The Secrets about Hatcheries and Big-Market Egg Factories

[GammaPoppyLilyFlutter]

While looking for a suitable hatchery to order chicks from in the future, I came about a post telling how Murray McMurray Hatchery treats their newly hatched chicks. Here is a YouTube video showing it:

Personally, I think this is outrageous! They pick the chicks up by the wing and FLING them into tiny boxes! The chicks are screaming as loud as they can but nobody cares. By the time I was finished watching this video, I was yelling as loud as I could to the hatchery people the put the chick down, and I'm not the sensitive type.

I was doing more research on this, and I found out:

They send more chicks than ordered because they don't think all of them will survive the shipping. Hatcheries typically put the chicks in tiny boxes with no food or water.


Then, while researching more, I came upon a page about big-market egg factories.

http://www.upc-online.org/freerange.html

Here's the page. Markets will actually KILL the poor little cockerels!


Is this what we want for the species of our beloved pets? Chicken lovers unite!

These are some propaganda banners I made for the cause

 

[enola]

These businesses are in business to make money. They don't look at the chicks as being future pets, they look at them as product that needs to be shipped out to the purchaser as quickly as possible. The faster they work, the more money the company makes.

The solution to this outrage?????? Buy your chicks from people that feel just as compassionate about chickens as you do.

And by the way, putting water in with the chicks is impossible. How would you keep the water from getting on the chicks??? Wet chicks die very quickly from hypothermia. Putting food in the box is also unnecessary, since the chicks are shipped immediately after hatching. The chicks survive the first 2 days of life by absorbing the yolk for nutrition.

 

[onthespot]

If you did more research, you would find that half of all chicks that hatch, are roosters. There are not "homes" for millions of roosters. If you avoid shipping from McMurray and just buy local and raise your own, you will find yourself in the same boat as McMurray, on a much smaller scale. What will you do with all your extra roosters? Not keeping roosters? Do you think keeping only hens is the solution? That is why hatcheries end up with extra roosters, because people who want "only hens" don't buy them, can't or won't keep them. It is of just a mathematical fact of raising poultry. If you don't want to participate in the equation, stop keeping chickens, don't eat eggs, or anything made with eggs (read the fine print) or eat anything that was fertilized with poultry manure to grow it, or has poultry fat in the seasoning base, or has calicum sources from egg shells, and on and on.

 

[GammaPoppyLilyFlutter]

But why don't they just kill the cockerels quickly? It doesn't entirely make sense

 

[ChickieBooBoo]

Its not all the hatcheries fault either though, they only produce what the customer wants. You always see people who order their 20 little pullets because they dont want roosters, where do you think the 20 cockerals go? Then they come on here and complain about the boys being killed at the hatchery and all that. I dont agree with the way they handle the chicks, they what else are they going to do with the roosters?

 

[chickieboy]

buy st run and raise the roo for the freezer

 

[ChickieBooBoo]

Quote:
Thats what I do, it gives the cockeral chicks a chance

 

[speckledhen]

These links have been posted numerous times and it always ends in fisticuffs.





ETA: In case you aren't aware of it, since you mentioned chicks being shipped without food and water, just for future reference, chicks do not need food or water for three days after hatch due to the yolk they absorb into their abdomens prior to hatch.