Graphic Undercover Video of Male Chicks Killed in Hatchery
by Heather Drennan
As a PETA blogger, I know that male chicks in the egg industry are simply discarded and killed—but knowing about it didn't make watching it any easier.
This new footage from an undercover investigation by Mercy for Animals shows workers at an Iowa hatchery killing 150,000 newborn male chicks every single day.
Chicks born at hatcheries are sent off to slaughter the very day they take their first breath. The only lives these babies know is one in which they are sorted and handled like pieces of garbage. Workers grab them by their wings, toss them onto conveyor belts, and throw them down a chute to spend their final moments in a grinding machine—in which they are ground up while they are still alive.
All this is standard procedure, widely accepted at commercial hatcheries and within the bounds of animal welfare laws. The egg industry considers male chicks to be useless because they don't lay eggs and can't be raised profitably for meat. Their sisters are not exactly lucky to remain alive.
For anyone who thinks that eating eggs doesn't kill animals, millions of male chicks each year are born in hatcheries and promptly thrown into the blades of giant garbage disposals.
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And the spokesman for the company just whines that there is no commercial use (profit-making use) for the male chicks. All that matters to them is the bottom line and how much money can be made. And he also tries to discredit the group that did the work to expose this atrocity (Mercy for Animals) by saying they are a group that wants all egg consumption to cease. Well, If you have to grind baby chicks alive in order to get eggs -- then maybe no one should eat eggs! Hello!!!! The things people will do for money! Geez!