Farmers Put Live Chickens in Wood Chippers (what the cluck?)

Reuters ^

[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.

[finnman69]

Why is this a big deal?

Where do we think Chicken McNuggets come from?

[Frapster]

lol - now that's what I call TLC.

[demosthenes the elder]

ooooo! omeletting that one go.

[AdA$tra]

A chicken retirement home?

Hows abouts a chicken shoot over yonder to the city dump.

[AdA$tra]

Ted Kennedy just drowns the chicks that won't lay - uses his olsmobile

I had to read that twice to make sure you really said that... LOL!

[Jhoffa_]

Surely there was a more humane way than this.

Just unbelieveable, imo..

[dpa5923]

Now that's funny!

[AdA$tra]

Besides, anyone that has ever been to a chicken processing plant knows the chickens that got fed thru the wood chipper are getting a good deal.

There: Now the truth has been spoken. I didn't even have to work there. I just had a friend who did for one day.

[Caesar Soze]

Unless I'm confabulating memories more than usual, dumping-into-chippers/grinders is standard operating procedure for dealing with unwanted chicks. Given a large enough chipper -- and we're not talking the kind of chipper Grandma uses to grind up fallen tree branches into decorative mulch, I'm guessing -- I don't see how putting bigger chickens into them is any crueller. My only concerns would be that the sound of the chipper and the smell of blood would cause panic in the birds as they waited to die, or that they wouldn't be rapidly pulled into the cutting mechanisms and might flop about bleeding to death.

[Pearman]

Ditto on that, thinktwice. Also if you have ever operated a chipper you know that they run at such a high speed and are so efficient that there is not enough time between insertion and expulsion for a small animal such as a chicken to feel any measurable pain before death.
I suspect these guys thought for health reasons it was the least messy and contamination free way to do it. They may have been wrong in there thinking, but in California you can't simply burn unwanted things anymore, so cremation was probably out of the question. What else were they going to do? Gas the birds and then put them in a landfill?

[Mr. Silverback]

Um...They couldn't find a meat cleaver? That's how folks used to kill chickens, once upon a time before the rise of the slaughterhouse.

[Eaker]

a big-ass chipper

Would that be the Jennifer Lopez model????

[Dallas]

#94

LOL

[Lockbar]

The guy that chopped up his wife in a wood chipper, All they found was a finger nail and a tooth, but it was enough to find him guilty.

[LibKill]

You know what kind of racket a woodchipper makes when you feed it wood.

I wonder what sound it makes when you feed it a chicken?

[moyden2000]

PETA is evil.

[demosthenes the elder]

no - the Rosie O'Donnel KMart Blue Light Special

[P_A_I]

We may have found another conservative tipping point.

Neos cry fowl.

Paleos laugh at the crying.

Libertarians cluck, & chuckle at both.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Geeze louise..there was no other way?

I suppose that the farmers could pretend they were baby seals and club them with baseball bats...

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Did they actually find that at Mickey D's or something?