1,000 Hens Rescued From Slaughter at Struggling Iowa Egg Farm

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from Senient Media
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Over the weekend, Animal Place, California’s oldest and largest sanctuary for farmed animals, rescued 1,000 hens from an egg farm in Iowa that scaled-down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The egg farm planned to “depopulate” over 100,000 hens with carbon dioxide gas—a common method used by farmers struggling to maintain their oversized herds and flocks. As infected workers, slaughterhouse closures, and disrupted supply chains wreak havoc on America’s food system, millions of animals are being culled.

Typically, animals trapped within the food system do not get a second chance at life, but this Iowa farm decided to allow individuals onto the property to rescue hens, and local animal advocates alerted Animal Place. Two Animal Place staffers then drove nearly 30 hours to Iowa to coordinate the rescue with eight local volunteers and chartered two planes to fly the hens back to their sanctuary in California.

“The entire process, from the 27-hour drive, arriving at the farm at 3 a.m., loading and unloading full crates from the planes and vehicles, and going straight to caring for them once we arrived at the sanctuary was the most exhausting experience I’ve ever had,” said Animal Place animal care director Hannah Beins.

Living conditions inside the egg facility were dismal. Rescuers found a battery cage system with cages stacked four to five high with 10 hens in each cage. They also found cages with surviving hens forced to stand and walk on top of deceased hens. Dead hens littered the aisles of the barn.
How COVID-19 is Changing Us

  • Dogs are being reclassified as pets, not livestock according to China’s new draft policy. The policy is part of a response to the coronavirus outbreak that the Humane Society called a potential “game-changer” in animal welfare. Wuhan, China also banned virtually all hunting of wild animals within its limits and imposed strict new controls on the breeding of all wild animals, declaring Wuhan “a wildlife sanctuary.”
  • The pandemic has illuminated glaring issues within the American food system that can no longer be ignored. A case is being made for deindustrialization and decentralization within food supply chains, breaking up the meat oligopoly, ensuring that food workers have sick pay and access to health care, and pursuing policies that would sacrifice some degree of efficiency in favor of much greater resilience.
  • COVID-19 is also influencing consumers’ relationship with meat. As the virus continues to pass through meat production plants in North America, consumers are questioning their food sources now more than ever. Interest in cultured meats and meat alternatives has risen during the pandemic and is expected to continue growing post-COVID.
Layer hens are often housed in extremely cramped conditions with no access to sunlight. They are bred specifically for laying speed—increasing the number of eggs produced by each hen. Since hens are not biologically designed to lay that many eggs, they suffer painful health problems like calcium depletion and osteoporosis as a result.

“I would do it again in a heartbeat, because until their rescue these hens never got to touch grass or feel the sunshine, and now they can live out the rest of their lives as chickens should,” said Beins.

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