Late final month, some 14,000 child chicks in Pennsylvania had been shipped from a hatchery — industrial operations that breed chickens, incubate their eggs, and promote day-old chicks — to small farms throughout the nation. However they didn’t get far. They had been reportedly deserted in a US Postal Service truck in Delaware for three-and-a-half days with out water, meals, or temperature management.
By the point officers arrived on the postal facility, 4,000 child birds had been already lifeless. The hundreds of survivors — largely chickens, but in addition some turkeys and quails — had been taken to Delaware’s First State Animal Heart and SPCA, which labored tirelessly to search out houses to soak up the animals as pets.
The incident has acquired intensive nationwide information protection, and it highlights an usually hidden side of America’s community of small poultry farms and yard rooster operations: the transport of hundreds of thousands of stay child animals within the mail to be raised for eggs or meat.
Most chicks survive their journey via the mail, however many don’t. In 2020, 4,800 chicks shipped to farmers in Maine perished as a consequence of postal service delays, whereas in 2022, nearly 4,000 chicks destined for the Bahamas died on the tarmac at Miami Worldwide Airport from warmth publicity. There are many different tales of chicks dying within the mail, and yard rooster lovers say it’s not unusual for a couple of birds out of each 50 or in order that they order from hatcheries to die within the mail or shortly after arriving.
Mass-casualty mail-order occasions are uncommon, however after they occur, they have an inclination to obtain information consideration. It’s a weird-sounding story with aggrieved prospects and typically, a hopeful end result, just like the hundreds of rescued birds in Delaware. However many extra farmed animals die in transportation than most of us understand. That’s as a result of these animals — whether or not raised by yard poultry lovers or main meat-producing conglomerates — are commodities, and their deaths merely a margin of error baked into the economics of the annual hatching, elevating, and slaughtering of billions of chickens for meals.
What occurs between the manufacturing facility farm and the slaughterhouse
Animals raised for meals are sometimes transported quite a few instances all through their lives, and so they’re sometimes handled like cargo reasonably than dwelling, feeling animals. Typically, it’s bins of day-old chicks shipped via the USPS from a small hatchery to a small farm. However extra usually, it’s truckloads of fattened-up chickens or pigs moved from a manufacturing facility farm to an enormous slaughterhouse.
Greater than 9 billion chickens raised for meat yearly within the US are stored on manufacturing facility farms — lengthy, windowless buildings that look extra like industrial warehouses than farms. The birds have been bred to develop monumental, which causes quite a few well being issues, and in these overcrowded services, illness spreads rapidly. The situations are so terrible that as much as 6 p.c die earlier than they will even be trucked to the slaughterhouse. That’s over half a billion animals every year.
As soon as the survivors attain about 6.5 kilos, they’re rapidly and tightly packed into crates. These crates are then stacked one atop one other onto a truck sure for the slaughterhouse. They’re nonetheless infants, at simply 47 days previous, however 6.5 kilos is their common “market weight.”
Most rooster farms are situated near a slaughterhouse, so the journey isn’t too lengthy — usually 60 miles or much less, based on the Nationwide Rooster Council.
However “even when it’s a brief journey, the climate and the stocking density has an enormous impact on mortality,” Adrienne Craig, an legal professional on the Animal Welfare Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for extra humane situations in animal transport, informed me. “They may very well be transported for 45 minutes and if it’s 110 levels,” quite a lot of chickens may die. They will additionally develop into harassed and bodily aggressive towards each other when packed so tightly.
The US poultry business doesn’t publish statistics on what number of animals die in transport — what they name “DOAs” (lifeless on arrival). Within the early 2000s, based on the information analytics agency Agri Stats, Inc., the DOA fee was round 0.36 p.c. Assuming this hasn’t modified a lot (an affordable assumption, because it’s not so totally different from DOA charges in lots of European international locations), round 33.8 million chickens within the US died in transport in 2024, or 92,602 day by day. (The Nationwide Rooster Council didn’t instantly reply to a request for business DOA figures.)
To place that into context, round 33 million cattle are slaughtered for beef every year within the US.
In a 2023 report, the Animal Welfare Institute revealed a report that particulars quite a few mass-death occasions in rooster transport. Listed here are only a few:
- In 2018, 34,050 chickens died in transport to a Pilgrim’s Pleasure slaughterhouse from extreme chilly and wind. (Pilgrim’s Pleasure occurred to be the high donor to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration.)
- In 2020, greater than 9,000 birds raised for Butterfield Meals died after being held in a single day in unheated transport trailers when the temperature fell to minus 17 levels Fahrenheit.
- In 2022, a transport truck carrying birds for Lincoln Premium Poultry — Costco’s in-house rooster manufacturing firm — caught fireplace and 1,000 birds had been burned alive, whereas an extra 1,500 had been injured and euthanized.
The DOA fee is even greater for pigs, with about one million yearly both lifeless on arrival on the slaughterhouse, unable to maneuver or sustain with different pigs after unloading, or in such a horrible state that they have to be euthanized on arrival.
Much like poultry birds, pigs and cattle are topic to excessive temperatures, however they’re usually transported a lot additional distances. And a typical beef or dairy cow is shipped a number of instances to totally different farms, and sometimes throughout state traces — not simply the journey from the farm to the slaughterhouse. These lengthy distances imply the animals reside in each other’s urine and feces whereas on the truck, and, based on Craig, they will expertise bruising when jostled round as truckers navigate curves and bumpy roads.
Animals haven’t any federal protections in transportation journeys below 28 hours, and the federal Twenty-Eight Hour Legislation, supposed to cut back their struggling on these longer journeys, is poorly — and infrequently — enforced. The legislation additionally excludes poultry birds — the overwhelming majority of animals raised for meat.
The common client, if they give thought to farm animal struggling in any respect, could solely give it some thought within the context of manufacturing facility farms or slaughterhouses. However the manufacturing facility farm manufacturing chain is extremely complicated, and at every step, animals have little to no protections. That results in tens of hundreds of thousands of animals dying painful deaths every year in transport alone, and nearly no corporations are ever held accountable.
These deaths are simply as tragic because the hundreds who died within the current USPS incident, and they’re simply as preventable. The meat business may select to pack fewer animals into every truck, require heating and cooling throughout transport, and provides animals ample time for relaxation, water, and meals on lengthy journeys.
However such modest measures would minimize into their margins, and if there’s one factor that must be understood about nearly each main US meat firm, it’s this: They may all the time minimize corners on animal welfare to extend revenue until they’re legally required to alter.
