Wood-chipper slaughter stirs debate

Associated Press via Houston Chronicle ^ | July 6, 2003, 10:52PM | NADA EL SAWY

[weegee]

Wood-chipper slaughter stirs debate Animal activists push for changes By NADA EL SAWY Associated Press

LOS ANGELES -- The owners of a Southern California egg farm insist they did nothing wrong when they slaughtered 30,000 chickens, quarantined because of a virus, by throwing them into wood chippers.

State authorities agreed and decided not to file animal cruelty charges.

That decision has incensed animal-rights advocates -- and some producers -- who say it's an example of the need for stricter laws and enforcement to stop what they consider inhumane slaughter of livestock.

"It's not what we do," said Paul Bahan, owner of AAA Egg Farms in Riverside County, who chairs an industry committee targeting treatment of poultry.

Amid a growing national push for better treatment of livestock, the industry is enacting new guidelines for slaughterhouses and farms that will take into account everything from the size of cages to the ways animals are killed. Restaurant and grocery store chains are urging independent audits of the nation's 900 slaughterhouses, and the federal government is moving to hire more inspectors.

Critics say the changes aren't happening fast enough.

During a hearing in May on agriculture appropriations, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., called on the Agriculture Department to speed up the hiring of inspectors.

"Despite the laws on the books, chronically weak enforcement and intense pressure to speed up slaughterhouse assembly lines reportedly have resulted in animals being skinned, dismembered, and boiled while they are still alive and conscious," Byrd said.

Members of Congress also have received a video from Sen. Jim Moran, D-Va., actor Alec Baldwin and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The tape, titled Meet Your Meat, contains graphic images of cruelty at farms.

The American Meat Institute denied that enforcement at slaughterhouses is weak and that animals are routinely abused. Officials also pointed out that the plants can't operate unless an inspector is on the premises.

In the past decade, the $133 billion processing and packing industry has taken a number of steps to improve animals' final moments, such as redesigning pens to accommodate natural movements and minimizing use of electric prods, American Meat Institute spokeswoman Janet Riley said. Such treatment is not only ethical, it's good business, she said.

"If an animal is stressed when it goes to slaughter ... it will emit hormones that create quality defects in meat that then has to be trimmed away," she said.

Each year, 8 billion chickens and turkeys, 97 million hogs, 35 million cattle, 3 million sheep and lambs, and 1 million calves are slaughtered in the United States.

Larger animals are usually killed with a gun that shoots a rod directly into the brain. Chickens are typically stunned in an electrified bath before their heads are cut off with a rotating blade. Others are suffocated with carbon dioxide or their necks are broken.

The 45-year-old federal Humane Slaughter Act offers guidelines on slaughtering but only requires that animals be rendered "insensible to pain" before being killed. It excludes poultry from that requirement. State laws vary.

In the wood chipper case, the USDA did not approve the slaughter method, said Ed Lloyd, a department spokesman. The decision on filing charges was up to the San Diego County district attorney's office, which declined in May after determining there was no criminal intent by farm owners Arie and Bill Wilgenburg.

Officials have said the brothers acted on the advice of a veterinarian. The birds could not be sent to a slaughterhouse because they had been quarantined after an outbreak of a bird virus, Exotic Newcastle Disease.

While the case is unusual, animal welfare advocates say it shows that farmers are seldom held responsible when animals are subjected to unnecessary pain and suffering.

The USDA reported that from January 1998 to January 2003, 21 of the nation's slaughterhouses were cited for violations related to mistreatment.

It says the relatively low number of citations shows enforcement methods are working.

"We make our living by selling cows. We don't make our living by abusing them," said Arthur Green, whose Benton Packing Co. in Springdale, Ark., was cited last year for having too many cows in one pen.

[weegee]

In the wood chipper case, the USDA did not approve the slaughter method, said Ed Lloyd, a department spokesman. The decision on filing charges was up to the San Diego County district attorney's office, which declined in May after determining there was no criminal intent by farm owners Arie and Bill Wilgenburg.

The USDA had no say in the manner of killing of these animals because they were being destroyed to prevent further infection. They were not killed for use as a food or drug which is where the USDA's power lies.

That said, I do not agree with the practice of throwing living things into a wood-chipper. If the chickens had been injected first (or gassed?), then the destruction of the carcases may have been easier to defend.

It sounds like this rare event is being used to push for other investigations into animal slaughter for food.

"If an animal is stressed when it goes to slaughter ... it will emit hormones that create quality defects in meat that then has to be trimmed away," she said.

Most predatory animals eat live animals. That has to be quite stressful to the animal being chased, captured, and eaten. Do the predators eat around this "tainted meat"?

[TheAngryClam]

The solution is simple: ban assault chipper-shredders!

[sine_nomine]

Do any of these people care about the pain caused to the unborn baby when the child is killed? Americans kill at least one million helpless children each year.

[dalereed]

"That said, I do not agree with the practice of throwing living things into a wood-chipper. If the chickens had been injected first (or gassed?), then the destruction of the carcases may have been easier to defend."

They had to destroy thousands because of newcastle disease and a wood chipper is instant death, probably less pain than giving it an injection. This has been hashed around here locally and everyone as much as told PETA to go stick it!

[Calpernia]

AND, where was this ban when the plastic shredder was uncovered in Iraq that was used on humans????

[Threepwood]

These animals had a virus. I'm not sure a wood chipper is the best way to get rid of them. All that areosolized chicken? Not only is that dangerous in terms of germ spread, it must have been right nasty to watch. Blech.

The correct strategy for my money is pitch them directly into some kind of mobile furnace, or a tank of caustic chemical. Sounds awful, but chickens can carry viruses that can make the jump into people, and these are issues we need to think about.

[Calpernia]

>>>Each year, 8 billion chickens and turkeys, 97 million hogs, 35 million cattle, 3 million sheep and lambs, and 1 million calves are slaughtered in the United States.

I believe some of these were on my grill today. YUM.

[Calpernia]

Ping for fun.

[squidly]

All I know is I wouldn't want to be the guy who has to clean the wood chipper.

[Calpernia]

>>>areosolized chicken

Hmmm, now you had to go and put logic in this thread! I was being a wiza gal playing on the PETA spin.

darn you...Ok. So is this a factor?

[hole_n_one]

Drop the chicken!

[honeygrl]

This was posted a while back apparently when it first happened. The chicken had to be killed and there were 30,000 of them. So the question is, how do you otherwise kill that many without going totally broke in the process? If it was a large wood chipper, they would've died almost intantly. Would it have been better for them to chop off all their heads and have 30,000 headless chickens running around? (they do run around after their heads are cut off) Injecting or gassing that many chickens would've been a longer, more drawn out death and that would've taken a lot of money and much more man power. I'm not sure what they did with the chippered up meat but it seems like if they had bags attached to the output of the wood chipper, they could've sealed them and disposed of them with a large bonfire or something. Honestly, to me it doesn't sound like it was such a bad way to do it considering how many they had to kill. As long as it was a large wood chipper, it was likely a much quicker and more humane death than they use at chicken-for-food factories. Killing this many animals at one time is going to sound gruesome no matter how it's done.

[honeygrl]

"The correct strategy for my money is pitch them directly into some kind of mobile furnace, or a tank of caustic chemical. Sounds awful, but chickens can carry viruses that can make the jump into people, and these are issues we need to think about. "

A large bonfire type situation probably would've been a good alternative. I would think that the people who did it probably were required to dispose of the remains properly afterward to ensure the virus didn't spread. In the previous article I read on this, the guys had talked it over with some sort of official-type-government employee beforehand to be sure it was OK to do. The animal rights activists just got their panties in a wad though after they heard about it.

[Threepwood]

Well, I'm not an engineer, but even stabbing another person with a knife areosolizes enough blood to make disease transmission possible. Throwing hundreds or thousands of whole, live chickens into motorized blades would have to have a similar effect on a much larger scale.

If there isn't something to filter the "output", I'm not sure how this couldn't be a hazard. My leaf shredder will just about make leaves into an inhalable powder, which is why I wear a mask. If you had a zoomorphic (I think that's the word) disease on hand, this could be a very effective vector into people.

At this point, I would like to thank Freerepublic.com for offering me a forum on which I could seriously consider the effects and risks of putting a diseased chicken into a leaf shredder. This line of thought is unique in my experience, and wouldn't have come about without your help.:)

[Wacka]

http://www.miketheheadlesschicken.org/

[Moonman62]

LOL. That's the only reason I looked at this thread.

[honeygrl]

Here is the previous article:
Farmers Put Live Chickens in Wood Chippers (what the cluck?)

Posted on 04/14/2003 2:44 PM EDT by Dallas
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -
Two California poultry farmers who fed some 30,000 live chickens into wood chippers will not face criminal charges because they had permission from the U.S. Department of Agriculture , prosecutors said on Friday.

But a spokesman for the Humane Society of the United States called the farmers "callous and barbaric" and disagreed with the decision not to prosecute them.

The farmers needed to destroy the chickens because they were "spent" -- or no longer able to produce eggs -- and could not make chicken soup out of them because the farms were under quarantine for the poultry virus Exotic Newcastle Disease, District Attorney's spokeswoman Gayle Stewart said.

Stewart said the men, who run a poultry farm near San Diego, asked a senior veterinarian with the Agriculture Department if they could employ the wood chippers and were given permission.

"Once they had permission we decided that they did not have any criminal intent," Stewart said.

Brothers Arie and Will Wilgenburg, who run Escondido-based Ward Poultry Farm, could not be reached for comment on Friday. Earlier, they told the San Diego Union Tribune newspaper that they were doing "what we thought we had to do" based on expert advice and stopped as soon as they learned otherwise.

Wayne Pacelle, a spokesman for the Humane Society, said that explanation was unacceptable.

"The act of feeding live chickens into a wood chipper is an extraordinarily callous and barbaric act and I can't imagine any person with a whit of common sense would use a wood chipper as a killing tool," he said. "No person with any experience in killing animals would sanction the use of this technique."

Pacelle said the District Attorney's decision not to prosecute the brothers rested on the "faulty assumption" that using wood chippers to kill chickens was an accepted practice.

[Threepwood]

Gotcha. Well, if the local health people say it's ok, that's good enough for me.

[honeygrl]

"Gotcha. Well, if the local health people say it's ok, that's good enough for me."

My favorite quote from that article is from Wayne Pacelle, a spokesman for the Humane Society:

"No person with any experience in killing animals would sanction the use of this technique."

I guess that means we all need some more experience in killing animals. Get out your guns! Time to go hunting!

[Calpernia]

Well now, you added significant logic to bring my humor to a halt. That was an interesting post. I will stop now with my trolling.