Warning: The following post is graphic in the treatment of animals from a first hand experience. I am overcome with emotion recalling these past events, but I believe the public has a rite to know if they ask. Read with caution, stop if it is too much.
Ok, let me just go into a little bit of my past employment history here for a moment. Believe it or not, I used to catch chickens for a living. And … it was at this very Moorefield factory in West Virginia. My title was “Pullet Catcher” with the “Live Haul” crew. Job requirements wer simple – be able to count to seven, and be able to handle wild life. I would go out each night to a growing house and catch pullets (chickens that are 20 weeks old). We would drive to an egg laying house and deliver the chickens. All chickens needed to be counted, and medication needed to be administered. All roosters needed plastic dowels driven through there beaks (don’t know why).
The video here is not in the factory, it is in a growing house where – you guessed it, the Live Haul crew would work. The video applies to the live haul crews – primarily the pullet catchers. I’ve worked with the breeder crews a few times and they were very professional about what they did and are not out of control. They do not catch all the bad stuff that goes in these videos, but they do catch enough to make a point. I have seen this first hand for myself. A lot of these young kids are wild and out of control. Live Haul positions are fast, very stressful and intense. You get a workout each night. The treatment of chickens (and people) is very bad. If you slow down, people throw chickens at you. You don’t know who as it is dark in the growing houses when you catch chickens. In houses with two floors, you have to be careful when you are neer the doors with the cages or someone could knock you down to the ground from the second floor. Practical jokes are very common. I’ve swallowed cigarette butts in my drinks before and couldn’t get the feeling out of my throught for a couple of hours. Others have poured large amounts of exlax into co-workers cups. Driving consisted of high speeds that even closing your eyes would scare the living daylights out of you. And oh yea, more then half of these guys would not pass a drug test.
So why didn’t you say anything? I’ll tell you. In the video at the website provided, the camera is focused mainly on the table where oil-based medicine is injected into chickens. If you do anything to piss any of these guys, you would risk practical jokes at your own expense, or being injected. An injection is no fun. You immediately are rushed to the nearest hospital while your hand is exploding. (Due to the oil in the medicine). Plus, I really needed the job. I just came back home from dropping out of college and was trying to make it on my own. Live Haul is one of most well paying jobs in WV with benefits (or was at one time). I was making $94 per night. That … “was” a lot of money. Today, I program web pages and stand alone application software. I jumped on the opposite side of the spectrum.
Were you one of the violent guys? No. I was the guy who kept to myself and did my job. I wasn’t good at it so I would get write ups saying I was too slow, missed a day of work, and stuff like that. I would have jokes played on me every now and then. I probably should have quit, but the consequences of doing so were not at all pleasent. Did I know what I was doing? Did I feel bad about it? You bet. I have had bad nightmares. I added a lot to my existing depression problems already and it went against a lot of things that I believed in. I’ve even wrote a story called The Factory about it.
Ok, so why are they throwing chickens against the wall? I’ll tell you. When you slide a chicken accross the table to get its medication and its beak pierced, the person doing the shooting or injections takes a good look and determines if the chicken is of good quality. If not, then the chicken is destroyed. The chickens are thrown against the wall so that they will be out of the way. The chickens are most likely already dead. The chickens neck would be broken against the edge of the table and then thrown against the wall. However, the force at wich the chicken is not needed. Reason, the assembly line moves quick and everyone is keeping up with the pace. They are in the zone.
Why are there so many? We have come accross growing houses where a lot of chickens were just … sick. Honestly. You get a large group of chickens together and sometimes you can have a miniature epidemic on your hands. Any chicken that appears to be so sick that it can hardly move on its own is destroyed. However, in this video – I have not seen such a great number of chickens killed before. There have been times that if a shooter has had a bad day, he’ll just take a good number of chickens for no reason and kill them. Also, if a chicken regurgitates on a shooter, that may be reason alone to upset the shooter and kill it. Chickens are not to be fed on nights that we come to gather them, however some growing houses did not lift the food and/or water early enough and thats why a massive amount of chickens will regurgitate.
These guys are jumping up and down on the dead chickens! Yes, this is the wild behavior of this group. Think of the class clown in your high school. Now think of a whole group of them talking tall, showing off, making a good time out of a stressful job with no adult supervision. There is no formal work environment here. No inspections, hardly any rules, and a few of them are doped up. These are the kids who made trouble for the rest of the class. This is where they end up. God I hated these guys.
Radio is loud! Yes, the noise of the chickens are so loud that it is deafening. My guess is that the video camera is actually inside the radio. Imagine, someone positioning a radio so that it points to the crew. Nothing wrong with that, everyone wants to hear it better. I’m just wondering what all was involved. It couldn’t have been the farmers radio, we always had our own. Maybe they got a new one that had the camera inside of it.
Did you kill chickens? Yes. This was a job requirement. If you were not able to kill a chicken then you were most certainly out of a job. There are many ways I was tought to kill a chicken. I did not use most of these. I primarily twisted its head and broke the neck, as that seemed the least violent and quickest way to get the job done. However, I have seen the others performed.
- Grab the feet, slap its head against a table or edge of door to break its neck.
- Pull the head from the body till you hear the neck crack
- Twist the head till you hear the neck crack
- Place the chicken on its back and then put its head under its wing and watch it sufficate.
- Kick the chicken from behind really hard
I’ve also seen kids get upset and keep pounding the head with there fists.
God I hated this place. I felt like it was my punishment for dropping out of college. I came home smelling like amonia all the time. My quality of life was nil. Thank god my brother invited me to stay with him and work at Burger King. What a dream job it was.
Just an update … (Government Investigations)
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has launched its own investigation into the plant for possible food-safety violations, based on testimony from PETA’s investigator that chickens who died as a result of their injuries were sent down the slaughter line to be used for human consumption and that workers sprayed feces on other birds and on each other by painfully squeezing the chickens’ abdomens, possibly contaminating their flesh with E. coli and other bacteria. Click here for more information about the health hazards of fecal contamination of meat.
This was another problem with pissing an employee off. People would throw this crap on you. These people need routine inspections to be watched for the whole shift.
Ask Pilgrim’s Pride officials (politley) to adopt a controlled-atmosphere killing of chickens:
Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim, Chair
Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation
110 S. Texas St.
Pittsburg, TX 75686
903-855-1000
903-856-7505 (fax)
corpcomm@pilgrimspride.com
Tags: Slaughterhouse, Cruelty, Chickens, Pullet, Chicken, Live Haul, Job, WLR, WLR Foods, Pullet Catcher, Wompler, Wompler Longacre, Pilgrim, Pilgrims Pride, PETA
[...] 1. I used to catch live chickens at night for a living, 7 at a time. 5 in one hand, 2 in the other. Transport them from the growing houses to egg laying farms. I had so many nightmares from the job though. You can read more about this and my view points at my real life blog on the post, Slaughter House. [...]