FORT WAYNE, Indiana––A predawn fire on July 28, 2014 killed 65,000 hens at an Egg Innovations barn in Kosciusko County, Indiana, reviving attention to a two-year-old National Fire Protection Association proposal to require sprinkler systems in farm animal housing.
“Flames were showing. Probably shooting in the air about 20 feet,” Atwood fire chief Mike Harmon told WANE-TV of Fort Wayne.
The Kosciusko County barn had been acquired by Egg Innovations about a year and a half before the fire, local media reported. The dead hens were about four weeks from being introduced to egg production.
“Though Egg Innovations bills itself as a ‘free range’ and ‘certified humane’ facility, this tragedy sheds light on the deceptiveness of labeling and just one of the many dangers chickens face when exploited for their eggs on commercial farms,” blogged Ari Solomon for Mercy for Animals.
Egg Innovations, descended from an egg farm founded by Herbert Brunnquell in Ozaukee County, Wisconsin, in 1917, has emerged in recent years as a national leader in cage-free egg production. The Brunnquell family focused on dairy farming for several decades, but refocused on egg production after a barn fire in the late 1960s, company president John Brunnquell told Agriview assistant editor Sara Schoenborn in December 2012.
Egg Innovations in 2000 became the first egg producer certified by the Free Farmed program formerly operated under the auspices of the American Humane Association, later replaced by the current AHA Humane Heartland program. After Free Farmed founder Adele Douglas left the AHA at the end of 2002 to found Humane Farm Animal Care, with more stringent standards than those of Humane Heartland, Egg Innovations become one of the first producers to qualify for the HFAC Certified Humane logo. Summarizes the Egg Innovations web page, “This means that the animals are fed a nutritious diet without antibiotics or hormones, and are raised with shelter, resting areas, sufficient space and the ability to engage in natural behaviors.”
Egg Innovations produces Blue Sky brand free range eggs, from hens who “have never been caged, and are free to roam inside and out of their barns during favorable weather,” the company advertises.
The lack of fire suppression systems in barns was spotlighted earlier in 2014 after a January 31 blaze killed 300,000 egg-laying hens at the S&R Egg Farm in La Grange, Wisconsin.
Free-range hen. (Beth Clifton)
“In 2012 more than 600,000 farmed animals––mainly chickens and turkeys––died in fires in commercial housing facilities in the U.S.,” said United Poultry Concerns founder Karen Davis.
“There is a reason hell is depicted as eternal fire,” blogged Chicago-based health writer Martha Rosenberg. “Yet millions of farm animals die in preventable fires enabled by industrial scale farming. Recent burn victims include 7,000 turkeys at a Butterball operation in North Carolina, 250,000 chickens at an Ohio Fresh Eggs facility, and 500,000 chickens at Moark Hatcheries in Colorado.”
The National Fire Protection Association in 2012 proposed an amendment to the 2013 edition of NFPA 150: Standard of Fire & Fire Life Safety in Animal Housing Facilities which would have required all newly-built farmed animal housing facilities to have both sprinklers and smoke control systems.
Founded in 1896, the National Fire Protection Association publishes and frequently updates fire safety standards used by insurance underwriters and often written into building codes.
National Fire Protection Association data shows that firefighters respond to about 830 barn fires per year in the U.S., doing $28 million worth of damage.
“The NFPA already requires sprinklers in facilities housing animals like bears and elephants who can’t be easily moved,” observed Rosenberg. “But 15 big ag groups including the National Chicken Council, National Turkey Federation, United Egg Producers, and cattle, pork, and dairy producers appealed against the NFPA proposal and it was scrapped. The reason? Animals’ lives are not worth the cost, says big ag.”
Michael Formica, chief environmental counsel for the National Pork Producers Council, alleged that installing the NFPA-recommended fire protection systems would bring “staggering costs in the billions of dollars,” said that many farms lack “sufficient water supply available to service an automated sprinkler system,” and even that installing such systems and “the sprinkler water itself” would spread disease, Rosenberg recalled.
Beth & Merritt Clifton.
(Geoff Geiger photo)
In truth, the existing water supply system serving the animals at any farm could double as a sprinkler system just by adding heat-sensitive sprinkler heads. No more water would be needed than the water already in the supply lines.
United Poultry Concerns on February 10, 2014 posted a Change.org petition in support of the NFPA proposal, sent the NFPA a formal public comment about it, and urged other animal advocacy organizations to do likewise: http://www.upc-online.org/welfare/140210nfpa_petition.html.
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Thank you for drawing people’s attention to the horror and agony endured by tens of millions of chickens, turkeys, pigs, cows and other farmed animals each year in the US and elsewhere trapped in buildings they cannot escape from when a fire breaks out. United Poultry Concerns launched a campaign in 2012 urging the National Fire Protection Association in Quincy, MA to require agribusiness corporations and farmers to install sprinklers and smoke control systems in the buildings their animals are trapped in. Currently, farm animal owners have no accountability at all. They simply allow the chickens and other animals to burn and suffocate to death and let taxpayers pay through US Department of Agriculture reimbursement programs to rebuild and restock the facilities. This July 28 fire killing 65,000 hens is one more reason to stop raising animals for food, one more example of the fact that there can be no such thing as “humane” animal farming. My heart aches for these hens and the agony they endured in the fire that slowly destroyed them. May their sad and terrified souls find peace far, far away from the terrible world that human beings forced them to live and die in. Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns. http://www.upc-online.org
Thank you for the coverage of this chicken barn fire loss and a lucid summary of the issues facing the technical committee of the NFPA 150 Standard. As you can imagine – there are many obstacles to be overcome in implementation of these recommendations.
I will be attending the meeting in October of the committee as an alternate member and will provide a opinion and summary to Mr. Clifton afterwords.
Additionally, I will be presenting at AAEP veterinarians this year about improvements to barns (including sprinkler recommendations) in equine facilities.
Sharing with colleagues.
Dr. Rebecca Gimenez
President, http://www.tlaer.org
Factory farming on any level by its very nature engenders abuse, neglect and suffering. This would be avoidable if there were no factory farms. Having enjoyed the pleasure of having chickens in our family in the past, I hope that that time will come.
The deaths of 65,000 hens by this most recent of many human-perpetrated holocausts on enslaved birds highlights, not a need to install sprinklers on the nation’s thousands of gigantic slave shacks, but the need to end the enslavement of all animals. Humans’ being plant-foraging herbivorous apes originating on the African savanna with no need of direct contact with nonhuman animals, all human uses of other animals — including those purporting to be well-intentioned, such as love — are forms of animal abuse.
Sincerely,
David Cantor
Executive Director
Responsible Policies for Animals
Thank you for reporting this. The letter below that I wrote to the National Fire Protection Association was sent in April after their call for public comments. Maybe more of your readers could send letters to the NFPA.
——————–
A Plea for Animals in Danger of Death by Fire
Dawn Bellis, Secretary
Standards Council
National Fire Protection Association
1 Batterymarch Park
Quincy, Massachusetts 02169
April 4, 2014
Dear Ms. Bellis,
I am sending this letter for the millions of farmed animals who die by fire each year trapped and terrified in burning buildings from which they cannot escape. The “NFPA 150 Standard for Fire and Life Safety in Animal Housing Facilities” needs to be amended to require sprinklers and smoke control systems for confined animals whether housed on small farms, factory farms, or anywhere else. Though I’m speaking for all so-called “Category B” animals, for the purposes of my argument I refer primarily to factory farmed animals because they are the ultimate test case. The lives and deaths they endure are already misery enough and it may seem odd, therefore, to request fire protection for them—such creatures as suffer daily a living death and are condemned to die anyway under a hellish, lawless hand. Yet imagine any responsible parent of a child suffering a painful, progressive illness, even a child certain to die in agony within a short time, who would deny that child such protection even if costly. I cannot imagine a single one, particularly given what a terrible way it is to die, destroyed by fire, and given the frequency with which fires occur.
Many a follower of Jesus suffered death by fire and later was beatified. If the core of Jesus’ teachings is agape—divine, beneficent, unconditional love—Scripture defines God Himself as agape (1 John 4:8). Farmed animals are obviously not beatified; rarely are they even remembered. Yet it could be argued that in some sense they are agape’s truest earthly embodiment—all the more so as they in their innocence face the routine heartless violence of the food industry. Despite all that they endure they remain tenderhearted, abounding in love. Release them from their daily terror, lead them to sanctuary, and watch how quickly they return to their true ways! “Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds,” Shakespeare’s sonnet declares—reminding the reader that human love is fleeting as the leaves of fall. Yet the love gentle animals pour out does not waver, nor does it fail. Such creatures watch out for us the way they watch out for their own young. They warn us of dangers. They lift our spirits. They sometimes even heal us, body and soul. They know much at which we flawed humans can only guess. Some people regard them as messengers from God. For the genuine poet they may serve as a Muse. How much first-rate poetry has been inspired by the swan, the hen, the nightingale, the bee, the butterfly, the lamb, the donkey, the cow, the pig, the horse, among so many other beings, tame or wild—all intelligent, sensitive individuals who deserve, at the very least, to live free from torture.
The most perfect nature is often the most fragile. Nearly eleven billion farm animals are slaughtered here each year for food. The Earth herself is now being systematically defiled, and so are the forests of the world, the oceans, the air, the very foundations of being itself, as if a major apocalypse were at hand and the sightless devil is on a rampage. Entire populations are being displaced by wars and natural disasters. Wild animals are indiscriminately targeted by government agencies everywhere. One hundred fifty plant and animal species are becoming extinct each day. There is no safe place for innocence. Yet traces of the divine shine from every portal, not least from the faces of animals. And those faces remind us that our task here is to fight against the devil, not to accommodate him.
That something so deranged as factory farming could take hold in the first place raises questions about evil, its nature, its origins. The Buddha seems to point to such questions when he defines this life as one of unrelenting suffering. “The world hateth me because I testify of it, that the works thereof are evil,” Jesus tells his disciples (John 7:7). Gnostics argue that the world is fallen, the creation of an evil deity, and the early Gnostics were, indeed, Christians. The prince of this world is Satan according to Jesus and Paul (John12:31, 2 Corinthians 4:4)—and Paul even sees art as degraded without agape: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not agape, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. (1 Corinthians 13:1).” That agape is finally the antidote to evil is the core teaching of Christianity and Judaism both—and Buddhism and Hinduism espouse something very similar—the same as mystics of so many faiths—when they emphasize the centrality of compassion. The fact that Jesus twice quotes Hosea 6:6 saying “I desire mercy and not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13, 12:7) suggests to some that were he alive today he’d be a vegetarian. His exhortation to his disciples—after he’s returned from death and is about to ascend to heaven—to “Preach the good news to every creature!” (Mark 16:15) could also suggest that.
An NFPA document from 2007 states:
The requirements of NFPA 150 recognize the following fundamental principles: 1. Animals are sentient beings with a value greater than that of simple property (i.e.Storage). 2. Animals, both domesticated and feral, lack the ability of self-preservation when housed in buildings and other structures. 3. Current building, fire, and life safety codes do not address the life safety of the animals.” (http://www.alnmag.com/articles/2007/10/nfpa-150-animal-housing-facilities-road-ahead).
That paragraph alone should justify fire protection for ALL housed animals. Given that all “Category A” animals are already covered, I urge you to require fire protection systems also for all “Category B” animals. They are also precious beings in their own right and they have much to teach us. Though the people who run animal factories may be lost—thinking so much of profit that they are unable even to perceive, let alone acknowledge, the suffering of the innocents in their care—a suffering patently visible to and often weighing heavily upon the rest of us—yet “agape never fails” (1 Corinthians 13:8), and, animated by agape as much as possible, it is up to us to protect helpless creatures.
Thank you.
Respectfully,
Joan C. Harrison, PhD
Independent Advocate for Animals