An American animal advocacy organization, Mercy For Animals, has been able to gain undercover footage of the practices of commercial chicken hatcheries. Please watch and if you are not yet vegan, think about what your money supports the next time you buy an egg or a product containing egg.
…lovely.

Thrown, dropped, mutilated, and ground-up alive. This is the shocking reality faced by hundreds of thousands of chicks each day at the world’s largest egg-laying breed hatchery – Hy-Line International in Spencer, Iowa.

New hidden camera footage obtained at this facility during a Mercy For Animals undercover investigation gives a disturbing glimpse into the cruel and industrialized reality of modern hatcheries.

The warm, comforting, and protective wings of these newly hatched chicks’ mothers have been replaced with massive machines, quickly moving conveyor belts, harsh handling, and distressing noise. These young animals are sorted, discarded, and handled like mere cogs in a machine.

For the nearly 150,000 male chicks who hatch every 24 hours at this Hy-Line facility, their lives begin and end the same day. Grabbed by their fragile wings by workers known as “sexers,” who separate males from females, these young animals are callously thrown into chutes and hauled away to their deaths. They are destined to die on day one because they cannot produce eggs and do not grow large or fast enough to be raised profitably for meat. Their lives are cut short when they are dropped into a grinding machine – tossed around by a spinning auger before being torn to pieces by a high-pressure macerator.

Over 30 million male chicks meet their fate this way each year at this facility.

For the surviving females, this is the beginning of a life of cruelty and confinement at the hands of the egg industry. Before even leaving the hatchery they will be snapped by their heads into a spinning debeaker – a portion of their sensitive beaks removed by a laser. Workers toss and rummage through them before they are placed 100 per crowded box and shipped across the country.

Remainder of article at MFA

Channel Five News in the UK has been exposing how the standards of Freedom Foods Farms are not so righteous as the consumer is told. These are farms given a mark of approval by the RSPCA and are supposedly not as gruesome as the rest of the modern mechanised animal production machinery.
And as always we see that there is no escape from the fact that cruelty is involved in getting meat to a plate.
And it is also worth remembering that even if these standards had been met the animals still end up terrified at the same slaughter house having their lives taken away.

From news.five.tv

Five News has uncovered more evidence of chickens being kept in horrifying conditions at an RSPCA ‘Freedom Food’ farm, this time in Somerset.
Last week, Five News reported on the appalling conditions chickens were being kept in at a farm in Norfolk. The farm was endorsed by the RSPCA’s ‘Freedom Food’ label and is now facing an investigation into their handling of chickens.In Jason Farrell’s latest investigation he has uncovered another farm failing to meet the relevant standards set by the ‘Freedom Food’ label.
Video Blog Watch how Jason Farrell uncovered this latest investigation.
Click here to watch the video blog.

An egg related story here at meatismurder. It appears as if China is now able to produce fake eggs. Please see related details of animal egg production here

Egg Piracy in China

During a recent raid on a wholesale centre in Guangzhou city, the capital of China’s Guangdong province, a large quantity of fake eggs was seized.

Their wholesale price is 0.15 yuan (S$0.03) each - half the price of a real egg.

Consumers have a hard time telling a genuine egg from a fake one. This is good news for unscrupulous entrepreneurs, who are even conducting three-day courses in the production of artificial eggs for less than S$150.
A reporter with Hong Kong-based Chinese magazine East Week enrolled in one such course.

The artificial egg can be fried sunny-side up or steamed. Although bubbles appear on the white of the egg, those who have tasted it say the fake stuff tastes very much like the real thing.

But experts warn of the danger of eating fake eggs. Not only do they not contain any nutrients, a Hong Kong Chinese University professor warned that long-term consumption of alum could cause dementia.

Here is a review (from Osocio) of the KFC campaign by PETA, and their attempt to get seen during the ad break of the Superbowl.

Kentucky Fried Cruelty

PETA is speaking up against the way Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is handling its chicken.

PETA was willing to pay up the $4.2 million to get these commercials on during the Superbowl. They could have reached nearly 100 million viewers. Fox however refused to air them. Now the movies live a viral life as “banned commercials”, saving PETA a lot of money and reaching at least a part of the intended audience.

In the ads we see Colonel Sanders, the founder (and logo) of KFC condoning and even indulging in the mistreatment of chicken. PETA has gathered quite some graphic evidence of this treatment going on in real life, not by Col. Sanders of course, he died in 1980, but by employees of KFC.

The third video in the row is titled “Torture Camp” and has the most explicit violence in it.

The campaign website (kentuckyfriedcruelty.com), a spoof of the original KFC website, provides all the information needed to support this cause.

They start of in good PETA style by getting some celebrities’ support.

And then they provide you with everything you need to protest or spread the word. Leaflets, banners, billboards and ads. You can download about everything from their website or order them as prints, ready to use. They also provide you with the necessary code to embed their videos and banners on your website or blog to spread the word online.

A banner:

The depth of the site shows they were prepared to receive the after superbowl surfer and provide the honestly interested with all the information they could wish for. Big pro’s go to the fact that they have done everything to make it easy for people to share this story. The design of most of the posters and banners on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired.
Of the three videos I like “Torture Camp” best. Just because the other two don’t hit you in the stomach like this one does. Getting banned from the Superbowl shouldn’t be a problem for these three little gems, as I mentioned earlier, I predict they’ll live a ‘happy’ viral life.

Time for some pictures on meatismurder. Often so much more succinct than words.

It’s a dark day. The British public are shown on television for a week during prime viewing hours on a mainstream channel by public figures how terrible the conditions are for intensively farmed chickens and yet sales of these animals continue to rise. It appears that all the program achieved in the short-term at least was to act as an advert for carcasses. Hopefully in the long-term it’ll be part of the background drip of conciousness that is starting to expose people to the horror of the mass production food industry that they accept so readily.

Sales of intensively reared chicken appear to have risen despite a TV campaign to get customers to purchase free-range poultry instead. The campaign was led by chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on his recent Hugh’s Chicken Run shows for Channel 4.

Directly after the series was aired, Tesco said sales of standard chickens increased by 7% and free-range by 3%. Sainsbury’s free-range sales have gone up by 50% but there were also more of its Basics label chickens being bought. Conditions compared The campaign two weeks ago aimed to persuade shoppers that intensively reared chicken meat damaged animal welfare. During one of the programmes, Fearnley-Whittingstall set up his own intensive chicken unit. It was created alongside a free-range operation to compare the conditions the birds were raised in.

The British Poultry Council, which represents poultry producers, said chicken sales had risen across the board. It put the increase down to the reassurances farmers gave about the way intensively reared birds were treated.

Source at BBC
Viva - Broiler Chickens