Today, one week before Thanksgiving, Mercy For
Animals filed the first-ever formal rulemaking petition calling on the USDA to
end its decades-long hypocrisy. As it stands now, the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (HMSA)—one
of the only federal laws that protect farmed animals—has a glaring loophole. The USDA has so far
refused to apply the HMSA protections to birds, who make up 98 percent of all land animals slaughtered for
food in the United States. That’s right—the vast majority of the animals killed
for food in the U.S. are not covered by the one law that’s supposed to afford
farmed animals the most basic protections.
If it seems ridiculous and illogical that
birds are exempt from the law, that’s because it is. The USDA’s refusal to
include poultry in the HMSA makes no sense; chickens, turkeys, and ducks are
just as capable of feeling pain as cows and pigs. The USDA’s supposed rationale for excluding birds? The
USDA claims that the HMSA does not apply to poultry because the law refers only
to “livestock” and that poultry are not livestock.
This glaring loophole leaves nearly 9 billion animals each year vulnerable to
some of the worst abuses. Standard industry
practice is to subject birds to live shackling and
being dragged through an electrified stun bath before
they are killed. The birds resist being shackled, and studies have
found that stun baths often only paralyze the birds, meaning they aren’t actually rendered unconscious
before they are killed. Under the USDA’s current policy, that’s perfectly legal
since there’s no requirement that poultry be rendered unconscious or
insensible to pain prior to slaughter.
Under these standards, the USDA’s own inspectors have
documented horrors like chickens having their legs or wings cut off by the
beheading machine while conscious and many being scalded to death in the
feather-removal tanks. The USDA itself estimates that
approximately 1 million birds are scalded alive each year.
MFA has corroborated the USDA’s findings by
conducting numerous undercover investigations inside poultry slaughterhouses,
documenting cruelty that would be illegal if inflicted on pigs or cows. We’ve
documented chickens being scalded to death, workers ripping chickens’ heads off and violently
slamming birds into shackles, and birds being painfully
shocked with electricity.
See for yourself.
You know the system is
broken when certain corporations are regulating themselves before the
government mandates even minimal humane standards. Companies like
Perdue have even committed to replacing live-shackle slaughter with the less cruel
method of controlled–atmosphere stunning, which eliminates the cruelty of
shackling birds while they’re fully conscious and terrified. But we can’t
count on all corporations to make these changes themselves—it’s time for the
government to catch up and to regulate the way these poor birds are treated.
MFA is calling on the USDA to include birds in
the HMSA, and we encourage you to add your signature to our Change.org petition. If granted, our petition would
address this broken system by requiring that birds be handled in a way that
minimizes stress and pain before they are slaughtered.
There’s never a logical or ethical
justification for abusing animals, but this glaring loophole is perhaps the
most egregious example of the way our country’s laws arbitrarily allow the
abuse of some animals and not others. Let’s call on the USDA to end this
hypocrisy and mandate protection for the 98 percent of farmed animals who have
no rights—not even to a less painful death.
Take action here, and remember that the best thing you can do is leave
animals off your plate altogether so
that we can end this suffering for good.