Animal Writings

When Gary say anything can be done to chickens, he really and truly DOES mean ANYTHING!

To give you just a very few excerpts from what I personally saw during my years at Tyson, I saw a great number of atrocities. that I can assure you. Despte overwhelming proof, invluding the videotaped confessions of some of those responsible and those who saw it, since it was not against the law, some of my co=workers got away with"

--One night someone had the bright idea to line up about a dozen chickens on the belt. They were pretty sick and couldn't struggle very much. He shoved each chicken's head up the butt of the chicken in front of it. Since this action made for such a tight fit, the chickens couldn't pull their heads out.

We went back in there to hang them after a break and I picked up the first chicken, not noticing this because the chickens are stuffed together on the belt so tight, anyway, They were still barely alive, (maybe some were dead from suffocation) and some other people hung some of them. Most of them were bleeding from their butts, so I'm sure it hurt them quite a bit. And it surely can't have been much fun to have their heads enclosed in another chicken's butt.

--I remember another time we went back from break and someone had gone in there at break time when the line was stopped. They hung about 20 chickens by their wings instead of by their feet. When the line started back up, before we could get it shut back off again, most of them had run through the killing machine and had their feet cut off. With no feet, they couldn't be rehung on the line, so most of them got thrown in the
DOA dumpster still alive (and we all know what happens to the ones in there). A lot of them also had their wings snatched off by the killer and the utility guy that ran in the killing room to pull them off.
Whoever had done this might have gotten in some trouble for doing this since it stopped the line, but nobody knew and he never got caught.

--Sometimes people would intentionally hang chickens by their heads because the guy on the end of the line had to snatch them off and rehang them right.
They thought it was a great prank to pull. Usually the guy on the end of the line would just hang the feet without taking out the head because it was quicker.

Those were almost sure to be scalded alive because the killer couldn't get to their throats
to cut them and the shackle wouldn't squeeze their throats enough to strangle them.

One night a guy on the end of the line got really aggravated and picked up a piece of pipe about 2 ft. long (a 3/4" piece of galvanized steel hot water line that maintenance had inadvertently
left in the floor after eplacement that night).
He started whacking the chickens' heads off with it like a baseball bat because one of them shit in his face. The heads would travel across the room and hit the wall about 10 ft. away and just splatter like tomatoes against the wall. He did about 10-15 birds that way. It was the worst display of loss of control I ever saw down there.

--Culling the runts: Standard policy was to just throw them in the dumpster alive. This is the same one that the DOAs went in. Several times a night a forklift would come by and pick it up and
set down a new one. The ones they carried away went to the augur where the chickens were ground up, the runts being ground alive.

This wasn't enough for some of the workers around there. They had to get a little more creative about it. One of the things they did
was to take a step back off the line with one and chunk it into the exhaust fans over our heads. The exhaust fan would pulverize it
and sling it back as a mush into the person's face who was standing directly below it.
(Ha ha ha! Real funny, huh? Sick.) This was fun since it would totally freak out a new person
who is standing there on the line, trying to hang their chickens and suddenly gets a face full of
blood, guts, feathers, and shit.

Another thing I have seen them do to them is to throw them against the wall as hard as they could. It would leave a big bloody smear on the wall. I fail to see how this is amusing, but it seemed to give them a real thrill, anyway.

The third, and last, way that they would cull a runt was also the most common. They simply pulled its head off and threw it on the floor to watch it flop. Sadly enough, this was probably the most humane way, but still a bit sick for the reason behind it. It wasn't that they were trying to be humane, they just wanted to watch
it flop and sling blood Everywhere. It was especially common for them to do it and throw
the chicken behind a new person. The bird would flop up and bounce against the backs of their legs.
They would turn around and look and see a headless bird flopping around, spraying blood all over
them. I think this would be quite an upsetting thing to happen to anybody, but especially somebody who had never been in the hanging cage before. It was always great fun to mess with the new people. What can they do?

There would be several hundred runts a night, and management didn't care, since they were
to be culled anyway.

And, of course, there were the dry ice bombs I have already mentioned on my blog.

Remember that these are only a FEW things seen by ONE person at ONE plant. Just imagine what all goes on when the cameras aren't rollling and no one like me talks...