IATP Hog Report - Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

Section 6
factory, or battery for laying hens, hens are crowded into cages stacked
one on the other, four or five to a small cage without room to spread their
wings, and have only wire to stand on. Some cages are not high enough
for birds to stand upright. Crowding and stress leads to feather pecking,
which can lead to cannibalism. Debeaking got its start around 1940 when
a California farmer discovered that searing the top beaks of chickens with
a blowtorch prevented them from pecking at each other's feathers. 32
Today, the practice of mutilating the top beak of chicks is accepted as part
of the modern system of industrialized laying hen production.
http://www.iatp.org/hogreport/sec6.html (7 of 30)2/27/2006 3:50:16 AM
It has been known for some years that laying hens housed in battery cages
have lower bone density than hens that are allowed to run free in yards. 33
When a caged hen's egg laying life is over, she is known as a "spent" hen.
These spent hens have deteriorated physically over their short lives and
have little meat on their weak bones. 34 They often are sold to provide
meat for soup production. Almost a third of spent or out-of-lay hens have
at least one broken bone by the time they get to the processing plant, a
cause of severe suffering for the hens. 35 By the time they have been hung
on the processing line prior to slaughter, 98% of birds have broken bones.
Lack of exercise and intensiveness of production contribute significantly
to bone deterioration, but rough handling by human workers who are
transferring hens from their battery cages and into transport cages several
at a time, each held by one leg, does the actual breakage.
On modern, mechanized dairy farms, the tails of dairy cattle are docked.
This prevents them from getting caught in milking parlor gates and from
switching their manure-clad tails into the faces of the people milking
them. It also robs cows of a way to keep away flies.
In the industrialized system of agriculture, there is little motivation to
implement housing systems where sand or dirt can be made available and
chickens have the space to exercise, scratch and dustbathe, or to add straw
or other natural materials to pigs' environments for them to chew and
manipulate instead of each other's tails, or to design milking parlor gates
that do not catch cows' tails, because it is cheaper to alter the animal.
Administration of recombinant bovine somatotrophin (rBST) to dairy
cattle via injection marginally improves the milk production of high
performance dairy cows, but reduces their welfare by increasing the
incidence of mastitis and rate of physical deterioration, resulting in greater
use of antibiotics to treat infections and often a higher culling rate. 36
Increased use of antibiotics to treat mastitis increases selective pressure on
antibiotics to develop resistance and increases the probability that
antibiotic residues will be in milk that reaches consumers, which would
result in health problems for consumers allergic to antibiotics. 37 Increased
levels of IGF-1, another hormone stimulated by rBST use, may also