by Clare Druce
So many of the images we received from overseas have told and continue to tell the same stories of abuse. A battery hen, it seems, is a battery hen the world over, and the same can be said for other factory-farmed animals.
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South Africa
In 1989 we’d received a letter from a certain Louise van der Merwe in South Africa. She wanted to start her own campaign and had written to Bristol University’s School of Veterinary Medicine requesting information, and wondering if she might be given an introduction to organisations in Britain. Contact details for several organisations including Chickens’ Lib were supplied, and we responded eagerly.
Clearly, Louise cared deeply about farmed animals, and poultry especially. Keen to get her campaign established, she suggested she might become ‘Chickens’ Lib South Africa’. Cautious as ever, fearful of taking a step we’d regret, Violet and I decided to decline her offer, but said we’d be delighted to send her as much information as we could. And there began a great and mutually beneficial friendship. Soon Louise had formed her own organisation, ‘Humanity for Hens’ and before long was making remarkably fast progress.
Over the years, Humanity for Hens was transformed into The Humane Education Trust, and its magazine Animal Voice, edited by Louise, is now the official mouthpiece of Compassion in World Farming South Africa (1). Here follows no more than a tiny snapshot of what Louise and her colleagues have achieved. For simplicity, I’ll (inaccurately) refer to the organisation in all its stages as CIWF (SA).
By 1991, following two years’ hard lobbying, Pick’n Pay and Woolworths were stocking free range eggs and a mere decade later CIWF (SA)’s Humane Education programme was introduced into eleven schools as part of the Western Cape Education Department’s Safe Schools programme, while a related video was shown in Brussels, to international acclaim.
By 2003 CIWF (SA) was participating in the process of integrating Humane Education into South Africa’s Curriculum, and in the same year it hosted the All-African Humane Education Summit in Cape Town, attended by educators from eighteen African countries.
In 2010, following a presentation from CIWF (SA), Cape Town’s Health Committee unanimously voted for one meat-free day a week.
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Since that first letter in 1989, Louise and I have met, just once. In 2005 CIWF held a two-day international conference in London on animal sentiency, ‘From Darwin to Dawkins’. Initially I’d thought I’d be unable to attend, and Louise had sounded unsure of her plans, but at the last minute I did book in, just for one day. Half way through the morning session, I was in the ladies cloakroom, when I heard an unmistakably South African accent. Whirling around, I immediately recognised Louise from photographs in Animal Voice. We literally fell into each other’s arms and spent as much time as possible together for the rest of the day. It was such a pleasure to meet at last.
I’m proud to be a friend of someone whose influence has spread throughout South Africa and beyond, and rewarded to think that in the early days of Louise’s campaign Chickens’ Lib was able to be of help and encouragement.
America
We’ve kept in touch with several animal rights/welfare organisations in the USA, but most closely with United Poultry Concerns (UPC). UPC’s founder and President is author and tireless campaigner Karen Davis, and her passion is poultry. On her website (2) Karen describes how, by chance, she’d found and cared for an abandoned and very sick chicken. Soon, she came to realize that this one little bird was a typical victim of America’s massive broiler industry. In 1990, as a result of all that this one chicken represented, she founded United Poultry Concerns.
At around that time someone mentioned Chickens’ Lib to Karen and recommended my book Chicken and Egg: Who Pays the Price? Karen read it, and got in touch. She tells me the book influenced her campaign; soon she had no doubt that the poultry meat and egg industries in both our countries were based on the same mindset – the profit motive above all. Karen has said that our videos Chicken for Dinner? and Sentenced for Life affected her deeply when first she saw them and was planning her campaign strategy.
All UPC’s information is admirably detailed and Karen lectures widely, informing the public, teachers and academics about the terrible abuses meted out to farmed birds. An updated version of her book Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs (3) covers all aspects of domesticated poultry. As well as detailing the cruel abuse of poultry, she highlights the effect on humans of the filthy practices within the poultry industry, via antibiotic resistance. (4)
Then there are the toxins ingested directly: Karen quotes the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s figures relating to the arsenic content in an average intake of chicken meat: ‘Arsenic concentrations in young chickens are three times greater than in other meat and poultry products… people ingest 3.6 to 5.2 micrograms of inorganic arsenic, the most toxic form of the element,’ and she warns that: ‘People who eat more chicken may ingest 10 times that amount of arsenic, which can cause bladder, respiratory, and skin cancers from a daily intake of 10 – 40 micrograms of arsenic.’ (5)
In its magazine Choice, the Association of Colleges and Research Libraries of the American Library Association reviewed Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs. Describing it as ‘riveting and brilliant’ their reviewer commented: ‘[Karen Davis] illuminates the ugly, the brutal, and the robotically efficient, the greed of heartless owners, and the callousness of workers in this machinery of exploitation and extermination.’ (6)
An on-going campaign with UPC involves opposition to a custom sometimes still carried out in the days leading up to Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Live sacrificial chickens are swung around the perpetrators’ heads before slaughter, a custom hardly likely to atone for anything, one would think. On September 25th 2009 Rob Eshman, Editor-in-Chief of the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles had this to say about the practice: ‘You’ll recognise places to swing a chicken by the stench, the shrieks of the birds, the stealthy, guilt-clouded atmosphere in which men (mostly it’s men) carry out a duty they know most people find cruel, and which inflicts a measure of absolutely superfluous cruelty on animals destined to die. A Kapparot area represents nothing so much as the seediest strip club, where men slink in and out, compelled by a force they can scarcely understand.’ For more on this, visit www.upc-online.org and key the word ‘Kapparot’ into ‘search’.
In an attempt to wake American consumers up to the facts of chickens’ lives and deaths, United Poultry Concerns has lately taken to displaying huge posters on buses in both Washington and New York, and on hoardings in Times Square.
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Australia
Another courageous woman, and a contact of Chickens’ Lib, is Patty Mark, President of Animal Liberation Victoria (ALV). Patty founded ALV in 1978, and in 1993 her Open Rescue Division began its work. Fearlessly, Patty and her colleagues infiltrated some of the biggest and worst intensive poultry farms in her region, filming and rescuing injured and dying hens and broilers. Her website (7) testifies to the terrible conditions on intensive farms in that country of vast open spaces.
On February 25th 2007, the Herald Sun reported on a visit by ALV to Happy Hens farm, Victoria’s biggest battery farm, situated in Meredith (already investigated by Patty Mark and fellow activists over a period of many years). The newspaper told how on this occasion they broke in and stole eighteen chickens, vowing later to increase their ‘guerrilla strikes’.
Despite electric fencing, guard dogs and security lights, the protestors had entered the units undetected. They had found illegal overcrowding, filthy conditions, birds stuck in manure pits, hungry birds eating the rotting bodies of dead ones… all the old familiar horrors. Patty Mark, described in the report as a ‘serial activist’, commented that the sheds were being converted to hold 80,000 battery hens in a space that once held a quarter of that number.
The egg industry threatened to hit back with prosecutions (no new experience for Patty). Danny Colla, manager of Happy Hens told the Herald Sun t
hat it was in the hens’ best interests to be treated well, adding that the RSPCA had been to the farm and found nothing amiss.
The report did end on a happier note, stating that the ‘pilfered’ hens had been given to homes around Melbourne, as pets, and that the RSPCA was about to investigate ALV’s complaint against Happy Hens.
Make no mistake about it, this is a tale of persistence. I’ve just come across a fax from Patty dated August 1996, and it concerns ALV’s thirteenth undercover inspection of Happy Hens Egg World in Meredith. By that date, ALV member Diana Simpson had compiled over fourteen hours of damning video evidence, which had been shown around the world on numerous TV news reports.
A court case was then looming, the charge being trespass, and not for the first time. Patty had been fined on previous occasions; Pam Clarke, another serial rescuer, had already been arrested many times in Tasmania and seen the inside of a prison following her refusal to pay fines. This history of sustained complaints against a major battery farm, backed up with hours of video evidence, points to the power of industry and the gross failure of those whose job it should be to protect the animals.
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A recent and horrific four minutes of film on the ALV website shows Patty in a laying hens’ breeding unit – a building holding thousands of hens, many with backs rubbed raw from unnaturally frequent mounting by the cockerels, along with enough of those to ensure the maximum number of fertile eggs. Patty describes the frantic noise in the shed as of chickens ‘gone mad’: cocks crowing non-stop, and a sort of screaming coming from the hens as they’re relentlessly mounted by the males. My guess is it’s the sound of hungry birds too – feed restriction for egg-type chickens, though not as severe as with broilers, is practised. The filmed hens are mostly near-featherless, their backs scabby and raw, testament to never-ending attention from the cockerels. Above the racket within the shed, Patty explains that part-way through this year of torture, the initial males are replaced by younger, fitter and keener ones, to ensure the number of fertile eggs doesn’t decline (to view this footage go to Patty Mark’s Diary, on the ALV website www.alv.org.au ).
Chickens’ Lib’s contact with Patty has been specific to poultry, but ALV campaigns on all animal-related issues, for example the tragic long-distance export of livestock from Australia’s shores.
I’ve been forced to be selective, when writing about our overseas contacts. It would take too long to include every group or individual we’ve exchanged material with, learning from their experiences and eager to send them any information that might help with their campaigns. But I must mention Charles Notin who, on behalf of Protection Mondiale des Animaux de Ferme, CIWF’s branch in France, kindly helped me translate our booklet Today’s Poultry Industry into French.
While writing this, I’ve been thinking back to that 1969 letter from MAFF, when the Minister’s Private Secretary boasted of Britain’s thriving export trade in breeding stock and farming know-how, and find myself reflecting on the immense suffering caused (8).
But now for that other grim world, new then to Chickens’ Lib – the abuse of turkeys, right here in Britain.
**** DHSS Department of Health and Social Services
NACNE National Committee on Nutrition Education (UK)
FAO Food and Agriculture Organization (United Nations)
WHO World Health Organisation
Enter turkeys
1989 found Chickens’ Lib extra busy. In the run-up to Christmas, we’d arranged to have 70,000 new leaflets condemning the intensive turkey industry delivered with local papers in selected areas throughout the UK. Our January 1990 newsletter to supporters enclosed a fact sheet in which we laid bare the reality of how modern farmed turkeys lived. Under an etching of a pair of slim and elegant wild turkeys (probably dating back a century) we described their enforced fall from grace at the hands of a ruthless industry: ‘The widespread factory farming of turkeys is relatively new. Until the 1960s turkeys were mainly reared for the Christmas market, but now they are the raw material of a fast-growing industry, supplying birds all the year round, plus many ‘value added’ convenience foods such as turkey breast roll, sausages etc. Turkeys still run wild in America, and are more closely related to the pheasant and partridge than the chicken. Their semi-wild nature ill befits them for life in intensive units, where, even when debeaked or kept in semi-darkness, they resort to cannibalism. Chickens’ Lib believes that not enough is known about the cruel turkey industry, and has prepared this fact sheet to alert the public.’
We set out some of our major concerns:
• Slaughter age for commercially reared turkeys ranging from 12-26 weeks. (A turkey’s natural lifespan is around 10 years.)
• 33 million turkeys slaughtered in the UK (during 1988).
• Mortality running at around 7% with a wide range of causes, one being cannibalism, to which stressed turkeys are prone.
We included a detailed description of how the modern turkey procreates. As a result of selective breeding, the male is now too heavy and broad-breasted to mate with the smaller female. Consequently, his semen must be artificially extracted, two or three times a week, by teams of artificial insemination (AI) operators.
A 1983 reference book (number 242 – Crown copyright) produced by the Agricultural Development and Advisory Service (ADAS) described the recommended procedure in detail: teams of two or possibly three AI operators were needed, one to restrain the turkey by the legs, in readiness for the semen to be collected, the other to massage the male bird around the vent area, using the palms and fingers of both hands until the vent opens and the phallus protrudes. Now, the vent must be kept open, with the phallus protruded, using finger and thumb. This allows semen to be ‘milked’ and set aside, at a carefully controlled temperature, for subsequent insemination.
The next stage, the insemination of semen into the female, would be achieved via a hypodermic syringe, or by more basic means, namely a length of rubber or plastic tubing, through which the operator must blow. Apparently, the latter method was convenient, though with one drawback. If the number of females to be inseminated was large, the operator might well end up with a dry mouth.
Artificial insemination, preceded by the ‘massaging’ of the male until he ejects semen, is now 100% throughout the intensive turkey industry. Surely ‘the bird’, centre stage at millions of Christmas and Thanksgiving celebrations, represents animal abuse of a particularly distasteful kind.
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In the same January 1990 newsletter we wrote about a shocking competition, then in its thirtieth year, run for charity by the British Turkey Federation (BTF). ‘Well done,’ enthused poultry feed firm BOCM Silcock Ltd, in one of its advertisements. ‘Champion Tyson weighed in at a magnificent 86 lbs to win the British Turkey Federation Heavy Turkey competition, smashing all previous records.’
86 lbs – that’s around six stone, or almost 40 kilos. No details were offered as to how Tyson reached this gross weight, but the temptation may have been to administer growth promoters in abundance. Clearly, Chickens’ Lib must do all in its power to stop this disgraceful competition.
We urged all our supporters to write to the BTF, demanding that the competition be abandoned. I don’t know how one of them – let’s call him Mr G – had expressed his disgust, but Neville Wallace, Director-General of the BTF, hadn’t liked his style, sternly suggesting that he should check his facts before sending ‘threatening letters’. However, he did promise to take Mr G’s views into account when the time came for the British Turkey Federation to decide on the future of the Heavy Turkey competition, admitting that some members of the public clearly found the whole thing ‘distressing or repugnant’.
And take such views into account they did, for on June 25th 1990 Raymond Twiddle, Chairman of the BTF, wrote to Chickens’ Lib telling us that in spite of the fact that in all the thirty years of the competition the turkeys did not suffer in the way we and our supporters ‘suggested’, the Federation was ‘constantly reviewing’ i
ts charitable activities. It had just been decided to change the format and to omit the heavy turkey competition. Mr Twiddle didn’t state that the competition was over for good and all. That would have seemed like admitting defeat. But that was indeed the outcome.
In his opening paragraph, Mr Twiddle revealed that over the previous two years the BTF had, as a result of the competition, been able to provide fifteen motorised wheelchairs for disabled children. While not wishing to denigrate the motives behind this generosity, the irony was not lost on us. In a roundabout way, severely disabled children were benefiting from the sufferings of grossly deformed turkeys.
It was good to wave goodbye to the infamous Heavy Turkey Competition. Sadly, few battles were to be won so easily.
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In 2003 one of our supporters failed to be reassured by the letter she received from a leading turkey producer in which he explained that AI ‘pays handsomely’ by increasing fertility, and while it represents a chore for staff, ‘both hens and stags enjoy it’, a claim that rang exceedingly hollow.
I’m not aware of any undercover filming of artificial insemination of turkeys in the UK but the principles of AI are the same worldwide, though the scale of the operation will differ. While trawling the net recently I came across Farm Sanctuary’s website (1) and there viewed undercover filming shot inside an American turkey breeding establishment. The process undergone by the birds is even more savage than I’d imagined. This is how it goes in the States: first we see the male turkeys (known as toms in America, stags in the UK). With their feet clamped together, forced onto their backs, the operator arouses his trapped turkey to ejaculation, roughly and fast. It’s all happening in a huge hangar-like building, the rows of pens packed with toms. There must be hundreds, maybe thousands of them, waiting their turn.