May
2000
Changing
the Legal Status of Chickens
By Karen Davis
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Under the current American legal system, a practice,
however inhumane, can be economically defended as a standard agricultural
practice, such as the debeaking of chickens and turkeys, and is not
deemed "cruel." The federal Animal Welfare Act excludes farmed
animals from oversight, and the federal "Humane Methods of Slaughter
Act," which applies to cattle, pigs, sheep and horses, is not
enforced. Moreover, the Slaughter Act excludes all birds, so that 98
percent of
all animals slaughtered in the U.S. are not given even a modicum of
protection from cruel and painful deaths.
In the 1990s three bills were introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives
that sought to amend the Poultry Products Inspection Act to require
the slaughter of poultry in accordance with "humane" methods—to
obtain comparable protection of poultry with livestock under the law.
None of these bills ever got past the House Agriculture Subcommittee
on Livestock, although United Poultry Concerns (UPC) succeeded in getting
the Subcommittee to hold a hearing on one bill in 1994.
At the outset of the hearing, at which I testified, the Chairman, Harold
L. Volkmer (D-MO), announced that he did not support extending "humane"
slaughter legislation to poultry. During the hearing he joked about
killing chickens while growing up on a farm. Representative Volkmer’s
attitude exemplified a chief reason why this legislation for poultry
was important. The absence of a law conveys the false notion to lawmakers,
the public and those who work directly with poultry that these birds
do not suffer, or that their suffering does not matter, and that society
has no moral obligation toward them.
While UPC opposes the slaughtering and eating of animals, we recognize
that without laws there is no accountability and prosecutions are impossible.
Exploiters cannot be counted on to police themselves. Currently, there
is no federal welfare law in the U.S. for poultry, even though, as
Rep.
Andy Jacobs (D-IN) said at a briefing on behalf of another House bill,
birds raised for consumers’ plates "bleed, hurt and cry just
like any other creature."
A primary obstacle to achieving federal legislation for farmed animals
is that bills designed to protect them go directly to the Agriculture
Committees of the Senate and the House of Representatives, which continue
to fail to pass them. Unless and until this changes, there is little
hope that such bills will be moved to the point of becoming legislation.
This leaves the states.
Every state in the U.S. has an anticruelty statute, allowing fines
and minimal jail time to be imposed on convicted animal abusers. For
this
reason, over the past two decades, many states have quietly amended
their anticruelty statutes to exclude all animals raised for food and
to exempt practices affecting these animals from regulation or even
investigation by a licensed cruelty investigator, thereby ensuring
that
95 percent of all animals in this country have no legal protection. "Farmers" can do whatever they want to animals raised for
food without fear of legal intervention, as long as they can show that
their activities constitute "customary" farming practices.
Protected practices include not only the range of current abuses—debeaking,
claw removal, food withdrawal, castration, electric prods, and lack
of sunlight, fresh air and space to turn around in—but any new
abuses that agribusiness chooses to inflict on animals in the future.
A huge problem in our society is the distinction that we make between
personal, "wanton" acts of cruelty, like an angry man beating
his dog with no economic motive, and institutionalized cruelty, in which
the profit motive supersedes every other consideration. The farm-animal
production system relies on public and government collusion to uphold
the "motivation" argument, which runs: "We’re not
being deliberately cruel, like setting cats on fire for fun; we’re
acting in the interest of business, increasing our company’s and
our industry’s wealth, while saving consumers money."
If someone withheld food from their pet for days or weeks, that person
would probably be charged with cruelty to animals and the news media
would run with the story. Yet each year in the U.S., the egg industry
intentionally deprives millions of hens of food for up to 14 days,
but
the cameras aren’t rolling and no one is paying a fine or going
to jail. The practice of starving hens for profit is known as forced-molting.
Molting literally refers to the replacement of old feathers by new
ones
in birds over the course of a year to maintain good plumage at all
times. A natural molt often happens at the onset of winter, when nature
discourages
the hatching of chicks. The hen stops laying eggs and concentrates
her energies on staying warm and growing new feathers. The egg industry
exploits this natural process by forcing flocks to molt simultaneously
in order to pump a few hundred more eggs out of exhausted hens. As
a
consequence hens develop immune system dysfunction and thus become
an easy prey for transmittable pathogens like Salmonella enteritidis
and
other disease organisms. Their bones weaken and their internal organs
develop pathologies including gastrointestinal hemorrhage.
This past February, the Association of Veterinarians for Animal Rights
(AVAR) and United Poultry Concerns succeeded in getting an Assembly
Bill introduced in California that would ban forced molting in California.
Introduced by Assembly Member Ted Lempert (D-Palo Alto), the bill would
make it unlawful to deprive any hen used for egg-laying purposes of
food or water or otherwise cause a forced molt that results in harm
to the bird.
Conversations with California Assembly Members and staffers convinced
the AVAR that the best and probably only way of getting a bill to ban
forced molting, let alone getting one passed into law, was to emphasize
the health (Salmonella) issue.
If it were up to UPC, starving a hen or a dog would be classed as a
felony offense carrying the same penalty as starving a child or anyone
else. The infliction of deliberate harm upon an innocent and defenseless
creature is felonious in our view. But while depriving an animal of
food in California is considered a misdemeanor under the Penal Code,
using that law to prosecute California egg producers for starving their
hens, while possible in principle, is unlikely in view of the latitude
given to "customary" farming practices and the virtual nonentity
status of poultry in the U.S. It seems, rather, that highlighting a
specific type of food deprivation situation might have a better chance
of getting lawmakers’ attention. The conditions to which hens
have been relegated in our society could use the spotlight, while showing
the tie between their mistreatment and its effect on human health is
one way to get some people to start looking at these birds and reflect
on how horribly we treat them.
This doesn’t mean that we must not vigorously practice and promote
a vegan lifestyle. We must. One of the best days on earth will be the
day that the categories of "farm animal, "poultry," "livestock,"
"lab animal," "circus animal" and "fur-bearing"
animal no longer exist. Meanwhile, given the plight of chickens in our
society, we should do everything we can to help them on all fronts,
because, at this point, chickens are not even considered a "subclass"
of animals in America, despite the fact that "With increased knowledge
of the behaviour and cognitive abilities of the chicken has come the
realization that the chicken is not an inferior species to be treated
merely as a food source." (Lesley J. Rogers, The Development of
Brain and Behaviour in the Chicken, 1995).
Karen Davis, Ph.D. is President and Director of United Poultry
Concerns, a non-profit organization which promotes the compassionate
and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. She is the author of Prisoned
Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry.
For information, call (757) 678-7875 or visit www.upc-online.org.
