The point of view not taken
It's very hard to stand on the conveyor belt and impossible to rest. That's how each schnitzel starts its life – as a frightened chick led on a conveyor belt from the hatching trays to the supermarket checkout.R: "I don't really know why, but the hatchery is designed in such a way that the chicks are moved through a huge number of tracks and conveyor belts in a huge hall, thrown from one moving belt to the next, fall down and lifted up again. The speed of certain conveyor belts is so high that it's hard to actually see them, and they seem like a moving river of yellow plumage – of chicks shot from a 'chick gun' which packs them onto boxes at a fixed rate, or run around again and again along a circular belt. It seems as if someone was asked to design an evil obstacle course which won't allow chicks to stand upright even for a single moment of the first hours they spend in this world."
From the point of view of the just-hatched chick, who's looking for its mother's warm protected lap, the hatchery is a nightmarish trip through a real roller coaster, where it can't relax or rest for a single moment. The frightened chicks are moved on tracks at high speed, thrown from great heights from one belt onto another, jumping on top of each other, getting caught in their wings and thrown in the air, hitting the hard metal and slip through a large funnel which leads to the next conveyor belt system. All of them slip and fall, and in the meantime invest great efforts in trying to keep stable until the next obstacle. Their deformed body makes this task especially difficult, mainly due to their enlarged chest, which makes it hard to stand straight even without any obstacles around.
Some of the chicks are so injured that they can't even stand up straight, and so are left lying on their backs or stomachs. some skip and fall down. Both are not worth the investment in feeding them at the chicken coop, and so are thrown to large boxes to die a slow death, then thrown into the rubbish. No water of food is available to the survivors until they reach the coop after many hours, during which they've been packed tightly in boxes and driven to it in extremely crowded trucks."
First stop on the conveyor belt: Separation from the egg shells
A: "In the first hall, the chicks are separated from the shells of their eggs. Employees lift the chicks, ten or more at a time, tightly together, and throw them from about one meter high onto a box lying on the floor. There's a terrible smell there of rotten eggs, probably coming from the water washed from the hatching trays."
Second stop: Removing the "faulty" chicks
In recent years, the chick has unfortunately become the cheapest part of the chicken coop. Everything is more expensive, and therefore more important: the facilities, land, electricity, food and drugs. This is why 4 million male chicks of the egg-laying type are killed each year. There's simply no economic justification to invest in rearing them to become 'meat', compared to 'fattened for meat'-type chicks, which have been genetically deformed to grow at a much more economical rate. For this reason, the chicken meat industry prefers to remove any chick which may waste expensive food and drugs without eventually producing meat at the required rate. So millions of chicks are killed each year, even in the meat industry hatcheries, without anyone trying to find ways of killing them in a faster and less painful way."Y: "The selection is done by hand while the chicks travel on the conveyor belt. The 'selector' drops most through waving them around or stirring them by hand. Almost all of them fall just because the selector's hand hits them, or because they collide with other chicks which also fell. One female selector explained that she tries to see which chick cannot get up quickly enough once she's dropped it. Also, which one suffers from obvious bruises or bleeding. Once she finds such a chick (or thinks she did – since she only devotes a split second for each chick), she throws it into a box of "faulty" chicks on the floor. I asked her what's done with these chicks. She became quiet. A minute later she suddenly said: "There's nothing to be done with them."
R: Throwing a lame chick from a meter high (or more) is cruel by itself, but the speed required forces the employees to throw the chicks without even looking at them, and without even aiming. Some land outside the box and hobble around the hatchery, looking for some warmth. Some are being trodden. All eventually end up in the rubbish."
A: The "faulty" chicks thrown out of the boxes try to find a warm space to cuddle into, and seem very cold. We saw one chick who'd found some old tracksuit which someone had thrown, and tried to sleep inside it. We also saw some chicks who climbed (or thrown) on the edges of the conveyor belts and fell to the floor, also to be left behind. The saddest sight of all was a couple of hurt chicks who found each other on the floor and tried to cuddle together."
A: The "faulty" chicks thrown out of the boxes try to find a warm space to cuddle into, and seem very cold. We saw one chick who'd found some old tracksuit which someone had thrown, and tried to sleep inside it. We also saw some chicks who climbed (or thrown) on the edges of the conveyor belts and fell to the floor, also to be left behind. The saddest sight of all was a couple of hurt chicks who found each other on the floor and tried to cuddle together."
Third stop: Male/female selection on the "carousel"
Y: "A hatchery employee explained that since male chicks grow faster than female chicks, there are some coop owners who only seek males. On the night of our arrival they prepared the chicks to fulfill such an order, so the course the chicks went through was especially long, since it included the "carousel".
R: The "carousel" is actually a large circular conveyor belt revolving around two huge metal funnels sitting on top of each other, which lead to two different conveyor belts: on for males and one for females. There were eight selectors around the belt, and they casually lifted chicks out of the belt and less than a second later threw them high in the air into the internal or external funnels. One of them explained that they identify the chick's sex through its wing feathers. In a split second the staff stretch the wing and then use it to throw the chick into one of the funnels high in the air, sometimes with a centrifugal force and some other times forcefully enough to make them hit the other end of the funnel."
Y: "At any given moment, the selectors throw some chicks in the air into the funnels. Some are hit hard by the internal funnel wall before falling into the external one. All of them roll around and hit the walls while trying to find some form of foothold. Some manage, for just a few seconds, until another chick hit them, and then they are all quickly slipping down the funnel.
The employees
A: "I've already been to places where animal abuse is taking place on a large scale, but the atmosphere in this hatchery was especially depressing and scary. We managed to talk to a few employees, but most of them avoided any form of communication. They seemed apathetic... extinguished, didn't talk at all. It took me some time to realize they don't even talk to each other. I felt this was the sort of work that removed from them any form of feeling. It must also stem from the speed, which forces them to become mere nuts in the hatchery's machine. Above this, I felt that this way of treating tens of thousands of animals as if they were just inanimate raw materials caused them to behave like machines."
Fourth stop: packing
Y: "At some stage after selection, the healthy chicks are 'packed' in boxes according to their quality rating: Type A, type B etc... They are sent through the fastest conveyor belt in this place to a machine that 'shoots' them at a fixed rate into the box, until half of it fills up. The chicks seem stunned, and try to stabilized themselves despite the flood of chicks landing on their heads, trying to move up on top of each other in order to stand up and breathe. A few seconds later, the box is automatically pushed aside and continues being filled with chicks, which are naturally all pushed around once again."
R: "After that, the chick-filled boxes are piled up very high. It's obvious that at this stage, the chicks find it hard to breathe, and they are panting. They fight each other trying to get a place by the side of the box in order to get some air, maybe to peep out a bit. Every second some new faces appear at the slots on the side of the box, only to disappear once other chicks topple them over, pushing them down. In some cases, a chick putting its head out to breathe may actually suffocate, probably because of the other chicks that scrambled on its head.
R: "After that, the chick-filled boxes are piled up very high. It's obvious that at this stage, the chicks find it hard to breathe, and they are panting. They fight each other trying to get a place by the side of the box in order to get some air, maybe to peep out a bit. Every second some new faces appear at the slots on the side of the box, only to disappear once other chicks topple them over, pushing them down. In some cases, a chick putting its head out to breathe may actually suffocate, probably because of the other chicks that scrambled on its head.
The piled-up boxes await being loaded onto the trucks that would take the thirsty chicks, terribly over-crowded and suffocating, to the chicken coop where they'll be locked up until the moment they'll be taken violently to the slaughterhouse.
