I have met quite a few people who seem to think that chickens are vegetables. When someone says he or she is a vegetarian, these people reply with something like, “Yes, but you do eat chicken, don’t you?” I feel reasonably confident that most of today’s poultry producers know their stock well enough to realize that chickens aren’t vegetables. But they seem unable to grasp the fact that they are animals, and as such have profound territorial needs.
At the Hainsworth Farm in Mt. Morris, New York, naturalist Roy Bedichek found four and even five hens squeezed into cages 12 inches by 12 inches.’1 Under these conditions, the birds are unable to lift a single wing. In fact, they are squeezed together so tightly that they have a great deal of difficulty even turning around in place. This is not seen by the factory managers as a bad thing, though. With their bodies in forced contact at all times on all sides with other chickens, they absorb heat from their fellow inmates, so this cuts down on heating costs.
The Hainsworth farm is an extreme example. But the industry norm isn’t much better. A surprisingly large percentage of the eggs eaten in Los Angeles come from the 345 acre “Egg City” in Moorpark, California.” Here, some 2,200,000 eggs are laid daily by 3 million hens. The hens are housed five to each 16-by-iS cage.”
To get a chicken’s eye view of these conditions, picture yourself standing in a crowded elevator. The elevator is so crowded, in fact, that your body is in contact on all sides with other bodies. Even to turn around in place would be difficult. And one more thing to keep in mind—this is your life. It is not just a temporary bother, until you get to your floor. This is permanent. Your only release will be at the hands of the executioner.
By the way, in your picture of the elevator, you may have imagined the other people trapped with you as doing the very best they can to hold still, and not make things difficult for you. But what if all the others do not have the ability to understand what is happening? What if they react to the terror of it all with raw instinct, without even a trace of a civilized veneer? What if, like you, they have powerflul territorial needs, and the utter frustration of the situation has driven them literally insane, prone to erupt into violehce with or without provocation?
Now imagine ffirther that the floor of the elevator is slanted sharply, so gravity tends to push you all in one direction. The ceiling is so short that you and the others can only stand upright towards one side, and the floor is made of a wire mesh that is terribly uncomfortable to everyone’s feet. And to complete this approximation of the living conditions in today’s factory farms, what if some of the others trapped with you in the elevator have, in their madness, become cannibalistic?
These are the conditions which the industry tells us is a “chicken heaven.” This is the actual living situation of the chickens whose flesh and eggs Americans eat.