Big poultry wants Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to accelerate slaughter lines. The change would come at the expense of both workers and animals.
Many chicken slaughterhouses nationwide can kill up to 140 birds per minute, more than two per second, which means workers moving too slowly might lose their job — or a hand. The injury rate for poultry slaughter workers is six times higher than the average for all U.S. industries; at Tyson Foods slaughterhouses alone, on average one employee a month is injured by equipment and loses a finger or limb.
Yet, the National Chicken Council wants workers to kill even faster. NCC’s recent petition to increase slaughter line speeds, submitted to the USDA, aims to create a loophole that would enable some chicken slaughterhouses to kill as many birds per minute as they’d like. This free-for-all would surely result not only in more money for meat producers but also in more injured workers and tortured chickens.
The already-breakneck speed of chicken slaughter lines leads to botched slaughters and abusive handling by workers who can’t kill quickly enough, according to the USDA’s own inspection records. Inspectors have documented chickens missing the kill blade and being scalded to death in tanks of hot water and having their legs or wings cut off by the beheading machine while alive and fully conscious.
Undercover investigations by Mercy For Animals at poultry slaughterhouses across the country corroborate these findings. Using hidden cameras, we’ve documented workers ripping chickens’ heads off, throwing birds like basketballs, and violently slamming them into shackles. We’ve revealed chickens suffering painful shocks — enough to paralyze them but not to render them unconscious or insensible to pain — in electric water bath stunners and birds burned alive in feather-removal tanks. According to USDA records, at least 1 million birds die this way each year.
It’s no wonder why.
Workers are tasked with grabbing chickens — live, fighting, defecating, and flapping — as they’re roughly dumped from transport crates onto a conveyor belt and hanging them upside down by their feet in metal shackles. Because they are strung up so quickly, chickens are often dismembered or their legs are broken.
You’d think the poultry industry would want to fix this clearly broken system to improve safety for birds and humans alike. But you’d be wrong. In 2012, NCC supported a proposal by the USDA to increase maximum line speeds to 175 birds per minute. The move failed after an outcry from consumers and a diverse set of organizations and unions, including the NAACP, Food and Water Watch, and UFCW.
You can help prevent dangerous working conditions and unimaginable animal cruelty by keeping this conveyor belt of greed from speeding up.
The public can submit comments to the USDA opposing NCC’s petition any time before Dec. 13. Take a minute to tell them that slaughterhouses don’t deserve this blank check. If this petition passes, animals and workers stand to suffer even more.
Vandhana Bala is the general counsel of Mercy For Animals, an international farmed animal protection organization.
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