How Does Chicken and Turkey Get to Your Table?
Egg Production and Factory Farming of Chicken and Turkey
TRIGGER WARNING: This is important information, but it may be upsetting. Consider having an adult with your for support or skipping this part altogether.
Step Three: The shackled birds are run through an electrified water bath that stuns them, making them immobile and unaware. In a process called “bleeding,” the birds necks are slit causing them to bleed to death.
What Happens to Male Chicks on Egg Farms?
Humane Care of Chickens and Turkeys: What They Need to Be Happy and Healthy
Stretching and Flapping Wings
Foraging and Hunting for Bugs
Roosting
Taking Dust Baths
Preening (Self Grooming)
Housing: The goal of factory farming is to squeeze as many chickens and turkeys as possible into cages or barn space. The vast majority of factory farmed birds spend the entirety of their lives indoors, and overcrowding makes it almost impossible for the birds to move much less exhibit normal behaviors. These conditions increase diseases within the flock and birds mutilating other birds. For this reason, “debeaking,” removal of the end of the beak with no anesthesia or pain medication is common practice. Unfortunately, the label, “Free Range” simply means the birds are not in cages. It does not mean that all the birds have access to going outdoors (there may be only one small door in the entire barn) or for how long they can stay outdoors.
Step Two: The live birds are moved on a conveyer belt to workers who hang them upside-down in shackles. This process is known as Live-Shackle Slaughter. In some slaughter houses the birds are exposed to gases that stop their breathing.
Socializing
Step One: Factory farmed birds are transported to the slaughterhouse in cramped wire cages, typically aboard massive transport trucks.
MAJOR TRIGGER WARNING: IF YOU CHOOSE TO READ THIS, PLEASE HAVE AN ADULT WITH YOU.
In egg laying operations, male chicks serve no purpose and are disposed of shortly after hatching. The most common way to slaughter them in the United States is to place the live chicks on a conveyor belt that drops them into a grinder, a process called maceration.
In-ovo sexing a technology used to determine the sex of a chick within the egg. The male eggs can be discarded before the chicks hatch. Currently, few hatcheries in the United States use this technology.
