The video, produced by Animal Equality, an international animal rights organization, has gone viral with 35 million views on Facebook.
Animal Equality’s investigators have infiltrated industrial hatcheries, where factory-farmed chickens spend the first nightmarish day of their short, miserable lives.
Unlike the barnyard pictures in storybooks, there are no hens, waiting to gather them under their wings when they’re born.
Instead, the baby chicks are cooked out of their shells in industrial incubators.
In an evolutionary attempt to keep their protective mothers nearby, they start chirping the moment they hatch. But their desperate cries for help are never heard.
Instead they are immediately dumped onto a conveyor belt, separated from their shells, and processed like auto parts in an assembly line.
Sick and weak chicks are thrown into dumpsters with the shells and brutally crushed.
“What awaits for those who survive is even worse,” the film’s narrator says.
After being vaccinated, they’re shot through chutes into crates, packed like sardines into trucks, and transported all across the country to fattening farms.
If a human baby grew at the same pace as these selectively bred baby chickens, it would weigh 600 pounds in two months.
Many of them can’t handle the pace at which their muscles grow. Their legs are crushed beneath their own weight and they become immobilized. They die in agony or are thrown away alive.
At just over a month old, they are sent to slaughter, where they are handled violently, breaking their legs and wings in the process.
The video ends by asking viewers to go vegan or eat less chicken. We’d like to add the options of pasture-raised chicken and eggs, backyard chickens, grass-fed and wild meats, and/or producing fewer humans.
Comments
40 responses to “Hidden Cameras at Chicken Hatchery Shed New Light on Horrors of Factory Farming”
Attack Planned Parenthood for massacring humans before losing sleep over chicken, brother
And saving a lot of humans too. This chickens are alive to have a horrible and painful short life. Much much worse
Go jump off a curb.
Amen!
No way..a human life means the same as an animals..when people start eating human flesh, start a human life the same way as these, then you got room for an argument..but for now a human life means NOTHING just as these chicks dont.
I bet you approve of abortion, which means you are as hypocritical as you think we are.
Like cattle, chickens exist solely for the purpose of feeding humans. Their evolutionary ancestors went extinct a long time ago.
More importantly, you’re saying it is perfectly acceptable for us to kill and eat you and your family. What is your address again?
So you’re telling me that, if a human baby and a newborn chick were trapped inside a burning home and you only had time to save one, you’d have to stop and think about it? I find that hard to believe.
Your belief of human life is also severely disturbing. People who think that way are usually on watch lists or in prison for being serial killers. Might want to rethink that.
And my god, can people stop banging on about abortions already? Just let people be. For all we know, that baby they killed could’ve grown up to be a factory farm worker.
This would be apt if the video was condemning people for eating eggs. Instead it is about the mis-treatment and cruelties of newborn chickens that are fully birthed. Your analogy would work if planned parenthood went into maternity wards and punched newborns in the face. Plus, why are chickens on a lower plane of concern than an undeveloped fetus? Life is life, right; or is that just part of circumstantial morality too?
Fetuses inna womb are alive cognizant of their environment, and human…..killing fetuses in the womb is no different than clubbing a newborn
So right!
Frank, way to take away from the subject matter at hand.
Your self importance is matched by an apparent lack of empathy.
Oh, and spelling.
Word.
Planned parenthood does no such thing…. and I suppose you do your part by contibuting to unwanted kids in shelters and state facilities…. sure you do !!!
the solution to this is to kill 5 billion humans. I got no problem with that and making child bearing a privilege and not a right
Why choose one over the other? Are we in capable of being compassionate and civilized human beings on more than one front? I am ashamed to be a member of the human race on a daily basis.
Do you not have enough compassion to be both anti abortion, and anti cruelty? Or are you just using this as justification to continue participating in animal abuse?
thank you ! made me so sad! i alreday avoid eating meat if i can
This makes me sick !!!
Please stop this cruelty !
It is so sad to think that this is the way it is – it doesn’t have to be! I am no tree hugger, but this is deplorable!
I have a flock of four hens who get to roam the backyard and who come running for petting when our family goes out. I cannot imagine them being treated in such a manner – I hope when we bought them that they were cared for differently, but I don’t know – I will find out though!!
God made us stewards of the land and animals – we had better heed His trust. This is just so awful!!
I had over 100 free range chickens I used for eggs. They are much more brutal to each other than these set up hatcheries. You hear of someone being hen pecked… oh my. and Roos my gosh
‘God made us stewards of the land and animals’- Ooopsy
What country is this in?
Good old USA
God save them!
Terrible! I don’t have words enough!
Not every farm treats chickens this way…factory farms may but not small family farms and it makes me angry that it is made to look like every farm mistreats animals.
Read the last sentence of the article.
I have cut meat consumption back considerately in recent years but its not enough.
I’m still eating chicken but I would appreciate it if the food industry were held to higher standards. I might but from a more humane local farmer. One who has the babies with the mothers and doesn’t throw them un-naturally through chutes and into garbage bags alive!!! There has got to be better methods than this. Every processor should be forced to adjust their processing and then they will be equally competitive. Of course chicken prices would go up. I guess I would be willing to pay more for chickens that were treated with as much dignity as possible during a precess that ultimately has a morbid end.
They are held to extreme standards, dont believe these shister movies.
The machine that is human consumption at work. Deplorable and disgustingly inhumane. Over population is real. I for one will be more diligent on where and how my food is prepared.
The video does not say which country this is in.
Obviously one with very poor animal welfare standards that need addressing sharpish.
What a shame this is misrepresented as if this is the norm everywhere. It is not – though best to avoid factory farmed meat anyway for many reasons.
Why not eat insects instead?
Anyone who can viciously treat and kill helpless animals can easily kill human beings – esp the helpless unborn. We start at the bottom – treating all God’s creatures humanely.
Really? You worry about food production that is not being cruel, but is food farming at a production pace to feed everybody. Animals are not people(pets are a different topic) Undercover video is just emotional blackmail to get some group on the money train. Talk to the people ordering chicken wings during the NFL Kneeler games and the super bowl they ate 1 billion wings this year that is only 500000 chickens making humans HAPPY! the rest of those chickens made the rest of us just as happy.
If only we could breed chickens with 10 wings each just think how cheap a plate of good hot wings would be, YUMMY!
Stop mowing your grass that is cruel and insensitive and all that landscaping material is taking away our oxygen…can’t breath…I….need wings…
Lol careful you are being insensitive, you may soon be arrested for your words….
Have compassion eat nothing everything has feelings. I wonder if hens would say it is my egg i can kill it if I want too.
This is why a lot of us raise our own meat birds or buy from someone local. But understand the life of a chick isn’t easy even when hatched and raised by a hen.
Genesis 9:3
Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.
We don’t eat meat from the store. me and my youngest son really can’t eat meat from a store it makes us sick we don’t know if it’s what they put in them or what. we rasie are own chickens. Then we also are hunters, hog,deer,turkey, rabbits, squirrel.
Who are these people that can do this work and how do they treat little humans?
how i would love to fuck whoever owns this factory up.