Meatonomics

by David Robinson Simon

  For chickens unlucky enough to be born female and destined for a laying career, life starts with a painful surgical procedure known clinically as “partial beak amputation.” Euphemistically called “beak trimming” by those in the industry, this procedure involves cutting off about one-third of an unanesthetized chick's beak and leaving the sensitive nerve endings exposed for the remainder of her life. As one group of researchers explains:

  The avian beak is a complex sensory organ which not only serves to grasp and manipulate food particles prior to ingestion, but is also used to manipulate non-food articles in nesting behavior and exploration, drinking, preening, and as a weapon in defensive and aggressive encounters. To enable the animal to perform this wide range of activities, the beak of the chicken has an extensive nerve supply with numerous [nerve endings sensitive to pressure, heat, and pain]. . . . Beak amputation results in extensive neuromas [tumors] being formed in the healed stump of the beak which give rise to abnormal spontaneous neural activity in the trigeminal nerve. . . . Therefore, in terms of the peripheral neural activity, partial beak amputation is likely to be a painful procedure leading not only to phantom and stump pain, but also to other characteristics . . . such as hyperalgesia [extreme sensitivity to pain].25

  There is no human analog to debeaking, though it's not much of a stretch to compare it to having your lips chopped off and cauterized, with the exposed flesh and nerve endings left to react painfully to whatever you eat, drink, or touch with your lips for the rest of your life. Researchers who monitored hens' pecking, drinking, beak-wiping, and head-shaking activities after being debeaked observed significant changes in these activities that persisted long after the hens' beaks appeared to be healed. The researchers blamed these persistent behavioral changes on the hens' increased sensitivity to pain and concluded, “The modifications in the pecking and drinking behavior of birds following partial beak amputation [conforms with other reports] that partial beak amputation results in long-term increases in dozing and general inactivity, behaviors associated with long-term chronic pain and depression.”26

  Like most other painful mutilations to which farmed animals are subjected, debeaking has only the farm operator's bottom line in mind. Birds in close confinement would normally peck one another to death because of stress, but once debeaked, they find it too painful to do so. It's like cutting off a human inmate's knuckles to stop him from punching others.

  As an innovation, debeaking started in 1940. That's when a San Diego poultry farmer discovered he could stop his chickens from pecking each other by burning off their upper beaks with a blowtorch.27 Further “advances” led to the use of a searing blade, the current technology, to debeak birds instead of a blowtorch. But for laying hens, debeaking is just the beginning.

  Innovation in Egg Production

  Battery means either “a number of similar things occurring together” or “offensive physical contact or bodily harm.”28 In the case of the battery cage used to house laying hens, the word takes on an apt double meaning. Fold down three inches at the top of a regular sheet of paper to leave a smaller sheet measuring 8.5″ by 8″, or 68 square inches. Most laying hens spend their entire two-year lifespan in a space that size or smaller—the bottom of an industry-standard cage is 67 square inches. To get an idea of the conditions in a typical battery cage, imagine ten birds living in the drawer of a filing cabinet. While many people would consider this cramped, the National Chicken Council assures us that confining laying hens in such cages “is the most effective way to keep [them] comfortable and in good health.”29

  First patented in 1909, battery cages were not originally intended to house birds for their entire lives but only to rear chicks during the “dangerous early stages.”30 However, when chicken farmers discovered the cages could be used to house chickens indefinitely, their use quickly proliferated. One early enthusiast was Milton Arndt, a sales manager in the brooding division of Kerr Chickeries in New Jersey. Arndt conducted experiments to determine whether it was more profitable to house laying hens individually or in batteries. In 1931, he wrote, “Birds confined in the batteries outlaid considerably the same size flock in the regular houses. The birds consume less feed than those on the floor and this coupled with the increased production made them more profitable than the same number of pullets in the laying house.”31

  Of course, the droppings have to go somewhere, which is why the cages have wire mesh floors. This works well for the farm operators whose clean-up duties are simplified, but not so well for the birds whose entire lives are spent standing on the unnatural wire surface. When animal advocates speak to school groups about the conditions in egg factories, they sometimes bring a wire mesh surface for students to stand on, barefooted, to appreciate what the hens experience. Standing on these surfaces for their whole existence, birds often develop painful joint conditions, brittle bones, and crippling deformities. By the end of their lives, 30 percent of laying hens are likely to have broken bones.32

  Forced Molting

  Hens in the wild molt, or replace their feathers, annually at the end of their laying season (generally in the fall). Wild hens typically lay about twenty eggs per year. By contrast, hens in US factory farms laid an average of 269 eggs in 2010, slightly more than needed to satisfy a typical American's annual consumption of 246 eggs.33 This thirteenfold productivity increase in egg factories is driven by innovations such as forced molting, the practice of starving hens for up to two weeks to increase productivity. Hens forced to molt typically lose one-third of their weight but, because of physiological changes relating to fertility, become better egg layers when it's over.

  What's it like to be starved for two weeks? For laying hens, according to one researcher, it causes “extreme distress” evidenced by numerous physiological and psychological changes, including “increased aggression and . . . pacing.”34 According to United Poultry Concerns, whose exposure of forced molting helped bring the issue to the forefront, starving hens become so desperate for food, they eat one another's feathers.35 Captive hens' normal mortality rate, about 15 percent per year, doubles during forced molting. The American Egg Board recommends that hens be forced to molt twice in their lives: at fourteen months and twenty-two months of age.36 Because a third episode of forced molting typically wouldn't yield sufficient productivity increases to be worthwhile, the “spent” hens are slaughtered instead at about age two. Otherwise, hens would have a lifespan of ten years or longer.37

  The Uncontrollable Urge to Act Like a Chicken

  In the wild, hens roost and build nests in safe places. They spread and flap their wings. They take frequent dust baths to remove insects and debris from their feathers. They scratch for food, because often the best seeds or insects are found under leaves or other covering. Intelligent, social animals, they bond with their young and with other members of their flock.38 Chickens have evolved these behaviors over millions of years, and they are driven to engage in them whether they live in the wild or in confinement.

  Categorically denied the natural behaviors coded into their DNA, battery hens nevertheless go through the unsatisfying motions their bodies crave. These thwarted impulses have a particular pathos, a futility and frustration of purpose that observers say is hard to watch. “The worst torture to which a battery hen is exposed is the inability to retire somewhere for the laying act,” wrote the late Nobel Prize–winning zoologist Konrad Lorenz. “[I]t is truly heart-rending to watch how a chicken tries again and again to crawl beneath her fellow-cage mates to search there in vain for cover.”39 Another researcher writes of the animals' frustrated desire to dust-bathe:

  Chickens in battery cages which have wire floors and no loose substrate for the birds to scratch and dust bathe in can often be seen to go through all the motions of having a dust bath. They squat down, raise their feathers, and rub themselves against the floor and flick imaginary dust from their backs. They behave as though real dust were being moved through their feathers, but there is nothing really there. If
such dust-deprived birds are eventually given access to something in which they can have a real dust bath, like wood shavings or peat, they go in for a complete orgy of dust bathing. They do it over and over again, apparently making up for lost time.40

  A free hen under attack uses a unique call to summon help from her rooster. Maybe because she doesn't want to dilute the call's efficacy by crying wolf, she never uses it for any other purpose. Caged battery hens make the same last-resort call for help.41 This means the cacophony in a henhouse is much more than purposeless noise: it's actually the sound of thousands of distressed hens repeating a rescue call over and over.42

  Cage-Not-So-Free

  Americans' hearts are increasingly in the right place, although sometimes we still lack facts. The American Egg Board estimates that at least 5 percent of the US eggs consumed in 2010 were cage-free, a number that grows as consumers are egged on to buy the output of “humanely” raised hens.43 We're told cage-free eggs are a compassionate alternative to battery eggs because, as one “progressive” farm boasts, the hens have “plenty of room to do the things that hens love most: scratch, flap their wings, perch, nest and roost in a carefully managed, safe, low stress environment.”44 However, while this may be the case at a handful of small, alternative farms, it is not the case at the vast majority of cage-free facilities.

  In fact, most cage-free hens are raised in industrial environments identical in almost all respects to battery cage facilities. Thus, like battery hens, cage-free hens are typically raised in dark steel-and-concrete warehouses reeking of ammonia and other fumes, where they are denied sunlight, dirt in which to bathe or scratch, and straw or other materials in which to nest. They're subjected to partial beak amputation and forced molting. Their brothers are killed at birth and discarded en masse in any manner that's cheap and easy.

  The term free-range refers to eggs from hens with access to the outdoors. However, few birds take advantage of the ability to go outside. Instead, free-range chickens follow learned behaviors and stay inside, generally ignoring or avoiding the outdoors. As noted, Michael Pollan observed that during his visits to free-range chicken farms, he never actually saw a bird go outside.45

  Jewel Johnson runs the Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary, a haven for rescued farm animals in Deer Trail, Colorado. She writes of her visit to a huge henhouse at a well-known organic, free-range egg farm:

  There was a strong stench . . . like a chicken coop times 10,000. . . . [The hens'] beaks were chopped off at the end. Their necks were featherless. Their combs were pale skin color untouched by the sun. . . . These birds only had the grate they were standing on and the metal walls surrounding them until they died. . . . There was no straw, and there was no wood to perch on. There was nothing natural in that building other than death and suffering. There were no windows to see a world other than this. The only roost was a metal one designed to collect eggs and take them away from the birds. There was nothing to build a nest with unless the birds used their feces and lost feathers as building material.46

  That's “humane” egg farming in an eggshell. The industry takes a loosely defined standard like “free-range” or “cage-free,” determines the minimum it must do to meet that standard, and proceeds accordingly. This kind of cage-free egg production might be incrementally better than a battery cage system, but is it really humane? To ask the question another way, is it humane for cage-free hens to be debeaked, denied basic instincts, assaulted by caustic fumes, subjected to starvation bouts, and crowded by the tens of thousands into dark warehouses?

  The Secret Lives of Chickens

  Some people may be inclined to dismiss details like these on the grounds that chickens are bird-brained and not smart enough to care. But remove any random chicken from its industrial environment, as rescuers sometimes do, and you'd soon discover an intelligent, social companion with a unique and friendly personality. Jeffrey Masson, who has written about his experience as friend and guardian to two rescued chickens, said the animals are “funny, curious, affectionate, stubborn, ingenious companions.”47

  A recent study suggests we can add empathetic to this list of traits. Researchers at the University of Bristol placed hens and their chicks in separate enclosures where the hens could see, smell, and hear their young. They subjected the chicks to short puffs of compressed air, which caused mild discomfort but no real pain. The chicks reacted aversively but did not make a distress call. Nevertheless, seeing their chicks apparently suffering, hens experienced an empathetic stress response that elevated their heart rates and body temperatures and made them vocalize.48

  Studies find that chickens are as smart as mammals, including some primates.49 In an interview with Chris Evans, a chicken researcher at Macquarie University in Australia, a New York Times reporter noted, “The chicken [has an] intriguing ability to understand that an object, when taken away and hidden, nevertheless continues to exist. This is beyond the capacity of small children.”50 And Colorado State University Professor Bernard Rollin observes, “Contrary to what one may hear from the industry, chickens are not mindless, simple automata but are complex behaviorally, do quite well in learning, show a rich social organization, and have a diverse repertoire of calls. Anyone who has kept barnyard chickens also recognizes their significant differences in personality.”51

  Karen Davis runs a poultry sanctuary in Machipongo, Virginia, founded the advocacy group United Poultry Concerns, and literally wrote the book on chicken welfare (Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry). Writing of her experiences living with dozens of chickens rescued from industrial farming, Davis observes:

  Chickens represented by the poultry industry as incapable of friendship with humans have rested in my lap with their eyes closed as peacefully as sleeping babies, and . . . they quickly learn their names. A little white hen from the egg industry named Karla became so friendly, all I had to do was call out “Karla!” and she would break through the other hens and head straight toward me, knowing she'd be scooped off the ground and kissed on her sweet face and over her closed eyes. And I can still see Vicky, our large white hen from a “broiler breeder” operation, whose right eye had been knocked out, peeking around the corner of her house each time I shouted, “Vicky, what are you doing in there?” And there was Henry, likewise from a broiler breeder operation, who came to our sanctuary dirty and angry after falling out of a truck on the way to a slaughter plant. Lavished with my attention, Henry, who at first couldn't bear to be touched, became as pliant and lovable as a big shaggy dog. I couldn't resist wrestling him to the ground with bearish hugs, and his joy at being placed in a garden where he could eat all the tomatoes he wanted was expressed in groans of ecstasy.52

  Industrial animal farmers don't set out to ignore animals' needs. Like other factory operators, they just want to keep costs low. But unlike a car maker or a toy company, the animal food industry's production units are living beings whose quality of life depends almost entirely on the amount spent on their welfare. There will always be conflict between making money and raising animals humanely. In any given year, one in seven laying hens dies of easy-to-treat causes like starvation, dehydration, or a prolapsed uterus. These deaths are just part of the cost of doing business, but the individual suffering that precedes each death doesn't show up in the financial statements. Why bother to provide costly veterinary care, when a laying hen can be replaced for $3? Why house birds comfortably in two sheds when they can be maintained more cheaply—albeit stressfully tightly—in one? Why settle for reduced egg output when hens can produce another dozen or two if they're starved to extreme distress?

  Enriched Cages

  Increasingly, voters and lawmakers around the world are questioning the egg industry's confinement practices. The European Union banned battery cages in 2012, requiring that laying hens live either cage-free or in enriched cages, which provide more space per bird as well as enrichment devices such as perches, nest boxes, and scratching areas. California's Proposition 2 re
quires that from 2015, laying hens must be housed in cages large enough to let them fully extend their wings in all directions without touching a cage wall or another hen.53 And in the wake of an agreement to support enriched cages between the United Egg Producers and the Humane Society of the United States, it seems that Congress may soon adopt legislation requiring enriched cages for hens in the United States.54

  However, some critics of the egg industry argue that enriched cages are not enough, and the only solution is to eliminate cages altogether. One commentator is veterinarian and University of California Professor Emeritus Nedim C. Buyukmihci, who writes:

  The increase in cage size dictated by [proposed enriched cage legislation], unfortunately, will have no meaningful positive impact. . . . Hens will still not be able to get proper exercise, they still will be too crowded to even properly stretch their wings, perches will be at an ineffectual height, and nest boxes will not be conducive to the needs for laying eggs.55

  Such debate is not unusual among those concerned for farm animals' welfare. Many believe, with good reason, that so-called humane farming measures do little to protect animals, and they'd rather see the abolition, not the amelioration, of the cruel practices found in factory farms. As we've seen, when implemented by industrial methods, even farming practices labeled organic, cage-free, and free-range are routinely little better for the animals than the more blatantly inhumane alternatives. For that reason, while I believe that eating less animal foods—or giving them up altogether—is a good way for an individual to address the problems described in this appendix, I don't advocate merely switching to purportedly humane animal products as a solution.