Voice of the Truth

*    “Do you think from your perception that the birds have a sense of what is going to happen to them?”  Virgil Butler, a former Tyson slaughterhouse worker, answered this question at a Press Conference in the U.S.A.:
     “Yes. They try everything in their power to get away from the killing machine and to get away from you. Even the ones that are stunned into immobility. If these people are trying to say, because this chicken is stunned, it doesn’t know what’s going to happen or doesn’t know what’s going on, they are lying. I stood on the kill floor and watched. They will look at you, they’ll open up their mouths; they try to squawk. They’ll do all that; they’ll get as mobile as they can, trying to get away. They have been stunned, so their muscles don’t work, but their eyes do and you can tell by them looking at you, they’re scared to death.”

*    “Inside the plant, in the ‘live-hang’ area, they are violently jammed into a movable metal rack that clamps them upside down by their feet. Suspending these heavy birds, most of who are already crippled, upside down by their feet, puts a painful strain on their legs and hips. Worse, meat industry specialist Dr. Temple Grandin reports “seeing a lot of one-legged shackling’ of birds.” – United Poultry Concerns U.S.A.

*    “The birds’ heads and upper bodies are then dragged through a splashing water trough called a “stunner”. This water, which is cold and salted to conduct electricity, does not stun the birds. Its purpose is to immobilize them to keep them from thrashing and to paralyze the muscles of their feather follicles so their feathers will pop out easily, as well as to induce “meat” characteristics in their breast muscle tissue. For these reasons at least 24 million chickens, turkeys and ducks are intentionally tortured every day with volts of electricity in federally-inspected slaughterhouses, and further tortured when the machinery breaks down. (The same process exists in South Africa)

*    (After the haphazard slaughtering)…. “Still alive, they then hang upside down for 90 seconds in a bleedout tunnel where they’re supposed to die from blood loss, but millions of birds do not die, while an unspecified number of birds drown in pools of blood when the conveyor belt dips too close to the floor. Dead or alive, the birds are then dropped into tanks of semi-scalding water. In 1993, of 7 billion birds slaughtered in U.S. facilities, over 3 million birds were plunged into the scald tanks alive. According to a former slaughterhouse worker, when chickens are scalded alive, they “flop, scream, kick, and their eyeballs pop out of their heads. They often come out of the other end with broken bones and disfigured and missing body parts because they’ve struggled so much in the tank.” (Mufti Afzal Elias and all Sanha’s ‘inspectors’ witnessed this brutality at Rainbow Chicken plant).

*    “Chickens go to the slaughter with rotting livers (necrotic enteritis), wing rot, pus-filled lungs (air saculitis), and ammonia-burned skin. Antibiotics are fed to chickens in massive amounts. As a result bacterial resistance to antibiotic treatment of humans has jumped dramatically since the 1970’s. Many people become violently ill with anti-biotic resistant disease, like Camphylobacteriosis and Salmonellosis and Staphylococcus aurens infections from handling and ingesting poultry, eggs and other contaminated animal products.”

*    “Arsenic (roxasone) is fed to farmed animals. More than 2 million pounds of arsenic are fed to 70 percent or more of the 9 billion chickens raised annually in the U.S. for human consumption. Arsenic causes bladder cancer, respiratory cancer and skin cancer, and is linked to heart disease, diabetes and declines in brain function in people. The antibiotic arsenic compound roxasone, which promotes the growth of blood vessels in chickens to produce pinker meat, does the same in human cells – a critical  first step in many human diseases, including cancers.” – Duquesne University’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

*    Battery hens suffer from the horrible diseases of female birds denied exercise, including an ugly new disease called Farry Liver Hermorrhagic Syndrome characterized by an enlarged, fat, friable liver covered with blood clots.”   …. “Poultry feed containing animal by-products – bone, feathers, blood, offal, condemned body parts of chickens and other sick animal parts – has long been identified as a primary source of salmonella contamination.” – United Poultry Concerns.