"A turkey chick is fighting its way into life, hatching somewhat more slowly from its shell than the others. Its egg, perhaps, was a little too far from the top.
There are 125 others, all hatchlings looking at their new world for the first time. Their nest is a plastic box, 85 by 60 centimeters with narrow slits in the sides -- the legs and beaks of those buried further down stick out.
The chicks are thrown out of the box onto a steel chute, from which they fall onto a conveyor belt . . . .
Behind a sheet of Plexiglas, the struggling turkey chick has finally pulled itself completely out of its egg and is peeping as it looks around.
But it is late. Too late.
The box is tipped and the chick, together with a pile of eggshells, slides into a grinder. Its life is snuffed out just as it was about to begin. . . .
Today's laying hens produce about 300 eggs a year, no matter how poorly they are treated. 'They simply lay until they drop dead,' says a veterinarian working for a state regulatory agency, who prefers not to be named. . . .
The real reason for shortening beaks is that the birds live in claustrophobically tight quarters in barns, especially near the end of the fattening period -- a stage that the industry is careful to keep out of the public eye. . . .
'What's happening here is torture,' says Focke, who has inspected hundreds of barns. . . .
But how safe is this system, which, through its use of antibiotics, generates such resistant bugs that hospitals now consider poultry farmers to be a safety risk?" More
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And these mass production lines are found everywhere in the modern world.
