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3.4 million “live inventory” – chickens & turkeys – drowned or starved in North Carolina storm 

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Poultry barns in bloody water.
(Beth Clifton collage)

by Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns

with Afterword by ANIMALS 24-7

A caring person’s reaction to learning that millions of chickens and turkeys and pigs drowned in North Carolina this month is the gut-wrench of sorrow and pity for these helpless souls and outrage at the companies that didn’t see fit to protect their captives from the hurricane they knew was coming.

But just as farmed animal businesses are indifferent when a fire burns and suffocates to death millions of chickens and other animals trapped in cages, crates, and confinement sheds, so they are indifferent when, instead of flames, the disaster occurs in the form of floods.

Karen Davis

Sanderson Farms

The North Carolina Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services reported last week that 3.4 million chickens and turkeys and 5,500 pigs died in Hurricane Florence. The company most cited was Sanderson Farms,  whose spokespersons told journalists that 1.7 million of its 20 million chickens drowned or starved to death in the sheds when the company couldn’t get food to them.

Pleased to report that none of its personnel appear to have died in the storm, Sanderson Farms noted, by contrast, that its “live inventories” were not so lucky, and that its focus now is on “replenishing our live production inventories.”

Companies like Sanderson needn’t worry.  Between insurance payouts and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s indemnification program, agribusinesses can comfortably repair and rebuild their flood-or-fire-damaged buildings and quickly restock millions of new individuals,  the same as they always do whenever weather or diseases such as avian influenza devastate their “inventory.”

(Beth Clifton photo)

“Rolling tides of firefighting foam”

Does anyone think that companies permitted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to suffocate millions of chickens and turkeys to death in rolling tides of firefighting foam as a means of mass extermination – does anyone think these companies care about the animals?

An article in Poultry World on September 20th exemplifies what really matters to them:  North Carolina-based Butterball,  the largest turkey producer in the U.S.,  assured everyone that the storm’s impact “would not lead to any pre-Thanksgiving turkey shortage.”

While businesses that “own” animals have an obligation to protect them against foreseeable disasters,  the unfixable problem is that the entire life of the majority of animals in food production is so miserable that just about anything that ends their life sooner than later may be viewed as preferable to being “saved.”

(Beth Clifton collage)

“The rescue these animals need is from the plate”

Saved for what?  The experience of chickens and turkeys, in the words of veterinary scientist John Webster, is,  he said,  “in both magnitude and severity, the single most severe,  systematic example of man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal.”

The only way out of “man’s inhumanity” for these animals is to be rescued or dead. “Rescue” must mean more than literally removing a certain number of animals from whatever human-engineered horror they are in – important as every rescue is.  The rescue these animals need most from us is from the plate. If people don’t buy them, they won’t be born, and that will be good.

References in order of citation:

United Poultry Concerns, National Fire Protection Association Rejects Pleas for Farmed Animals in Second Round of Proposals, January 17, 2015.

Sanderson Farms, Sanderson Farms assesses damage from Florence.  September 18, 2018.

Hurricane Florence claims 3.4 million US poultry, Poultry World, September 20, 2018.

United Poultry Concerns, Avian Influenza (Bird Flu) – What You Need to Know, 2007.

United Poultry Concerns, Government Approves Firefighting Foam to Exterminate Birds, 2006.

John Webster, A Cool Eye Towards Eden, Blackwell Science, 1994.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

(Beth Clifton collage)

Afterword

Among the grossest of ironies associated with the enormous loss of farmed animal life resulting from Hurricane Florence,  and at least four previous hurricanes that have devastated North Carolina farm country since 1995,  is media coverage using careless phrases such as “pig and poultry farmers are hard-hit,”  “hen and hog farmers are devastated,”  etc.

While the farmers are economically harmed to some extent,  and a farmer is occasionally hit by flying debris or drowned when his pickup truck slides off the road,  almost all of the hard hits and devastation––by more than a million-to-one ratio––are experienced by the animals involved,  not the humans.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Disaster vs. daily routine

The major difference,  when natural disaster such as a hurricane hits,  is that suddenly the humans experience––for a few hours or days––some of the stress and terror felt by farmed animals as a matter of daily routine.  For the animals,  the stress and terror merely takes a different form.

The violence the animals absorb and witness throughout their brief lives in time of disaster gives way to terminal neglect,  sometimes ended by “depopulation” before the neglected animals would otherwise die.

(Beth Clifton photo)

Ironically,  as United Poultry Concerns founder Karen Davis has written about elsewhere,  the “rolling tides of fire-fighting foam” now used in state-of-the-art poultry “depopulation” are both a killing method which is no longer legally used to kill dogs and cats in almost every state,  and markedly less cruel than the former standard methods of manual strangulation or neck-breaking,  asphyxiation with exhaust fumes,  live burial,  and even burning flocks alive,  all of which are also still legal and still used to some extent by agribusiness.

“Depraved indifference”

In almost any other context,  such “depopulation” might be prosecuted as “depraved indifference” to animal suffering,  but down on the factory farm it is business as usual,  done somewhere almost every day to clear barns of “spent” hens or diseased poultry,  while unwanted male chicks hatched by the egg industry are macerated alive by the multi-millions and mixed into feed or fertilizer.

Beth & Merritt Clifton

In context,  even the biggest natural disasters ever to hit the U.S. have caused very little animal suffering compared to the routine operations they have temporarily disrupted.

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Comments

  1. Jamaka Petzak says

    The historical truth of “thanksgiving” aside, I guess those who are gearing up for that particular holiday can rest assured — if it even crosses their minds at all — that they won’t be inconvenienced in having to look hard/pay more for their centerpieces. *Sharing, with sorrow and disgust*

  2. M Gene says

    I am so sorry – but you have never experienced real farm life – it sounds great in theory to coddle each and every animal raised for food, but there are not enough hours in a day – true farmers have the best interest of their animals in the forefront of their minds – but the sheer numbers involved to fill demand is staggering – that said, how can you possibly smear the reputations of these hard working peop!e – I guess you think they expected a once in a lifetime flood!? This country is raising a generation of pansies – where do you think food comes from? The grocery store??

    • Merritt Clifton says

      The fifth “once in a lifetime” flood to hit North Carolina in just 23 years occasions wonder as to whether the lifetime meant is that of a breeder sow.
      In point of fact the ANIMALS 24-7 staff have had extensive experience on working farms & looking after animals of farmed species. Nonetheless, as many ANIMALS 24-7 articles have pointed out, the manufactured demand for animal products and byproducts is not to be confused with the realities of feeding humanity, in view that an all plant-based diet could feed about four times as many people on a third less land. Neither does the human desire to consume animal products and byproducts rationalize the egregious cruelty that we have seen first hand is an inescapable facet of animal husbandry on a commercial scale.

  3. Eric Mills says

    It seems obvious that, at the bare minimum, these industrial animal factories should not be allowed to be built in the flood plain, especially with climate change and rising seas. State and federal legislation is in order.

    x
    Eric Mills, coordinator
    ACTION FOR ANIMALS
    Oakland

    • Mary Finelli says

      It should be obvious to any sensible person. However, as Rick Dove, founding member of the Waterkeepers Alliance, explains in his September 22nd article in The Washington Post:

      “But the [pig] industry has dragged its feet on upgrading its waste management; thanks to friends of industrial agriculture in North Carolina’s legislature, such changes aren’t required by law. Moreover, existing hog facilities are not required to move. Instead, after each hurricane, they are rebuilt and restocked, so we face the same threat in the next storm. In recent years there’s also been an explosion of new poultry facilities — huge buildings, housing millions of birds — right in the flood-zone, where the land is cheap.”

      I SAW FLORENCE SENDING MILLIONS OF GALLONS OF ANIMAL FECES FLOODING ACROSS NORTH CAROLINA.
      I’ve been Watching from the Air with Alarm.
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/09/22/i-saw-florence-sending-millions-gallons-animal-poop-flooding-across-north-carolina/?utm_term=.931e2dc03daf

      The government and the insurance industry need to stop covering the cost of losses caused to these facilities. First and foremost, the public needs to stop supporting them with their consumer dollars.

  4. Karen Davis says

    Thank you Animals 24-7 for publishing my article and for your Afterword observing that the contractors and corporations suffer little or nothing compared to what the animals endure from Day-Old to Death. The suffering of the animals, trapped in alien and inimical conditions reflecting the human psyche – not theirs – is beyond imagining. Yet we can imagine well enough, based on the incontrovertible evidence attesting these animals’ UNNATURAL SUFFERING documented by veterinarians and animal scientists who work for agribusiness. They describe the pathological genetic, physiological, and behavioral “anomalies” in chickens and turkeys that have become normalized as a result of breeding for “meat” and other “food” traits at the expense of these birds’ health and wellbeing.

    Their bodies are wracked with pain and misery. They’re forced to live in toxic filth. Ahead lies the terrorism of “catching” and being jammed into transport crates, then sitting on loading docks in the crates at the farm site and again at the slaughterhouses. Then being pulled out of the crates, hung face down and dragged through paralytic electrified water troughs while fully conscious. Then mechanically throat-sliced followed by 90 seconds bleeding out in a “blood chamber,” then dead or alive being thrown into scald-water tanks where, if they are still living, they break their bones thrashing in agony and their eyeballs come out of the sockets. So the sooner they die the better, rather than face another second of consciousness in the pain and terror we have inflicted on them.

    Karen Davis, United Poultry Concerns http://www.upc-online.org

  5. Elizabeth Clifton says

    Merritt and I were stopped at a roadside restaurant in Kenya where the driver had brought our group to for lunch. Out in front of the business was a cage of hens in the sun and they were fairly crammed into it. (The photo is up above in the article.) They had no water, no food and were covered and walking in their own excrement. The cage door was not secured. There was a filthy empty cut milk carton that had been long ago turned over. I had a large bottle of water and opened the cage and filled the empty container believing they would immediately go to it. Much to my surprise and sadness, not one of them took a drink of water. In fact they were completely oblivious to it. The hens in my summation had become so desensitized that the water was no longer psychologically essential to their existence. These hens were literally just existing as prisoners with no hope, no reason to be alive and they were indifferent to their own thirst.

  6. Karen Davis says

    Thank you for sharing this utterly sad account of these hens. Learned helplessness. Learned hopelessness. Quite likely their internal organs were too dehydrated for water to help them by that time. Many people mistakenly think that farmed animals are treated humanely in traditional societies as opposed to how they are treated in capitalist/Western/industrialized societies. History and travel dispel that illusion.

    Karen Davis, President, United Poultry Concerns http://www.upc-online.org