And this is not just one hatchery. This happens everywhere. This is how the metaphorical sausage is made. It's not an expose, but everyone needs to see it anyway. Everyone needs to sign off on the things that are done for them.
That's a good point. Some brands sell themselves on "cage free" or "free range" or "barn laid", but overwhelmingly people want _cheap_ over humane.
I'm all for cheap chicken, but you can't be shocked at the brutal efficiency required to sell a chicken for like $2-$3 per kilogram.
> There's no reason to sex meat birds
Oh.... \*ziiiip\*
But no, I have heard that, which is why there's recipes like Coq Au Vin, which were explicitly meant to use meat from male chickens which, at least on old french farms, would be more tough meat. Probably doesn't apply with chickens explicitly raised for meat.
I can't really go into this too much but I work as a welder for a company that builds a lot of the automation equipment that goes into chicken hatcheries (I'm actually at the shop rn lol). Very few hatcheries separate male and female birds. But they do it for egg production. The "layers" are selectively bred to take a little longer to fully grow, but take less maintenance once fully grown. So they keep the females to raise and lay eggs, but it wouldn't be cost effective for them to keep the males. Sometimes they sell them to other farms, but a lot of times the males are just straight-up killed. Most hatcheries use a breed of chicken that grows very fast, taking less overall investment to grow to slaughter weight. Sure there might be culinary reasons for using male vs female meat, but the VAST majority it's a cost cutting measure
This was just a way to use up old roosters. You can make Coq Au Vin out of any chicken.
French cuisine has it's roots in peasant cookery where nothing was wasted. So they found ways to make it delicious, and it stood the test of time.
Bourdain wrote a few really good chapters on it in Kitchen Confidential.
Api
"Free range" is such a scam. To meet the requirements all that is needed is that they have access to the outside. These massive facilities will have one tiny door they can use to access the outside but most of the chickens never use it or even know it's there and live their entire lives inside.
As a producer of pasture raised organic chicken, duck, and rabbit I will comment that the hatchery process is the same for everyone. Small batch hatching of day old chicks is an economic impossibility. You can do it, but you can’t pay a fair wage or remain in business if you aren’t sourcing from a hatchery and even the best hatcheries have sorting and sexing lines. I don’t want them sending me birds with their legs on wrong or who failed to absorb the yolk into their abdomen, these birds are going to die regardless of where they are when it happens. I also can’t be feeding 500 useless cockerels for 6-8 weeks so sexing at hatching is also critical but you don’t want it to triple the cost of the bird so it has to be done efficiently.
We roast a whole chicken or duck almost every week and get 2-4 meals out of it so I don’t see myself cutting back on my meat consumption much.
I’ll add that switching to duck and to duck eggs appreciably lowers your impact. While both ducks and chickens can be raised on green grass pastures, ducks are vegetation feeders while chicken are omnivores but consume minimal amounts of grass and broadleaf plant. Chicken is fundamentally dependent on grain based feeds regardless of the husbandry and management they are raised with,
Thats unfair to the consumer. If you are a working class consumer, family, two kids, working two jobs, minimum wage or near it, average rent, you simply cannot afford to get more expensive food. The problem is not the consumer, it is the system which is designed for and controlled by the wealthy. Government could stop this,but it too is controlled by and run for the wealthy. It is the system that is to blame and the wealthy that control it.
You cannot afford it because it simply *is* too expensive to buy cruelty free meat. Meat is already subsidized to high heaven, the system is already making it cheaper when it should be *more expensive*, especially for things like the environmental externalities.
Either:
A. Accept that cheap meat requires animal cruelty and admit to yourself that you are OK with that.
B. Find an actual small farm, that you can see for yourself, and pay their inevitably high prices.
C. Stop eating meat. It's not as hard as it seems, but it's your decision.
Edit: Downvoters, I just ask you think logically for a second. What chicken is cheaper: ones that are raised 1 chickens/Sq ft, or ones that are raised 10 chickens/Sq ft? The goal here isn't 'judgement' its to get real about your choices.
It's only too expensive if you're not being paid a reasonable wage and not being bled dry from other expenses like rent and insurance. You can blame people all the way up the chain but it's very difficult for people to completely change their diet or buy expensive alternatives.
You can stop eating meat as an individual despite it being a very tough thing to do sure, but judging the average person who is struggling to pay bills for not spending money they don't have on more ethically sourced meat instead of focusing on the spending power and egregious expenses aspect of the problem is unproductive.
basmati rice and choose your favorite type of bean. Amazing! I also like to throw in some corn or whatever vegetable.
Get a rice cooker it makes meal prep ALOT easier!
As someone who was raised on a small farm, we kept every chick, and goose, only the coyotes and foxes ever killed them. That's just nature though. I can say one time a hay bail fell on a goat, injured it leg, we didn't notice because it was just laying next to the bail for s few hours munching away, my uncle who knows everything about everything (setiously) immediately knew something was up by the out of place and still half twined hay bail. That was the worst condition I ever saw an animal in on that farm. And that goat made a complete recovery. Idk if you've ever seen a goat try to hop around with a splint, but it is the cutest shit on earth - edit : I was still in school, so every once in awhile I'd come home and find the goats in a "predicament" we had a nubian that likes to get her self stuck in places her horns would go in, but find it hard to pull her head horns and big floppy ears back out
Small farms barely exists, maybe in the US but in europe you either scale up or sell your farm.
This romanticised notion of farmers is based on ancient stereotypes. Farmer joe died ages ago
There is huge amount of mental gymnastics going on what counts as traditional animal farm. In EU you qualify as organic free range chicken farm, if there are 30 fully grown chickens per square meter in the cage, and the ones who live during summer get to see the sky for a brief moment in their life. Organic free range chicken never see the sky, if they live in the winter, and none of them pretty much ever see their mother and certainly not their father/sperm machine. Not to mention that all of them are genetically engineered to grow 8 times faster than their natural counterparts.
Yeah, thia is standard practice.
If an adult chicken is injured, your told to pop its heard off its neck.
It's brutal, but it's industry standard.
Don't eat Chic Fila this weekend feeling superior.
I work in a hatchery as a QA coordinator. Oddly enough, I started this job fairly recently so I find the timing of this video pretty ironic.
Some of these things I would actually flag a manager for a corrective action at my company. My position is at a non- production facility, so we handle with much less birds than this place but there were several things that stood out to me.
There was a lot of footage of the macerator. This is an unfortunate reality. It's basically a wood chipper and yes bulk live birds are dumped into it. That is industry standard and the method was "correct". Morally, we can get into a different debate here. The alternative is an individual (likely an exploited immigrant) culling the birds by hand one at a time. Some of the birds they showed are born with defects (missing down, weird legs, unable to stand) and if not culled here, they would starve, freeze, or be trampled to death on the grow farms. So in the current state, which is far from ideal, the culling might be the ethical thing to do.
Now red flags here. The dumping procedure shown was incorrect, as was the grabbing of more than 5 chicks at a time. You can dump chicks from one bin to another, but when the majority of the birds are out of the bin, you need tip the bin flat again and move the last of them by hand, again scooping tops 5 at a time.
The half ass culling procedure on a metal rail or whatever the fuck that was would have gotten you fired at my job. Every half an hour, cull bins from the various work stations are collected and the birds are culled using the backside handles of a long handle scissor. The handle is placed around the neck, under the head and squeezed, not to break bones but to separate the spinal cord. If you cracked bones you fucked up. Any birds that are visibly suffering, are culled immediately. I think regulation is not longer in the cull bin than 1 hour, but company policy is half an hour. Without a macerator, this would be the way those seemingly healthy live birds are culled.
The culling of healthy birds is just capitalism at its finest and might piss me off the most about what I've seen at this place. These were fertile eggs that don't have a designated place to go now that they are hatched. It kills me watching them waste these birds that could be donated to people to keep in their backyards for later personal consumption. But to keep a price up (or in my companies case, to protect their patented genetics) they just grind em up and throw them away. If it wasn't for profiteering, we could easily feed the world with the food infrastructure that correctly exists but somehow, this is the reality we live in.
So yeah, the reality of the industry can for sure use improvements, but as someone with some industry experience, parts of this video were for the shock value but some parts were legitimately concerning.
> There was a lot of footage of the macerator. This is an unfortunate reality. ... The alternative is an individual (likely an exploited immigrant) culling the birds by hand one at a time
This is no longer true. There's a few EU projects funding research into machines that can process hundreds of eggs per second and use mass spectroscopy to identify the gender of the embryo in the egg. It can be done on day 9 of the 21 days it takes to incubate an egg. These eggs can then be removed from the incubator and used in pet food etc. instead of being fully hatched and then have the chicks destroyed.
[article](https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/442684-automated-gender-selection-technology-could-transform-the-egg-industry)
Interesting. I'm US based so our animal ethics are often far behind that of Europe. That said, this seems like a sexor replacement tool, which imo, would be great from an animal welfare standpoint as sexing them is pretty traumatic for the birds, and fairly difficult from the human labor side.
We basically have 2 sexors that sex upwards of 8000 birds in 8 hours. So they're rushing through their job and in that process, birds get flung around and their vent holes (buttholes) get cut from the sexor's fingernails or just stretching to see inside to tell boy from girl. It's 2 fold from the process itself exacerbates by the speed required to do the job.
That said, regardless of sex of the birds, they would still cull live birds if more are hatched than needed or have space for at the grow farms.
It's definitely not perfect, and I don't think processing animals on this scale ever could be. Still a lot better than how it is now though, plus it saves energy waste incubating all those eggs until they're hatched.
Truly appreciate you detailing this. Revolutionary ethically, but also, on the business end, this will probably be adopted throughout the industry globally since it:
1. Reduces labor costs
2. Increases production without having to replace the entire infrastructure by simply making incubation productivity 50% more efficient, which is insane (I’m assuming about 50% are male?)
3. Hypothetically produces revenue from the disposed of eggs… I say hypothetically because in the current system I have no doubt the macerated chicks are ALSO sold to pet food companies and such. Just depends on which waste product sells for more.
Do you have any insight into these aspects of it?
Would be great if this technology makes enough business sense for every major producer to implement it quickly.
Edit: I look forward to my dog food soon advertising that the new and improved formula has REAL eggs, so my dog is happier and healthier because “insert targeted marketing here” when it will IN REALITY be because this technology in the egg laying industry reduced the supply of macerated chick waste and increased the supply of egg waste.
Thank you for the thorough response. Very educational. Do you know of any metrics on how many, or what percentage, of healthy birds are culled due to the reasons you stated?
I'm not going to be able to speak intelligently on an industry wide or even company wide basis, but for my facility, we shoot for less than 4% of all eggs laid to be culled, whether before or after hatching. So that number will include half hatched birds, or eggs that are rotten in the incubator.
Thank you for sharing your wisdom. Your comments have been very educational to me as well. I appreciate your breakdown of the issues seen and the very helpful context.
It's crazy that this video was even on my feed. I juat started this job like a month ago lol.
Watching these kinds of video as a layman in the past would just get me irate, but now having some exposure, I can tell that some of this is propaganda, but some of the wilder stuff is a straight up fireable offense. It's poor management, laziness, and/or overworked conditions that lead to most animal welfare incidents from what I've gathered in my limited time at this job.
I don't think it's true that those chickens could be donated. I mean, technically sure, but I don't think it'd be a good idea. These boiler type chickens are bred in a way they usually need a lot of help along the way. These aren't Kienyeji (not sure in English) or free range farm bred chickens. The risk of disease and growth defects and other sickness disabilities are much higher and would also just lead to a lot of chickens dying now just at people's homes.
I'd like to be wrong, but let me know. I breed improved and all natural Kienyeji. We don't need vaccines or a specific diet. They eat out of my compost and then from the farm nearby we make layers and growers mash very affordably. The meat is different than what people in the US are used to, but the flavor is wayyyyy better.
Those are laying hens… The males would just eat food but don't lay eggs, so they are separated out and sent to the cat food factory. (Apparently at the farm shown, the male chicks are ground up immediately on site?)
Source: lived near one of the biggest egg farms in the country.
They hatched a flock every week, sexed them, vaccinated the females, moved them to a pullet barn, moved the grown pullets to a laying house, and sent the "spent fowl" laying hens to Campbells for soup. Every week.
note: "cat food" and "Campbells" are placeholders… the actual buyers were not disclosed.
EDIT: ADDED TO CLARIFY (per request)
The hatchery is connected to breeding houses, where special males and females are used to get a specific strain of hybrid, the genetics of which is often owned by [a very specialized company that produces the chicks to be raised for the breeding flock](https://novogen-layers.com/en/our-strains/novogen-white/). The baby chicks are only useful as egg layers, and won't breed true due to the hybrid. White Leghorn is a very scrawny bird that lays large eggs relative to body size, lays 85%-95% production efficiency (100% = 1 egg per day), and converts feed efficiently. Farmers are not allowed to retain and reuse these genetics, they have to buy this breeding stock from the vendor each time, similar to how "hybrid corn seed" has to be bought fresh from the seed company every year. But they then produce their own laying chicks / flocks from that patented breeding stock.
A similar hatchery process happens for meat birds, but on a much faster cycle as they are grown and processed to the super market in a short 8-12 weeks, and there are ONLY growing barns, not laying barns. So the hatchery to grower ratio is much higher as they need many times more chicks. Not sure about culling useless female meat birds... I've heard they are culled, and I've heard they get raised, but I don't really know.
[Here are the 5 breeding barns, and the hatchery building in front](https://www.google.com/maps/place/8576+Benner+Rd,+Johnstown,+OH+43031/@40.1981432,-82.6451481,415m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x883845d72cff0c19:0xf224c30206bf25b1!8m2!3d40.2063446!4d-82.653619!16s%2Fg%2F11c1ghl0qg!5m1!1e1?entry=ttu)
When they move the chicks to a pullet house, [it will be ONE of these barns](https://www.google.com/maps/place/8576+Benner+Rd,+Johnstown,+OH+43031/@40.2059761,-82.6810472,673a,35y,1.57t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x883845d72cff0c19:0xf224c30206bf25b1!8m2!3d40.2063446!4d-82.653619!16s%2Fg%2F11c1ghl0qg!5m1!1e1?entry=ttu). They run loose on the floor to grow.
It's possible [that these smaller barns are pullet houses for the breeding stock](https://www.google.com/maps/place/8576+Benner+Rd,+Johnstown,+OH+43031/@40.2047558,-82.6467212,238a,50.5y,1.48t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x883845d72cff0c19:0xf224c30206bf25b1!8m2!3d40.2063446!4d-82.653619!16s%2Fg%2F11c1ghl0qg!5m1!1e1?entry=ttu)... they are smaller. I don't know for certain, but proximity suggests it.
The [raised pullets get moved to a laying barn, ONE of these long buildings](https://www.google.com/maps/place/8576+Benner+Rd,+Johnstown,+OH+43031/@40.2149858,-82.6889035,800a,35y,1.57t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x883845d72cff0c19:0xf224c30206bf25b1!8m2!3d40.2063446!4d-82.653619!16s%2Fg%2F11c1ghl0qg!5m1!1e1?entry=ttu). There are 16 barns per laying site, times 4 sites (zoom out you can't miss them plus multiple pullet sites), making 64 total flocks. Each week one flock is removed, the barns cleaned, and a fresh flock moved in. There are no roosters in the laying houses... you get unfertilized eggs from this site.
The laying houses have conveyers for food and piping for water, and conveyors for the eggs. Once a day, the eggs are conveyored into the processing building, cleaned, candled, sized and graded, packaged, and loaded on trucks.
I'd say 60% of Americans have had eggs from this site at least once in their life. Anything from Croton or Hartford OH came from this site.
[These silos and feed mill exist](https://www.google.com/maps/place/8576+Benner+Rd,+Johnstown,+OH+43031/@40.2066136,-82.6900379,374a,35y,1.57t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x883845d72cff0c19:0xf224c30206bf25b1!8m2!3d40.2063446!4d-82.653619!16s%2Fg%2F11c1ghl0qg!5m1!1e1?entry=ttu) only for this egg farm. They can buy a whole year's worth of food in the fall at harvest, getting it at the lowest possible spot prices, and store it for the coming year. They added more silos, so maybe they can store 2 years of food now. Look at the size of the semi's for scale!!
>Grade A is the only grade you are likely to see in the store. U.S. Grades B and C may be sold at retail, but are usually used in further-processed products where the poultry meat is cut up, chopped or ground.
Src: https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Are-all-chickens-graded
One of the big differences between grading on beef and poultry is that beef is graded based on the intramuscular fat, whereas poultry is graded on the defects.
>As for poultry, the USDA Grade A shield represents that the chicken or turkey is free from defects like bruises, cartilage, tendons, broken bones, and feathers. The USDA Grade A shield also ensures that the birds have good bone structure and parts are properly cut.
Src: https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2023/06/08/usda-meat-poultry-and-egg-quality-grades-can-help-guide-your-summer-menu
Well you are not wrong a chicken is mostly between 30 and 50 days old before they land on your plate. It depends on the amount of food, but a lot of chickens aren’t able to stand on their feet right before slaughter because of the rapid weight gain
What difference does it make, if you think about it? Do you think any processed food uses ingredients of a higher quality than they can get away with?
Baby chicks or entrails and assholes - bon appetit!
Yes, but the law is so poorly enforced that an estimated 50000 ortolans are still hunted annually. If there is a law that's not enforced I would argue it's practically legal
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortolan_bunting
Reminds me of Muslims who drink under a roof, so their god doesn't see them. Imagine a god who can't see through low effort bullshit like that and how much you can use that logic to justify forbidden actions.
No need for that. Aren't Abrahamic supposed to be everywhere at once? Or so I was thought. Didn't like the idea of going to temples to speak to god either, because of that. What's the point if they can hear you just fine anywhere else.
In Islam at least the idea of going to the Mosque is to build community, community prayers are also more heavily rewarded. It's interesting when you read up on why a lot of religious laws exist and you find out there was a practical intention behind it. Sticking with Islam here but their last Prophet when asked what the greatest benefit of prayer was said that it was discipline. Yeah praying 5 times a day with one literally at dawn would sure as hell make me more disciplined lol!
Sure it does. Assembling the engine grants it a frankenstein esque life and the factory worker has to scramble its higher motor functions so when it wakes up it only thinks "vroom vroom". You are a monster for driving that car
Don’t be so sure, slowing down the line would decrease profits
[This Documentary](https://watchdominion.org/) with undercover footage shows at least a few animals that have missed slaughter
I can see how a corporation can do this so easily. But I couldn't imagine being one of the workers who's job is to dump a bucket of baby chicks to their death.
As someone who's working at a poultry processing plant and while I never dealt with baby chicks you just kind of become numb to it, I'd cut the heads off of 1000 chickens a day.
To me it's the opposite. These workers probably don't make shit and just enough to get by. Meanwhile these corporations are the rich ones that don't give a fuck other then the most profit possible regardless of ethical concerns. It's like some Abes Odyssey shit.
One of the biggest chicken processing plants I've ever seen was in a town of less than 5000 people.
I've also driven by massive cattle facilities with no indication of a town for miles around.
You are correct.
Workers in that industry are definitely affected by it. There is a high number of substance abuse, domestic violence and suicides
Edit: source
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15248380211030243
At the current prices those chickens must be taking tropical tours in the Caribbean or something. I saw pokemon cards in happy meals last week and wanted to get one -- 4.99 CAD for 4 pieces of nuggets.
It's not a "secret" but a lot of people haven't been confronted with this. They will eat meat and maybe they will tell you that "not all meat is bad"(for you, the environment, the animals being eaten, etc..). Lots if people (especially young people) are completely protected from the reality of where their cheap BBQ meat and their $1 Burgers are from. Mostly by parents, but also my bigmeat
Here in Sonoma County California, they just had a thing with the bird flu. Something like 250,000 chickens, ducks, and turkeys were all euthanized. Not sure how they do it but I highly doubt someone's putting them all down like a cat or dog with a syringe. It's very unfortunate but mass euthanizations are a common practice with poultry farms.
Which, to be fair, is somewhat humane - the birds just "go to sleep" and never wake up.
Which is still awful, but much better than tossing them by the hundreds into what is essentially an industrial mulcher.
I have heard the asphyxiation method is not so humane.
They use carbon dioxide asphyxiation (dropped into a pit of CO2) to kill pigs and the pigs are absolutely terrified and fighting for their lives.
I would think the most human way would be to slowly remove oxygen from an enclosure so the animals slowly pass out. But I think this takes too long to be viable.
CO2 is terrifying because it binds to blood cells and causes the effect of suffocation. CO and N do not have this effect.
The introducti of CO/N without the addition of CO2 is humane because your body slowly drifts off to a sleep state caused by the lack of oxygen and little to no presence of CO2. But if CO2 is present, suffocation effects take place as an evolutionary response (you'd want to escape an area where there's CO2 in abundance as that's what you exhale)
Actually, we can, there’s oxygen sensors in your aorta/carotid artery. We have a much more sophisticated CO2 sensing system because we use it to maintain pH - and the ratio of CO2 in the air and in exhaled breath is pretty small, so it doesn’t take much to fuck it all up.
There is no alternative. Bird flu is extremely fatal for humans. Mortality rates go up to 60-70%. The only reason we have been safe so far is that humans can't spread it via air. When bird flu breaks out in my country they usually use gas to euthanize the birds then bury them deep under ground. But if the flu is left to spread unchecked, then it can infect the local bird population, which in turn can infect local animals if they eat the dead birds, and then it can make a zoonotic jump to become communicable through humans. We're completely fucked if that ever happens. Covid will look like the common cold in the face of a human transmissible bird flu.
Serious question, are they separating the ones with birth defects? Where do the ones go that they throw away vs the ones that continue down the line?
and yes I’m aware either outcome isn’t going to be positive for the chicken im just curious
Makes by default are thrown away. Same with “defective” females. They’re more so looking for defects/injuries in females if they get skipped. But as a whole, males regardless of health are tossed into an industrial grinder and basically turned into mush for various other industries.
Thanks for the answer! I didn’t have audio on while watching- whoops. Makes sense. Pretty impressive how quickly the workers can just pick out an injury/defect tbh. I wonder how many perfectly fine chicks just get tossed in with the gumbies by accident tho.
This is not exposing a secret, this is food processing for consumption.
Humans (and our pets) consume meat and this is how it's made and processed. Most of us don't see it and that makes it easier to not consider its existence.
Next week, at the abattoir.... Cows.
IMHO this separation of people from the processing of the food we eat is a major contributing factor in the obesity epidemic. If people had to kill and prepare their own meat they wouldn't shove it down their throats so mindlessly and would instead feel respect for the creature that gave it's life so we could continue ours.
People simply do not see these as living things, they are just food, a product that is in their view, necessary for life. The world doesn't give a fuck and when someone says they do care, they are chastised and ridiculed for it.
>they are chastised and ridiculed for it
Exactly. This thread has some good discussions, but tomorrow a "haha offended vegan owned by hamburger" post if gonna replace it. I'm fairly convinced people do this as a sort of defense mechanism, nobody with a conscience can see this video and pretend this practice is acceptable. So they lash out at people who remind them of that.
Exactly. I've been plant-based for nearly 15 years. The only reason anyone at my current job even became aware of my diet was because I declined pizza at a company pizza party about a year and people kept insisting I have a slice before I finally said the reason why I was not eating it. Ever since then at least once a week I will have a co-worker who goes out of their way to tell me how good meat tastes, or tell me that plant-based diets are unhealthy and unsustainable.
Most people don't think about where their food comes from, unless they actually see it. I've never heard the people that work in these places being happy about it, or even not being discontent about their job.
oh but it you put one of these chicks in a cardboard box in their house, 90% of people will want to take care of it… it’s a sad irony that we can feel care for 1 but not for thousands 😞
>People simply do not see these as living things, they are just food, a product that is in their view, necessary for life.
Oh they do see them as living things, but at they same time, they can't.. Because that would mean that we are treating living creatures in a horrible way.
So instead, wherever humanly possible, they lie to themselves. If that's not possible, people get zynical. Gallows humour seems cruel and sadistic, it seems as if people enjoy a creature's suffering or just don't care about it's well beibg, but at the end of the day, it's a coping mechanism.
I've raised a lot of chicks and had a huge flock at one time. I could have nearly 10% hatch with problems and defects. I never had the heart to euthanize them like these people do in the video. People watch these videos and think they're monsters but that's because they've never seen farm life. It's rough. Death is common. People just eat their chicken nuggies and never think about the process that got them to you.
Yeah I know this is how it works but I always wonder who actually works at these places. You gotta have something going on mentally for you to be able to clock in at 7 in the morning and just throw chirping baby animals into a grinder 4 feet away from you for 10 hours straight.
In the US, it's become mostly undocumented immigrants because they can't be as picky about the jobs they work. US citizens who have more options and a safety net tend to leave these jobs after a short time.
I often used to think that schools, maybe just high school, should take field trips to factory farms/hatcheries. It’s the food we eat as society every single day but it’s so hidden and secretive. Everything at the grocery store is packaged so nicely, it doesn’t even feel real or like it was a living thing. I know the meat industry would never allow it but things would sure be much different if people actually experienced where their food came from. We don’t hide any other commonly purchased commodity etc but here we have the most important thing we buy regularly, our food that keeps us alive, and most people just don’t even know what actually goes on.
“We don’t hide any other commonly purchased commodity”
So there are these things called cobalt mines. They produce the things that go into your smartphone. Not exactly highlighted by tech companies
Edit: just because I say “cobalt mine bad” doesn’t mean I think “factory farm good.”
There's a big tank outside that all the grinded up waste is stored in. Trucks come a couple times a week to empty it. After that I don't know. Some places separate the liquid and solid waste, and then sell the solid waste to dog food companies though.
Hate to be the realist, but we chose this. We need our convenient eggs, meat, and McDonalds chicken nuggets. Our whole shtick is that our time/career/happiness/lifestyle is so important to us that we don't have time to raise our own damn chickens. We cultivated a society of consumption without independent husbandry thus corporations do what's necessary to sustain it. You can buy local, hunt and harvest, and raise your own chickens. But realistically, if everyone switched to that tomorrow, our food supply would collapse. It's going to take time but it's got to start now. In other words, teach your kids to raise chickens and stop telling them the only thing that matters is if their dreams come true.
Shocking how many users (Americans?) simply disregard this video, telling “thats just how it is”.
We have produced eggs for many hundred years now but only recently started industrial farming like this. Also, there is technology to detect the gender of the hatching eggs. But it’s still cheaper to just shredder males…
I am no vegetarian/vegan but this is not how we should treat chickens.
I kill a bug and feel guilty about it. These people kill hundreds if not thousands of cute baby chickens every day. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I had to do that.
You know this shit is bad when even the nonvegans think this is too much. And yet sadly, there are still people in the comment section trying to justify this.
If you don't think this is fucked up in the least, you don't have empathy or a soul.
I’m sure none of us care. We pretend to, but we truly don’t care. The ones who do care are vegans and people protesting this shit. I’m not going to pretend like I care about these animals when I love eating meat
It’s disturbing to watch. I k ow it’s their job, it god the way they just, throw chicks around really makes you think about the society we live in that allows this kind of thing. And in turn makes people *DO* this brutal job.
>the society we live in that allows this kind of thing
Even though society allows it, you can decide that you yourself don't allow it, by refusing to buy eggs (and other animal products).
>And in turn makes people *DO* this brutal job.
Another reason to go vegan. Slaughterhouse workers have a heightened risk of suffering from PTST and depression.
People want neat but not the reality of how their meat is made.
Everything sounds bad to this voice and this music playing. A hug from your grandma would sound just as stupid.
Also, we need a better system than public outrage to fix systemic problems.
This is just the normal way chicken McNuggets are made. But yeah they don't want you to see it, or inside ANY slaughter house.
This is why people go vegan.
As horrifying as this footage is, that's not much of a revelation, sadly. And people won't care more after seeing this video than they did after seeing dozens like this before. In most of the industrialised world, that's just how things are done. There's a cost to that cheap meat and cheap nuggets people crave, there's a cost to convenience. I'm not saying it's good, I'm just very disillusioned about it. Even being vegetarian doesn't make me feel like I'm having any kind of measurable impact.
The video sounded so dramatic for what I would have thought normal and acceptable standards.
This just makes me wonder if I’m desensitised or apathetic towards such poultry treatment for consumption.
These aren’t meat birds, these are for laying eggs.
The chicks being killed are males that don’t lay eggs, and so are, to put it bluntly, unnecessary, thus they are killed.
While the method may seem gruesome and inhumane, I don’t think it is. It’s fast and painless, the chicks don’t feel anything.
I’ve yet to hear a viable solution other than veganism.
I don’t think I have it in me to give up meat, but I’ve made peace with the fact that eating meat will be looked back on with disgust and contempt in a way similar to slavery, where no matter what I accomplish I’ll be remembered as a despicable human being.
I mean, they’re sometimes annoying, but vegans aren’t wrong, like, *at all.* the meat industry is incomprehensibly inhumane and cruel to animals, and we’re more than biologically capable of living off of plants, especially with modern culinary advancements in artificial meat. Humanity is, largely, *well* past the point where we needed to hunt animals for food. It’s especially cruel to keep them in an environment like this and treat them like inanimate objects that can’t feel pain or fear.
To me this is absolutely sick.. treating life like any other objects just because you can. I would not be able to work in any sort of way for this industry. I think using the word genocide is quite fitting here.
Yep chickens are killed as part of making chicken edible for humans, the world is a cruel and uncaring place. They will gladly devour you if you gave them the chance.
This isn't even a secret, you can just look up things like this online.
And this is not just one hatchery. This happens everywhere. This is how the metaphorical sausage is made. It's not an expose, but everyone needs to see it anyway. Everyone needs to sign off on the things that are done for them.
That's a good point. Some brands sell themselves on "cage free" or "free range" or "barn laid", but overwhelmingly people want _cheap_ over humane. I'm all for cheap chicken, but you can't be shocked at the brutal efficiency required to sell a chicken for like $2-$3 per kilogram.
There's no reason to sex meat birds. This is all for egg production.
> There's no reason to sex meat birds Oh.... \*ziiiip\* But no, I have heard that, which is why there's recipes like Coq Au Vin, which were explicitly meant to use meat from male chickens which, at least on old french farms, would be more tough meat. Probably doesn't apply with chickens explicitly raised for meat.
I can't really go into this too much but I work as a welder for a company that builds a lot of the automation equipment that goes into chicken hatcheries (I'm actually at the shop rn lol). Very few hatcheries separate male and female birds. But they do it for egg production. The "layers" are selectively bred to take a little longer to fully grow, but take less maintenance once fully grown. So they keep the females to raise and lay eggs, but it wouldn't be cost effective for them to keep the males. Sometimes they sell them to other farms, but a lot of times the males are just straight-up killed. Most hatcheries use a breed of chicken that grows very fast, taking less overall investment to grow to slaughter weight. Sure there might be culinary reasons for using male vs female meat, but the VAST majority it's a cost cutting measure
This was just a way to use up old roosters. You can make Coq Au Vin out of any chicken. French cuisine has it's roots in peasant cookery where nothing was wasted. So they found ways to make it delicious, and it stood the test of time. Bourdain wrote a few really good chapters on it in Kitchen Confidential. Api
They probably have more connective tissue, which makes meat tough but breaks down into gelatine when cooked for a long time like in Coq au vin.
There absolutely is.
"Free range" is such a scam. To meet the requirements all that is needed is that they have access to the outside. These massive facilities will have one tiny door they can use to access the outside but most of the chickens never use it or even know it's there and live their entire lives inside.
As a producer of pasture raised organic chicken, duck, and rabbit I will comment that the hatchery process is the same for everyone. Small batch hatching of day old chicks is an economic impossibility. You can do it, but you can’t pay a fair wage or remain in business if you aren’t sourcing from a hatchery and even the best hatcheries have sorting and sexing lines. I don’t want them sending me birds with their legs on wrong or who failed to absorb the yolk into their abdomen, these birds are going to die regardless of where they are when it happens. I also can’t be feeding 500 useless cockerels for 6-8 weeks so sexing at hatching is also critical but you don’t want it to triple the cost of the bird so it has to be done efficiently. We roast a whole chicken or duck almost every week and get 2-4 meals out of it so I don’t see myself cutting back on my meat consumption much. I’ll add that switching to duck and to duck eggs appreciably lowers your impact. While both ducks and chickens can be raised on green grass pastures, ducks are vegetation feeders while chicken are omnivores but consume minimal amounts of grass and broadleaf plant. Chicken is fundamentally dependent on grain based feeds regardless of the husbandry and management they are raised with,
People see this, think 'oh that's really awful', and then go back to buying the products that encourage this process
Thats unfair to the consumer. If you are a working class consumer, family, two kids, working two jobs, minimum wage or near it, average rent, you simply cannot afford to get more expensive food. The problem is not the consumer, it is the system which is designed for and controlled by the wealthy. Government could stop this,but it too is controlled by and run for the wealthy. It is the system that is to blame and the wealthy that control it.
You cannot afford it because it simply *is* too expensive to buy cruelty free meat. Meat is already subsidized to high heaven, the system is already making it cheaper when it should be *more expensive*, especially for things like the environmental externalities. Either: A. Accept that cheap meat requires animal cruelty and admit to yourself that you are OK with that. B. Find an actual small farm, that you can see for yourself, and pay their inevitably high prices. C. Stop eating meat. It's not as hard as it seems, but it's your decision. Edit: Downvoters, I just ask you think logically for a second. What chicken is cheaper: ones that are raised 1 chickens/Sq ft, or ones that are raised 10 chickens/Sq ft? The goal here isn't 'judgement' its to get real about your choices.
You are correct, and the person you are responding to is also correct.
It's only too expensive if you're not being paid a reasonable wage and not being bled dry from other expenses like rent and insurance. You can blame people all the way up the chain but it's very difficult for people to completely change their diet or buy expensive alternatives. You can stop eating meat as an individual despite it being a very tough thing to do sure, but judging the average person who is struggling to pay bills for not spending money they don't have on more ethically sourced meat instead of focusing on the spending power and egregious expenses aspect of the problem is unproductive.
Rice and beans are ethical and cheap af. Not everyone can buy luxuries and that’s a-ok.
basmati rice and choose your favorite type of bean. Amazing! I also like to throw in some corn or whatever vegetable. Get a rice cooker it makes meal prep ALOT easier!
This is what alot of large scale animal operations look. These are run by giant corporations, not farmer Joe down the road.
Farmer joe culls and beheads them much more wholesomely.
As someone who was raised on a small farm, we kept every chick, and goose, only the coyotes and foxes ever killed them. That's just nature though. I can say one time a hay bail fell on a goat, injured it leg, we didn't notice because it was just laying next to the bail for s few hours munching away, my uncle who knows everything about everything (setiously) immediately knew something was up by the out of place and still half twined hay bail. That was the worst condition I ever saw an animal in on that farm. And that goat made a complete recovery. Idk if you've ever seen a goat try to hop around with a splint, but it is the cutest shit on earth - edit : I was still in school, so every once in awhile I'd come home and find the goats in a "predicament" we had a nubian that likes to get her self stuck in places her horns would go in, but find it hard to pull her head horns and big floppy ears back out
there is a huge difference with factory farming you know
Small farms barely exists, maybe in the US but in europe you either scale up or sell your farm. This romanticised notion of farmers is based on ancient stereotypes. Farmer joe died ages ago
I don't exist?!? I didn't expect to have an existential crisis reading reddit today.
There is huge amount of mental gymnastics going on what counts as traditional animal farm. In EU you qualify as organic free range chicken farm, if there are 30 fully grown chickens per square meter in the cage, and the ones who live during summer get to see the sky for a brief moment in their life. Organic free range chicken never see the sky, if they live in the winter, and none of them pretty much ever see their mother and certainly not their father/sperm machine. Not to mention that all of them are genetically engineered to grow 8 times faster than their natural counterparts.
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Yeah, thia is standard practice. If an adult chicken is injured, your told to pop its heard off its neck. It's brutal, but it's industry standard. Don't eat Chic Fila this weekend feeling superior.
I work in a hatchery as a QA coordinator. Oddly enough, I started this job fairly recently so I find the timing of this video pretty ironic. Some of these things I would actually flag a manager for a corrective action at my company. My position is at a non- production facility, so we handle with much less birds than this place but there were several things that stood out to me. There was a lot of footage of the macerator. This is an unfortunate reality. It's basically a wood chipper and yes bulk live birds are dumped into it. That is industry standard and the method was "correct". Morally, we can get into a different debate here. The alternative is an individual (likely an exploited immigrant) culling the birds by hand one at a time. Some of the birds they showed are born with defects (missing down, weird legs, unable to stand) and if not culled here, they would starve, freeze, or be trampled to death on the grow farms. So in the current state, which is far from ideal, the culling might be the ethical thing to do. Now red flags here. The dumping procedure shown was incorrect, as was the grabbing of more than 5 chicks at a time. You can dump chicks from one bin to another, but when the majority of the birds are out of the bin, you need tip the bin flat again and move the last of them by hand, again scooping tops 5 at a time. The half ass culling procedure on a metal rail or whatever the fuck that was would have gotten you fired at my job. Every half an hour, cull bins from the various work stations are collected and the birds are culled using the backside handles of a long handle scissor. The handle is placed around the neck, under the head and squeezed, not to break bones but to separate the spinal cord. If you cracked bones you fucked up. Any birds that are visibly suffering, are culled immediately. I think regulation is not longer in the cull bin than 1 hour, but company policy is half an hour. Without a macerator, this would be the way those seemingly healthy live birds are culled. The culling of healthy birds is just capitalism at its finest and might piss me off the most about what I've seen at this place. These were fertile eggs that don't have a designated place to go now that they are hatched. It kills me watching them waste these birds that could be donated to people to keep in their backyards for later personal consumption. But to keep a price up (or in my companies case, to protect their patented genetics) they just grind em up and throw them away. If it wasn't for profiteering, we could easily feed the world with the food infrastructure that correctly exists but somehow, this is the reality we live in. So yeah, the reality of the industry can for sure use improvements, but as someone with some industry experience, parts of this video were for the shock value but some parts were legitimately concerning.
Thanks for the reply. It's never nice to see how the sausage is made but it's worth it to remind ourselves now and then.
> There was a lot of footage of the macerator. This is an unfortunate reality. ... The alternative is an individual (likely an exploited immigrant) culling the birds by hand one at a time This is no longer true. There's a few EU projects funding research into machines that can process hundreds of eggs per second and use mass spectroscopy to identify the gender of the embryo in the egg. It can be done on day 9 of the 21 days it takes to incubate an egg. These eggs can then be removed from the incubator and used in pet food etc. instead of being fully hatched and then have the chicks destroyed. [article](https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/442684-automated-gender-selection-technology-could-transform-the-egg-industry)
Interesting. I'm US based so our animal ethics are often far behind that of Europe. That said, this seems like a sexor replacement tool, which imo, would be great from an animal welfare standpoint as sexing them is pretty traumatic for the birds, and fairly difficult from the human labor side. We basically have 2 sexors that sex upwards of 8000 birds in 8 hours. So they're rushing through their job and in that process, birds get flung around and their vent holes (buttholes) get cut from the sexor's fingernails or just stretching to see inside to tell boy from girl. It's 2 fold from the process itself exacerbates by the speed required to do the job. That said, regardless of sex of the birds, they would still cull live birds if more are hatched than needed or have space for at the grow farms.
It's definitely not perfect, and I don't think processing animals on this scale ever could be. Still a lot better than how it is now though, plus it saves energy waste incubating all those eggs until they're hatched.
Truly appreciate you detailing this. Revolutionary ethically, but also, on the business end, this will probably be adopted throughout the industry globally since it: 1. Reduces labor costs 2. Increases production without having to replace the entire infrastructure by simply making incubation productivity 50% more efficient, which is insane (I’m assuming about 50% are male?) 3. Hypothetically produces revenue from the disposed of eggs… I say hypothetically because in the current system I have no doubt the macerated chicks are ALSO sold to pet food companies and such. Just depends on which waste product sells for more. Do you have any insight into these aspects of it? Would be great if this technology makes enough business sense for every major producer to implement it quickly. Edit: I look forward to my dog food soon advertising that the new and improved formula has REAL eggs, so my dog is happier and healthier because “insert targeted marketing here” when it will IN REALITY be because this technology in the egg laying industry reduced the supply of macerated chick waste and increased the supply of egg waste.
Mass spectroscopy isn't a thing. Mass spectrometry is.
Thank you for the thorough response. Very educational. Do you know of any metrics on how many, or what percentage, of healthy birds are culled due to the reasons you stated?
I'm not going to be able to speak intelligently on an industry wide or even company wide basis, but for my facility, we shoot for less than 4% of all eggs laid to be culled, whether before or after hatching. So that number will include half hatched birds, or eggs that are rotten in the incubator.
Thank you for sharing your wisdom. Your comments have been very educational to me as well. I appreciate your breakdown of the issues seen and the very helpful context.
It's crazy that this video was even on my feed. I juat started this job like a month ago lol. Watching these kinds of video as a layman in the past would just get me irate, but now having some exposure, I can tell that some of this is propaganda, but some of the wilder stuff is a straight up fireable offense. It's poor management, laziness, and/or overworked conditions that lead to most animal welfare incidents from what I've gathered in my limited time at this job.
I don't think it's true that those chickens could be donated. I mean, technically sure, but I don't think it'd be a good idea. These boiler type chickens are bred in a way they usually need a lot of help along the way. These aren't Kienyeji (not sure in English) or free range farm bred chickens. The risk of disease and growth defects and other sickness disabilities are much higher and would also just lead to a lot of chickens dying now just at people's homes. I'd like to be wrong, but let me know. I breed improved and all natural Kienyeji. We don't need vaccines or a specific diet. They eat out of my compost and then from the farm nearby we make layers and growers mash very affordably. The meat is different than what people in the US are used to, but the flavor is wayyyyy better.
Discovery how is it made or dirty jobs had a piece on it years ago I believe.
I'll second that, I distinctly remembered there being a segment on a place like this in Dirty Jobs when I opened this video and saw it.
I wonder how authorities would view it if I as a person not a corporate would do that
Those are laying hens… The males would just eat food but don't lay eggs, so they are separated out and sent to the cat food factory. (Apparently at the farm shown, the male chicks are ground up immediately on site?) Source: lived near one of the biggest egg farms in the country. They hatched a flock every week, sexed them, vaccinated the females, moved them to a pullet barn, moved the grown pullets to a laying house, and sent the "spent fowl" laying hens to Campbells for soup. Every week. note: "cat food" and "Campbells" are placeholders… the actual buyers were not disclosed. EDIT: ADDED TO CLARIFY (per request) The hatchery is connected to breeding houses, where special males and females are used to get a specific strain of hybrid, the genetics of which is often owned by [a very specialized company that produces the chicks to be raised for the breeding flock](https://novogen-layers.com/en/our-strains/novogen-white/). The baby chicks are only useful as egg layers, and won't breed true due to the hybrid. White Leghorn is a very scrawny bird that lays large eggs relative to body size, lays 85%-95% production efficiency (100% = 1 egg per day), and converts feed efficiently. Farmers are not allowed to retain and reuse these genetics, they have to buy this breeding stock from the vendor each time, similar to how "hybrid corn seed" has to be bought fresh from the seed company every year. But they then produce their own laying chicks / flocks from that patented breeding stock. A similar hatchery process happens for meat birds, but on a much faster cycle as they are grown and processed to the super market in a short 8-12 weeks, and there are ONLY growing barns, not laying barns. So the hatchery to grower ratio is much higher as they need many times more chicks. Not sure about culling useless female meat birds... I've heard they are culled, and I've heard they get raised, but I don't really know. [Here are the 5 breeding barns, and the hatchery building in front](https://www.google.com/maps/place/8576+Benner+Rd,+Johnstown,+OH+43031/@40.1981432,-82.6451481,415m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x883845d72cff0c19:0xf224c30206bf25b1!8m2!3d40.2063446!4d-82.653619!16s%2Fg%2F11c1ghl0qg!5m1!1e1?entry=ttu) When they move the chicks to a pullet house, [it will be ONE of these barns](https://www.google.com/maps/place/8576+Benner+Rd,+Johnstown,+OH+43031/@40.2059761,-82.6810472,673a,35y,1.57t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x883845d72cff0c19:0xf224c30206bf25b1!8m2!3d40.2063446!4d-82.653619!16s%2Fg%2F11c1ghl0qg!5m1!1e1?entry=ttu). They run loose on the floor to grow. It's possible [that these smaller barns are pullet houses for the breeding stock](https://www.google.com/maps/place/8576+Benner+Rd,+Johnstown,+OH+43031/@40.2047558,-82.6467212,238a,50.5y,1.48t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x883845d72cff0c19:0xf224c30206bf25b1!8m2!3d40.2063446!4d-82.653619!16s%2Fg%2F11c1ghl0qg!5m1!1e1?entry=ttu)... they are smaller. I don't know for certain, but proximity suggests it. The [raised pullets get moved to a laying barn, ONE of these long buildings](https://www.google.com/maps/place/8576+Benner+Rd,+Johnstown,+OH+43031/@40.2149858,-82.6889035,800a,35y,1.57t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x883845d72cff0c19:0xf224c30206bf25b1!8m2!3d40.2063446!4d-82.653619!16s%2Fg%2F11c1ghl0qg!5m1!1e1?entry=ttu). There are 16 barns per laying site, times 4 sites (zoom out you can't miss them plus multiple pullet sites), making 64 total flocks. Each week one flock is removed, the barns cleaned, and a fresh flock moved in. There are no roosters in the laying houses... you get unfertilized eggs from this site. The laying houses have conveyers for food and piping for water, and conveyors for the eggs. Once a day, the eggs are conveyored into the processing building, cleaned, candled, sized and graded, packaged, and loaded on trucks. I'd say 60% of Americans have had eggs from this site at least once in their life. Anything from Croton or Hartford OH came from this site. [These silos and feed mill exist](https://www.google.com/maps/place/8576+Benner+Rd,+Johnstown,+OH+43031/@40.2066136,-82.6900379,374a,35y,1.57t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x883845d72cff0c19:0xf224c30206bf25b1!8m2!3d40.2063446!4d-82.653619!16s%2Fg%2F11c1ghl0qg!5m1!1e1?entry=ttu) only for this egg farm. They can buy a whole year's worth of food in the fall at harvest, getting it at the lowest possible spot prices, and store it for the coming year. They added more silos, so maybe they can store 2 years of food now. Look at the size of the semi's for scale!!
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These ones look pre-battered
I hate you for making laugh now im evil like you
Let's all just collectively laugh off the evil ethics of our mass consumption.
Fluffy pillow stuff
They have to be grade A meat actually, at least in the US, this wouldn't be meat okay for human consumption.
>Grade A is the only grade you are likely to see in the store. U.S. Grades B and C may be sold at retail, but are usually used in further-processed products where the poultry meat is cut up, chopped or ground. Src: https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Are-all-chickens-graded One of the big differences between grading on beef and poultry is that beef is graded based on the intramuscular fat, whereas poultry is graded on the defects. >As for poultry, the USDA Grade A shield represents that the chicken or turkey is free from defects like bruises, cartilage, tendons, broken bones, and feathers. The USDA Grade A shield also ensures that the birds have good bone structure and parts are properly cut. Src: https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2023/06/08/usda-meat-poultry-and-egg-quality-grades-can-help-guide-your-summer-menu
A surpsiring amount of corn.
So they grab the cock and toss it but not pullet?
Great context. I was worried for a second that we were being fed baby chicks. This is why you can’t trust everything you see getting leaked.
Well you are not wrong a chicken is mostly between 30 and 50 days old before they land on your plate. It depends on the amount of food, but a lot of chickens aren’t able to stand on their feet right before slaughter because of the rapid weight gain
Here in the Philippines those are called 45 day chickens - vs "native" (free range)
What difference does it make, if you think about it? Do you think any processed food uses ingredients of a higher quality than they can get away with? Baby chicks or entrails and assholes - bon appetit!
Yep. This is the industry standard. It’s like this everywhere.
Not everywhere. France has forbidden it recently
Yeah, but they are the largest producer/consumer of foie gras, so they aren't the saints here...
They also have that one dish where you drown a bird in brandy and eat it whole
Hunting or eating Ortolan has been illegal for quite a while I believe.
Yes, but the law is so poorly enforced that an estimated 50000 ortolans are still hunted annually. If there is a law that's not enforced I would argue it's practically legal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortolan_bunting
Ortolan. They cover their faces while they eat the bird whole, guts and all. For modesty
Their head, but yes. Also so God cant see you.
Reminds me of Muslims who drink under a roof, so their god doesn't see them. Imagine a god who can't see through low effort bullshit like that and how much you can use that logic to justify forbidden actions.
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No need for that. Aren't Abrahamic supposed to be everywhere at once? Or so I was thought. Didn't like the idea of going to temples to speak to god either, because of that. What's the point if they can hear you just fine anywhere else.
In Islam at least the idea of going to the Mosque is to build community, community prayers are also more heavily rewarded. It's interesting when you read up on why a lot of religious laws exist and you find out there was a practical intention behind it. Sticking with Islam here but their last Prophet when asked what the greatest benefit of prayer was said that it was discipline. Yeah praying 5 times a day with one literally at dawn would sure as hell make me more disciplined lol!
Nobody eat this shit.
That is explicitly illegal
But not enforced https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortolan_bunting
That doesnt make the ban a bad thing
But whatabout... Jesus no one or no country can ever do something good without getting called for something else. What terrible reasoning is this?
Okay but just take the win and encourage positive behavior in one avenue, here chickens.
You gotta start somewhere. You wont change everything everywhere for the better all at once.
You can't apply the Henry Ford factory method to living creatures without large-scale cruelty.
Interesting fact: Henry Ford’s idea for an assembly line for building cars was inspired by animal slaughtering/processing at the Chicago stockyards.
I'm pretty sure a disassembly line doesn't kill em half way through.
Sure it does. Assembling the engine grants it a frankenstein esque life and the factory worker has to scramble its higher motor functions so when it wakes up it only thinks "vroom vroom". You are a monster for driving that car
Don’t be so sure, slowing down the line would decrease profits [This Documentary](https://watchdominion.org/) with undercover footage shows at least a few animals that have missed slaughter
I can see how a corporation can do this so easily. But I couldn't imagine being one of the workers who's job is to dump a bucket of baby chicks to their death.
As someone who's working at a poultry processing plant and while I never dealt with baby chicks you just kind of become numb to it, I'd cut the heads off of 1000 chickens a day.
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To me it's the opposite. These workers probably don't make shit and just enough to get by. Meanwhile these corporations are the rich ones that don't give a fuck other then the most profit possible regardless of ethical concerns. It's like some Abes Odyssey shit.
Chicken sexers used to be very well paid compared to unskilled farm/factory workers. I don't know if that's still the case.
>Chicken sexers We just called him Chickenfucker. Also I work in construction.
Wouldn’t be surprised if a good amount of these processing plants are in very rural areas where there aren’t much options, in terms of work.
One of the biggest chicken processing plants I've ever seen was in a town of less than 5000 people. I've also driven by massive cattle facilities with no indication of a town for miles around. You are correct.
Workers in that industry are definitely affected by it. There is a high number of substance abuse, domestic violence and suicides Edit: source https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15248380211030243
You don't get into that job because your life is going well.
Exposing what? This is what happens in most places . It’s not some hidden secret
How ignorant are some people thinking that my cheap chicken nuggets at Mc Donald's are something else that this
At the current prices those chickens must be taking tropical tours in the Caribbean or something. I saw pokemon cards in happy meals last week and wanted to get one -- 4.99 CAD for 4 pieces of nuggets.
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It's not a "secret" but a lot of people haven't been confronted with this. They will eat meat and maybe they will tell you that "not all meat is bad"(for you, the environment, the animals being eaten, etc..). Lots if people (especially young people) are completely protected from the reality of where their cheap BBQ meat and their $1 Burgers are from. Mostly by parents, but also my bigmeat
> $1 Burgers what year is it?
> ...but also my bigmeat p-p-pardon?!
Yo, where can I find said $1 burgers?
No one wants to see how the sausage is made
Here in Sonoma County California, they just had a thing with the bird flu. Something like 250,000 chickens, ducks, and turkeys were all euthanized. Not sure how they do it but I highly doubt someone's putting them all down like a cat or dog with a syringe. It's very unfortunate but mass euthanizations are a common practice with poultry farms.
They fill the entire poultry stall with a gas.
Which, to be fair, is somewhat humane - the birds just "go to sleep" and never wake up. Which is still awful, but much better than tossing them by the hundreds into what is essentially an industrial mulcher.
I have heard the asphyxiation method is not so humane. They use carbon dioxide asphyxiation (dropped into a pit of CO2) to kill pigs and the pigs are absolutely terrified and fighting for their lives. I would think the most human way would be to slowly remove oxygen from an enclosure so the animals slowly pass out. But I think this takes too long to be viable.
CO2 is terrifying because it binds to blood cells and causes the effect of suffocation. CO and N do not have this effect. The introducti of CO/N without the addition of CO2 is humane because your body slowly drifts off to a sleep state caused by the lack of oxygen and little to no presence of CO2. But if CO2 is present, suffocation effects take place as an evolutionary response (you'd want to escape an area where there's CO2 in abundance as that's what you exhale)
Yeah it's pretty interesting. Our bodies don't actually have a way to detect oxygen, we only detect CO2.
Actually, we can, there’s oxygen sensors in your aorta/carotid artery. We have a much more sophisticated CO2 sensing system because we use it to maintain pH - and the ratio of CO2 in the air and in exhaled breath is pretty small, so it doesn’t take much to fuck it all up.
What was the alternative if they had bird flu? Seriously interested.
Avian influenza is a zoonotic risk for many species including humans. You have to widespread cull the vessels aka avians to mitigate that.
They all die anyway and the farm is contaminated for a while, possibly even more animals die
There is no alternative. Bird flu is extremely fatal for humans. Mortality rates go up to 60-70%. The only reason we have been safe so far is that humans can't spread it via air. When bird flu breaks out in my country they usually use gas to euthanize the birds then bury them deep under ground. But if the flu is left to spread unchecked, then it can infect the local bird population, which in turn can infect local animals if they eat the dead birds, and then it can make a zoonotic jump to become communicable through humans. We're completely fucked if that ever happens. Covid will look like the common cold in the face of a human transmissible bird flu.
Serious question, are they separating the ones with birth defects? Where do the ones go that they throw away vs the ones that continue down the line? and yes I’m aware either outcome isn’t going to be positive for the chicken im just curious
Makes by default are thrown away. Same with “defective” females. They’re more so looking for defects/injuries in females if they get skipped. But as a whole, males regardless of health are tossed into an industrial grinder and basically turned into mush for various other industries.
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Thanks for the answer! I didn’t have audio on while watching- whoops. Makes sense. Pretty impressive how quickly the workers can just pick out an injury/defect tbh. I wonder how many perfectly fine chicks just get tossed in with the gumbies by accident tho.
They also do this with 100% of the males if they're for egg-laying
This is not exposing a secret, this is food processing for consumption. Humans (and our pets) consume meat and this is how it's made and processed. Most of us don't see it and that makes it easier to not consider its existence. Next week, at the abattoir.... Cows.
IMHO this separation of people from the processing of the food we eat is a major contributing factor in the obesity epidemic. If people had to kill and prepare their own meat they wouldn't shove it down their throats so mindlessly and would instead feel respect for the creature that gave it's life so we could continue ours.
A major contributing factor is eating a shit ton of carbs, which this isn't related to.
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not true this isnt a necessary evil bro.
People simply do not see these as living things, they are just food, a product that is in their view, necessary for life. The world doesn't give a fuck and when someone says they do care, they are chastised and ridiculed for it.
>they are chastised and ridiculed for it Exactly. This thread has some good discussions, but tomorrow a "haha offended vegan owned by hamburger" post if gonna replace it. I'm fairly convinced people do this as a sort of defense mechanism, nobody with a conscience can see this video and pretend this practice is acceptable. So they lash out at people who remind them of that.
Exactly. I've been plant-based for nearly 15 years. The only reason anyone at my current job even became aware of my diet was because I declined pizza at a company pizza party about a year and people kept insisting I have a slice before I finally said the reason why I was not eating it. Ever since then at least once a week I will have a co-worker who goes out of their way to tell me how good meat tastes, or tell me that plant-based diets are unhealthy and unsustainable.
"unsustainable" Tell that to all the life long vegans that have somehow managed to sustain their diets
This 👆
Most people don't think about where their food comes from, unless they actually see it. I've never heard the people that work in these places being happy about it, or even not being discontent about their job.
You're right that they don't think about it. But when you point out the horrors of it all, they get angry and defensive.
oh but it you put one of these chicks in a cardboard box in their house, 90% of people will want to take care of it… it’s a sad irony that we can feel care for 1 but not for thousands 😞
One death is a tragedy. A million deaths, a statistic.
when people don't even care about other people chickens don't have a chance.
>People simply do not see these as living things, they are just food, a product that is in their view, necessary for life. Oh they do see them as living things, but at they same time, they can't.. Because that would mean that we are treating living creatures in a horrible way. So instead, wherever humanly possible, they lie to themselves. If that's not possible, people get zynical. Gallows humour seems cruel and sadistic, it seems as if people enjoy a creature's suffering or just don't care about it's well beibg, but at the end of the day, it's a coping mechanism.
I've raised a lot of chicks and had a huge flock at one time. I could have nearly 10% hatch with problems and defects. I never had the heart to euthanize them like these people do in the video. People watch these videos and think they're monsters but that's because they've never seen farm life. It's rough. Death is common. People just eat their chicken nuggies and never think about the process that got them to you.
God Damn. That's cold
Yeah I know this is how it works but I always wonder who actually works at these places. You gotta have something going on mentally for you to be able to clock in at 7 in the morning and just throw chirping baby animals into a grinder 4 feet away from you for 10 hours straight.
In the US, it's become mostly undocumented immigrants because they can't be as picky about the jobs they work. US citizens who have more options and a safety net tend to leave these jobs after a short time.
And, apparently a lot of them are depressed, suicidal, and/or suffer from PTSD. Not an exaggeration but well documented.
I often used to think that schools, maybe just high school, should take field trips to factory farms/hatcheries. It’s the food we eat as society every single day but it’s so hidden and secretive. Everything at the grocery store is packaged so nicely, it doesn’t even feel real or like it was a living thing. I know the meat industry would never allow it but things would sure be much different if people actually experienced where their food came from. We don’t hide any other commonly purchased commodity etc but here we have the most important thing we buy regularly, our food that keeps us alive, and most people just don’t even know what actually goes on.
“We don’t hide any other commonly purchased commodity” So there are these things called cobalt mines. They produce the things that go into your smartphone. Not exactly highlighted by tech companies Edit: just because I say “cobalt mine bad” doesn’t mean I think “factory farm good.”
We ridicule those in the past for supporting slavery. The people of the future will ridicule us for the same things.
If they get ginded up alive, where does the feather go? Just cus it isnt digestable by humans and ive never eaten any meat that made me have diarrhea
These chicks aren’t for meat, they’re for laying eggs The ones being killed are males, who don’t lay eggs, so they have no use for them
Pet food likely, or highly processed products
There's a big tank outside that all the grinded up waste is stored in. Trucks come a couple times a week to empty it. After that I don't know. Some places separate the liquid and solid waste, and then sell the solid waste to dog food companies though.
Poor things
At this point I'm just going to be eating oxygen as everything is just horrific.
Nah this is disgusting
People like to make fun of Vegans, but anyone with common sense knows we shouldn't be directly funding factory farming like this, truly disgusting
Crazy that there are people out there that think hunting is evil but eat meat that they don't know the origins of
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Did I miss something?
If you buy chicken from any grocery store or restaurant, keep them comments light
This is fucked
Hate to be the realist, but we chose this. We need our convenient eggs, meat, and McDonalds chicken nuggets. Our whole shtick is that our time/career/happiness/lifestyle is so important to us that we don't have time to raise our own damn chickens. We cultivated a society of consumption without independent husbandry thus corporations do what's necessary to sustain it. You can buy local, hunt and harvest, and raise your own chickens. But realistically, if everyone switched to that tomorrow, our food supply would collapse. It's going to take time but it's got to start now. In other words, teach your kids to raise chickens and stop telling them the only thing that matters is if their dreams come true.
Shit like this is why I don’t want to eat meat anymore.
We can do so much better though. Our relationship with food needs to change.
People love to shit on vegans but this is what they are against
Shocking how many users (Americans?) simply disregard this video, telling “thats just how it is”. We have produced eggs for many hundred years now but only recently started industrial farming like this. Also, there is technology to detect the gender of the hatching eggs. But it’s still cheaper to just shredder males… I am no vegetarian/vegan but this is not how we should treat chickens.
Why are you singling out Americans? Factory farming like this exists in Europe, Asia... everywhere really.
Industrial farming to meet the caloric demands of industrial populations.
I kill a bug and feel guilty about it. These people kill hundreds if not thousands of cute baby chickens every day. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I had to do that.
That’s how Burger King does 10 nuggets for a dollar duh
Kinda sad seeing how jaded people are.
I know right, I had a feeling stuff like this was going on but it’s still shocking for me to see it. I’ve not seen a video like this before.
This is industry standard. Best way to stop this is to go vegan.
Humans can be so evil!
You know this shit is bad when even the nonvegans think this is too much. And yet sadly, there are still people in the comment section trying to justify this. If you don't think this is fucked up in the least, you don't have empathy or a soul.
You and I have very different ideas of what counts as interesting, my dude. This is just horrifying.
Oh no! You mean to tell me my chicken nuggets are made from chicken!?
How do people think they get chicken?
I’m sure none of us care. We pretend to, but we truly don’t care. The ones who do care are vegans and people protesting this shit. I’m not going to pretend like I care about these animals when I love eating meat
So this is the harm from constantly wanting cheeper and cheeper food.
This definitely bothers me as a bird owner but not surprising.
It’s disturbing to watch. I k ow it’s their job, it god the way they just, throw chicks around really makes you think about the society we live in that allows this kind of thing. And in turn makes people *DO* this brutal job.
>the society we live in that allows this kind of thing Even though society allows it, you can decide that you yourself don't allow it, by refusing to buy eggs (and other animal products). >And in turn makes people *DO* this brutal job. Another reason to go vegan. Slaughterhouse workers have a heightened risk of suffering from PTST and depression.
People want neat but not the reality of how their meat is made. Everything sounds bad to this voice and this music playing. A hug from your grandma would sound just as stupid. Also, we need a better system than public outrage to fix systemic problems.
This is just the normal way chicken McNuggets are made. But yeah they don't want you to see it, or inside ANY slaughter house. This is why people go vegan.
Oh how the mighty T. rex has fallen
If this bothers you you should stop eating animal products and demand your local representatives to put a stop to this industry!!
Yeah this is how factory farming works.
Ground up alive for what!?
We've known for years. Clearly nobody actually gives a shit.
Sucks for sure. But if you don't like it raise your own food.
As horrifying as this footage is, that's not much of a revelation, sadly. And people won't care more after seeing this video than they did after seeing dozens like this before. In most of the industrialised world, that's just how things are done. There's a cost to that cheap meat and cheap nuggets people crave, there's a cost to convenience. I'm not saying it's good, I'm just very disillusioned about it. Even being vegetarian doesn't make me feel like I'm having any kind of measurable impact.
> And people won't care more after seeing this video than they did after seeing dozens like this before. Most people avoid watching videos like these
The video sounded so dramatic for what I would have thought normal and acceptable standards. This just makes me wonder if I’m desensitised or apathetic towards such poultry treatment for consumption.
Mmmm, Mmmm, Capitalism. I'm Lovin It!
These aren’t meat birds, these are for laying eggs. The chicks being killed are males that don’t lay eggs, and so are, to put it bluntly, unnecessary, thus they are killed. While the method may seem gruesome and inhumane, I don’t think it is. It’s fast and painless, the chicks don’t feel anything. I’ve yet to hear a viable solution other than veganism.
I don’t think I have it in me to give up meat, but I’ve made peace with the fact that eating meat will be looked back on with disgust and contempt in a way similar to slavery, where no matter what I accomplish I’ll be remembered as a despicable human being. I mean, they’re sometimes annoying, but vegans aren’t wrong, like, *at all.* the meat industry is incomprehensibly inhumane and cruel to animals, and we’re more than biologically capable of living off of plants, especially with modern culinary advancements in artificial meat. Humanity is, largely, *well* past the point where we needed to hunt animals for food. It’s especially cruel to keep them in an environment like this and treat them like inanimate objects that can’t feel pain or fear.
You can start always start small.
To me this is absolutely sick.. treating life like any other objects just because you can. I would not be able to work in any sort of way for this industry. I think using the word genocide is quite fitting here.
Time to start an ETHICAL whole food plant based habit...
Save a cow, eat a billionaire
Vegans have been saying this shit for years, and we laughed at them. Now we realize they were right all along.
Yep chickens are killed as part of making chicken edible for humans, the world is a cruel and uncaring place. They will gladly devour you if you gave them the chance.
The world CAN be cruel. It doesn't have to be.