| Pain on Your Plate |
| Part VII -- More Life and Death on the Factory Farm |
Chickens are forced to live in perhaps the most intolerable conditions of all.
When they are born, the males are thrown away in plastic trash-bags to slowly suffocate.
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The females have their beaks cut off by a hot blade -- without anesthetic.
This is necessary because they are often driven insane by the intensive confinement
of the factory-farm and would kill each other if their beaks were not mutilated.
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To get an idea of the cramped conditions these birds are put into:
imagine yourself in an elevator so crowded that your body is in contact on all sides with other bodies.
You can't even turn around in-place without difficulty.
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The others in the elevator are not doing their best to hold still, however.
They all have powerful territorial needs, and the frustration of the situation has driven many of them insane.
The floor of this particular elevator is slanted, so gravity tends to pull you all in one spot...
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...and it is made of a wire-mesh that is terribly uncomfortable to stand on.
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The ceiling of this elevator is so low that you cannot stand up straight, but must lean to one side or stand stooped-over.
You might be able to tolerate these conditions for a short time. But there's a catch:
this elevator is going nowhere; it's stuck! This is not a few minutes inconvenience: this is your life!
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The door will not open until the last day of your life
when the executioner takes you to be electrocuted and butchered on the assembly-line.
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These are the actual living conditions of the chickens whose flesh and eggs we eat.
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(A butcher cuts the throats of the chickens that were missed by the machine.)
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(The machine cuts off the chickens' feet and their dead bodies fall onto a conveyor-belt to be packaged.)
These are the conditions the industry tells us are "a chicken heaven!"
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