Despite being treated consistently as machinery in today’s chicken factories, the chickens still stubbornly refuse to settle down and devote themselves singlemindedly to producing as many eggs as possible and growing as fat as they can, in the shortest possible length of time. Instead, they insist on thinking of themselves as animals, with drives and needs.
But today’s chickens are allowed no expression of their natural urges. They cannot walk around, scratch the ground, build a nest, or even stretch their wings. Every instinct is frustrated. The bizarre lighting manipulations allow these light-sensitive creatures no vestige of a natural sleep cycle. They cannot establish a pecking order, or any sense of social identity. They cannot keep out of each other’s way, and weaker birds have no escape from the stronger ones, already maddened by the grotesque conditions in which they live.
The result is that these passionate creatures live in a state of perpetual panic. They fly into an uproar at the slightest disturbance, and show every sign of having been driven completely out of their minds. One naturalist noted:
“The battery chickens I have observed seem to lose their minds about the lime they would normally be weaned by their mothers and off in the weeds thasing grasshoppers on their own account. Yes, literally, the battery becomes a gallinaceous madhouse.”
Another reporter states:
“The birds in the laying house are hysterical. . . Birds squawk, cackle and cluck as they scramble over one another for a peck at
the automatically controlled grain trough or a drink of water. This is how the hens spend their short life of ceaseless production. stampedes. With no apparent caus a wave of hysteria sweeps over the whole battery; wild, unnatural chirps, jumbled screams, and a fluttering as if every feather on every chicken had become possessed and frantic.
In their panic, the birds will sometimes pile on top of each other and some will smother to death. Poultry producers are not by and large what you would call sentimental types, but since smothered birds represent a “waste of feed” this is the type of thing that will definitely spur them into action. Not to be outsmarted, they have found the piling problem can be decreased by crowding the chickens so tightly into wire cages they can hardly move. This way, when they panic, they can’t pile on top of each other as readily.
The cages produce a few problems of their own, however, that make the calling of them “chicken heavens” even more deceitful: the caged hens still try to behave as if they were designed by Nature to live on the earth, instead of in wire cages. For instance, their toenails continue to grow. With no solid ground to wear the nails down, they become very long, and can get permanently entangled in the wire. The ex-president of a national poultry organization wrote in the Poultry Tribune about the many times when, on removing a batch of hens from a cage:
we have discovered chickens literally grown fast to the cage. It seems the thickens’ toes got caught in the wire mesh in some
manner and would not loosen. So, in time, the flesh of the toes grew completely around the wire. “
Needless to say, those birds who get stuck in the back of the cage, where they cannot reach food or water, starve to death.
Once again, howevei the minds that created this whole situation have come up with an ingenious solution to prevent such a distressing “waste of feed.” The idea is simply to cut off the toes of the little chicks when they are a day or two of age.