My name is Virgil Butler. I worked at the Tyson plant in Grannis, Arkansas from July 1997 until November 12, 2002. I worked on the night shift in the receiving department as a live-hanger as well as on the kill-floor.

I personally witnessed many acts of cruelty toward the chickens by employees of the plant on a nightly basis:

One of the most recent problems that I observed was the night shift superintendent, turning down the stunner and ordering the employees to leave it down. This machine is the device that is supposed to stun chickens before they are killed. Turning it down results in the chickens missing the killing machine and evading the killer behind the machine, so that they end up being scalded to death by water in the scalding tank. The scalding tank loosens up the feathers so that they can be picked out. The chickens are supposed to be dead before they reach this point...

I was responsible for trying to slit the throats of the chickens the machine missed on the nights I worked the killing room. Our line runs 182 shackles per minute. It is physically impossible to catch them all. Therefore, they are scalded alive. When this happens, the chickens flop, scream, kick, and their eyeballs pop out of their heads. Then, they often come out the other end with broken bones and disfigured and missing body parts because they’ve struggled so much in the tank. Sometimes, when we had a line broken down, they would be left hanging upside down in the stunner in the water to drown...

We were extremely shorthanded, due to the horrendous working conditions. This led to a high turnover rate with inexperienced, frustrated workers under pressure to keep the production numbers up. If production fell, it would mean overtime work, so the belt speed was turned up. This resulted in the belt becoming overloaded in the area where the chickens awaited shackling, which ended up smothering hundreds of chickens a night. I heard a supervisor say, ‘I would rather smother a few hundred goddamned birds than to lose time because of empty shackles.’ (This was said in late July 2002 when temperatures in the hanging cage were exceeding 100 degrees in the middle of the night).

The absence of climate control is another cause of unnecessary suffering that results in death to the chickens. The heater in the “cage,” which is the area where birds are hung, worked less than half of the time I worked there. Many times the temperatures would be well below freezing. This resulted in the chickens freezing to the belt last winter and the winter before….My co-workers and I complained about this to a supervisor, but to no avail. He would just turn and walk away. The reverse of this problem happened in the summer time, where there is no adequate air conditioning…This results in the chickens dying of heat stroke, heart attack, and suffocation.

These uncomfortable conditions, coupled with the unrelenting pressure to keep the shackles filled at all costs, lead to much frustration and outright rage among the employees.

I have witnessed a fellow employee build dry ice bombs (made by putting dry ice and a small amount of water in a plastic Pepsi bottle and screwing the lid down tight) and putting it on the belt with live chickens during break time. This results in a high pressure explosion that rips the chickens’ bodies apart and scatters them all over the room. This occurred numerous times.

I have also seen a fellow employee rip the heads, legs, and wings off of live chickens, or just stomp them to death on the floor because he was aggravated. This occurred on a regular basis for about the last year and a half that I worked there.

I have also witnessed a forklift driver run over the chickens on purpose, then laugh about it. These kinds of incidents were ongoing and repetitive--just a part of a regular night’s work.

We were given thousands of chickens to hang that were above the size limit we were used to.... In the process of hanging the live birds, we were forced to break their legs to get them to fit into the shackles. This was unnecessary. The shackles could have been spread out to fit the larger-sized birds... However, one of the supervisors decided that it wasn’t necessary and didn’t want to lose the production time to do it.

I am writing this letter because I want to see something done about this cruelty. I don’t wish to be a part of the nightmare any longer and am willing to speak out about this to anyone at anytime.

Back | Contents | Next