Chicken Torture

PACKED HOUSE: Thousands upon thousands of chickens are jammed into a storage facility before they are transported for slaughter. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

An animal rights group takes on a local company.

by Amy L. Webb

West Conshohocken-based Keystone Foods LLC, one of the nation’s largest suppliers of processed poultry, is the target of a new animal rights campaign. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), along with a brigade of celebrity vegetarians, including hip-hop producer Russell Simmons and Sir Paul McCartney, is asking Keystone to change the way it slaughters chickens or face an onslaught of protests.

"We hope that Keystone will do what it can to change its policies," says Dan Shannon, national vegan outreach coordinator for PETA. "If not, we would explore an activist campaign. Demonstrations, boycotts, phone and e-mail campaigns, that sort of thing."

Keystone Foods operates 41 factories and offices around the world and produces more than one billion pounds of poultry and about 800 million pounds of beef annually. The company's chicken is used in 23,000 restaurants and is a major supplier to McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Keystone has poultry factories in Georgia and Kentucky.

"From time to time we get calls from animal rights people," says a Keystone spokesman who refused to give his name. "But we've never had any problems. We've also had a good relationship with PETA. As far as I know, PETA has not contacted our office about following better slaughtering standards. Frankly, it comes as a surprise that they have any concerns."

City Paper obtained a copy of the letter that PETA sent Keystone Chairman Herb Lotman on Nov. 18 asking that the company both follow the industry standard for slaughtering chickens and adopt a new set of guidelines developed by poultry experts. "The world's largest food corporations -- including McDonald's, Burger King, and Safeway -- understand that it is in their best interest to place a premium on animal welfare because an ever-increasing number of customers are choosing not to support egregious cruelty to animals," the letter states. "The obligation to treat animals fairly falls squarely on Keystone Foods' shoulders."

Lotman could not be reached for comment.

The process that PETA wants changed is standard throughout the poultry industry and also used at Keystone, the company's spokesman says.

It goes like this: Chickens are brought from farms and dumped from crowded cages onto a conveyer belt. As the birds move down, a big machine hovers over them and shackles the legs of as many as 180 chickens per minute. But because of the rapid pace of the line, many chickens are hung by only one leg instead of two -- which can clog the machine as it works.

After the birds are caught and shackled, they enter an electrically charged water bath. This is supposed to stun the birds before they meet the slicing machine. "The problem is that the level of voltage that is required to actually render them insensitive to pain can cause damage to the meat of the birds," says Shannon. "So most of these places set the stun voltage much lower than it needs to be set [for humane slaughter] to preserve meat quality."

Chickens, still shackled and hanging upside down, next move through a machine with a guide rail. This positions their necks close to a spinning blade that will slice their throats without beheading. Some chickens arrive to this machine fully conscious and writhing in pain, Shannon says.

Next, the birds pass through to an employee who uses a knife to slit the necks of any chickens still alive. "The machine misses a lot of birds, because they miss the guide rail," Shannon says. "In these places, you're talking about hundreds of birds going through every minute. Unfortunately, manual workers wielding knives can't possibly get every one."

After their throats are slit, the chickens move to a scald tank, which uses water heated to just under boiling. Birds are dunked into the tank and the scalding water removes their feathers. But according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), a percentage of birds are not dead when they enter the scald tank and drown. USDA data from 2002 shows that more than 3.7 million chickens -- out of the billions processed annually -- died as a result of burns or drowning in the tanks.

PETA has asked Keystone that it contract with farms that use mechanical pushers coated with rubber rather than human catchers. It also asked that the company stop slaughtering chickens using the stun-and-slice method and instead build gas chambers. An inert-gas killing line could cost up to $1.85 million, PETA says. But that money would be recovered within three to four years as fewer chickens would need to be thrown away. "If Keystone used a gas mixture to kill the chickens, the animals would have no chance of experiencing pain. It's just a more humane way of doing things," Shannon says.

Keystone has not said whether it is considering changing its method of slaughtering. To its credit, Keystone has in the past successfully pressured fast food chains such as McDonald's to use frozen meat products, which are safer because fresh meat spoils rapidly.

"The company seems to be looking out for humans," Shannon says. "We hope that Keystone will do the same for the animals it uses. The technology exists to eliminate a lot of this suffering. We want Keystone to read our reports and hopefully agree with us that there's another way, a more humane way, to process chicken."