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Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry by Karen Davis, Ph.D. Book Publishing Company: Summertown, TN 1997. $12.95 pbk. 176 pages After the main character in Isaac Bashevis Singer's short story, "The Letter Writer," thinks about the ways animals are treated, he concludes that "all people are Nazis" and that for the animals it's "an eternal Treblinka." Nowhere in America is the might-makes-right fascist mindset more in evidence than in the poultry industry's exploitation and slaughter of billions of defenseless chickens. Nowhere is the image of "eternal Treblinka" more apt than with respect to the mass murder that takes place at killing centers euphemistically called "poultry processing plants." In Karen Davis's important new book about the American poultry industry, she describes the hellish worlds of the two main genetic types of chickens created by the modern poultry industry -- broiler chickens slaughtered by the billions for meat and laying hens exploited by the millions for eggs (and then slaughtered). The book paints a vivid picture of the natural needs and instincts of chickens, which Davis knows about firsthand from her care of rescued chickens, and contrasts it with the degradation and distress chickens suffer from hatchery to slaughter. The catalogue of cruelties includes: mutilation, crowding, injuries, diseases, debeaking, forced molting, antibiotics, ammonia burn, heat stress, cutting off the combs and toes of breeding chickens, horrendous experiments conducted by "poultry science" university departments, the mass killing of male chicks born to laying hens by suffocation, gassing, and grinding them up, and the constant exposure of chickens to what Terrence Des Pres called "the excremental universe" in his description of Nazi concentration camps. In a chapter called "Death," Davis describes the prolonged and tortured killing of chickens at the poultry processing plants. After the chickens are yanked out of their cases and clamped by the feet upside down on moving racks which drag them through electrified water, workers cut their necks and leave them to bleed to death slowly in bleed-out tunnels. Their deaths can take up to nine minutes. In the never-ending quest to find more efficient ways to kill chickens, modern poultry researchers are looking for alternatives to present stunning methods. One of their ideas is to gas the chickens inside their transport crates. That would eliminate the carcass damage caused by the handling involved in removal and shackling. The researchers' gas of choice would be hypoxia mixed with small amounts of carbon dioxide and argon. During World War II, Germans tried something similar: in their search for more efficient ways to kill "sub-humans" they built gas vans which gassed their victims while the vans drove them to a mass grave. The three large stationary vans set up by the Germans in the woods near Kulmhof (Chelmno) in Wartheland in late 1941 became the first of the six Nazi extermination camps. Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs is a powerful wake-up call to a nation in a moral stupor. Anybody who eats chicken or eggs after reading this book should go straight back to school and take a refresher course in reading comprehension. © 1997 by Charles Patterson Charles Patterson, Ph.D. is the
author of Animal Rights, The Civil Rights Movement, and The Oxford 50th
Anniversary Book of the United Nations.
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