Filling the Ark: Animal Welfare in Disasters

Animals on Factory Farms / 47

ing them up. They had this huge pit, which was probably

twenty feet deep and then ten by ten wide and long. And

they would just dispose of the bodies. And they could some-

times catch a few, but they weren’t going to go out there

at night. They actually did catch several thousand, but [the

grower] thought that there were about fi ve hundred remain-

ing and it just wasn’t worth it. In actuality, there were about

two thousand remaining.

Soon after, Sturla’s Animal Place and the Humane Society of
the United States began to get calls for help from residents living
near facilities where birds were decomposing. One caller reported
seeing “so many dead chickens, it looked like a fi eld of cotton.” At
one facility, the producer had struggled to catch and relocate fi fteen
thousand birds from sheds that had been, in Walker’s words, “com-
pletely ripped in half,” into two other sheds that were damaged but
still standing. Sturla and Walker emphasized that catching birds is
laborious. Because the birds are so fast, it is best done at night when
the birds are somewhat calmer. The farmer understood that it was
inhumane to crowd more birds into the already packed shed. He
had contacted the poultry company to ask them what to do. They
told him to start burying them. By this time, Walker recounted, the
birds were already running “all over the place,” so farm workers
had to catch them individually, chasing them on all-terrain vehicles
and wringing their necks. As Walker recounted:

We pulled up, and there were birds everywhere. There were

thousands and thousands of birds. They were just running

free. We pulled up and the farm staff was all standing there,

and they kind of looked at us strangely. We explained we

were from New York and California and we were there to

save chickens. The farmer pulled up. We were really ner-

vous, because we really wanted to get these birds. They were

really suffering. They were tiny. Probably about two weeks

old. He was glad that we were there, and said we could have

all the birds we could catch.