Transport and Slaughter

Chickens are shipped through all weather extremes to slaughterhouses that are often hundreds of miles away.

Chickens who survive the horrific conditions of broiler sheds or battery cages are transported to the slaughterhouse. Workers rush through the sheds, grabbing birds by their legs and slinging them into crates for transport. Tens of millions suffer from broken wings and legs from the rough handling, and some hemorrhage to death. The journey to the slaughterhouse may be hundreds of miles long, but chickens are given no food or water and are shipped through all weather conditions. People who spot chicken-transport trucks on the highway frequently report seeing the heads of dead and dying chickens protruding from the crates.

Some birds miss the throat-slitting machine and drown in the scalding-hot water of the defeathering tanks.

After this nightmarish journey, the bewildered chickens are dumped out of the crates, and workers violently grab them and snap them—upside-down by their ankles—into shackles, breaking many birds’ legs in the process. The terrified animals struggle to escape, often defecating and vomiting on the workers. An undercover investigator at a Perdue slaughterhouse reported that “the screaming of the birds and the frenzied flapping of their wings was so loud that you had to yell to the worker next to you.”

Once in the shackles, the upside-down birds are dragged through an electrified water bath meant to paralyze the animals, not render them unconscious. In her renowned book Slaughterhouse, Gail Eisnitz explains: “Other industrialized nations require that chickens be rendered unconscious or killed prior to bleeding and scalding, so they won’t have to go through those processes conscious. Here in the United States, however, poultry plants—exempt from the Humane Slaughter Act and still clinging to the industry myth that a dead animal won’t bleed properly—keep the stunning current down to about one-tenth that needed to render a chicken unconscious.”²⁷ This means that chickens are still fully conscious when their throats are cut.

After the blade cuts their necks, blood slowly drains from the dying birds. But many birds flap about and miss the blade. These birds may have their throats slit by the “backup cutter,” but workers testify that it’s impossible for them to catch all the birds who miss the blade. According to USDA records, millions of chickens every year are still fully conscious when they are dunked into the scalding-hot water of the defeathering tanks.

According to Eisnitz, most hens used for their eggs are “neither rendered unconscious nor paralyzed [by the electric bath]. After a year or so of laying eggs, their bones are so brittle that immersion in electrically charged water would cause them to shatter.”²⁸ These birds, who feel pain just like cats and dogs, are scalded to death in the defeathering tanks.

You Can Help

Chickens are not protected by a single federal law.

Chickens are inquisitive, interesting animals who are as intelligent as mammals like cats, dogs, and even primates. When in their natural surroundings, they like to spend their days together scratching for food, caring for their young, cleaning themselves in dust baths, roosting in trees, and lying in the sun. Please don’t support an industry that abuses billions of these fascinating animals.

Learn how you can help save chickens from miserable lives and painful deaths.

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²⁷ Gail Eisnitz, Slaughterhouse, Prometheus Books: Amherst, New York, 1997, p.166.
²⁸ Eisnitz.