slowly; they also require more feed, water, and medicines. So industrial de-
signers made (and farmers were obliged to build) factory-barns in which
birds were not only debeaked but nearly immobilized. Light stimulates, so
the barns were dimmed to a torpor-inducing twilight. Each broiler was con-
fined, too, as hens in egg factories are—in about forty-eight square inches,
half the area of a conventional piece of typing or printer paper. (Egg pro-
ducers within the European Union must allow each hen square inches,
plus a perch and a nesting box, by . In the United States, there is not
even discussion of interfering with industry standards.) No wonder then,
that when men come in tractor-trailer rigs to gather the chickens for the
slaughterhouses, the animals are relatively docile and easy to carry by their
feet in groups of three or even four per hand (if the men are well-sized them-
selves). ‘‘They can get to throwing those birds around a bit,’’ said a Maryland
chicken farmer of the pick-up crews. ‘‘It’s a tough job.’’^19
Chicken slaughterhouses and packing plants are notorious not only for
their low wages, miserable working conditions, and high employee turn-
over rates but for the senselessly cruel manner in which they end chick-
ens’ brief lives. Typically, the animals are tied (or clamped) live, by their
feet, overhead at the beginning of the disassembly line. Their throats are
quickly slit with workers’ knives. But decade after decade, workers and in-
spectors have observed that chickens are often still alive when submerged
in scalding water to begin the defeathering process. Other than the late
Harry Spira, who campaigned against unnecessary slaughterhouse cruelty
of all meat animals and, more recently, People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals (), few Americans, and perhaps fewer southerners I would
bet, have concerned themselves. Our distance from these creatures has so
lengthened that one might say there is no relationship between consumer
and meat animal at all, save consumption.
Poultry process workers are different, of course.had long collected
anecdotal evidence of undue cruelty (that is, other than killing) in chicken
plants and, in October , managed to place an undercover investigator
on the disassembly line at the Pilgrim’s Pride unit in Moorefield, West Vir-
ginia. Pilgrim’s Pride is the second-largest poultry processor in the United
States and a major supplier to Kentucky Fried Chicken, which buys some
million chickens per year. Somehow the spy was able to videotape much
of the activity along the line, and soon after he left the Moorefield plant
in May ,posted the video on its website, sent out print news re-
leases, and made the anonymous investigator available for interviews. In
(blessed) brief: The spy observed workers jumping on, drop-kicking, and