones. It was designed with worker comfort and humane guidelines in mind (for example, the chickens are hung onto the hooks in a darkened room, so they stay calmer). We talked a lot about how the chickens are raised, and this company is head-and-shoulders over the others in the business. But no matter how well you do it, it's still a terrible industry. At the end of our tour, the rest of my group was very enthusiastic about the facility, so I gather that others are much worse. If that's true, then I don't think I have it in me to see any others.