AR-News: United Poultry Concerns Petitioners Urge Egg Industry to Stop Starving Chickens

Thu Jan 22 19:44:34 EST 2004

From:  easyveganalerts at yahoogroups.com

[Upcnews] United Poultry Concerns Petitioners Urge Egg Industry to Stop Starving Chickens 
Date: 1/21/04 12:55:39 PM Eastern Standard Time 
From:    Upcnews at upc-online.org

United Poultry Concerns PO Box 150 Machipongo, VA 23405
Phone: 757-678-7875 Fax: 757-678-5070 www.UPC-online.org

For Immediate Release
January 21, 2004
Contact: Karen Davis

United Poultry Concerns Petitioners Urge Egg Industry to Stop Starving
Chickens

Machipongo, Va. – United Poultry Concerns mailed 2072 petition signatures
yesterday to the U.S. egg industry trade group, United Egg Producers, urging
the industry to stop starving hens from 5 to 21 days at a time until the
birds lose a quarter to a third of their bodyweight including body fat,
feathers, liver tissue, musculature, and skeleton. This makes a total of
9528 signatures that we have gathered and mailed from U.S. citizens who are
appalled by the egg industry’s practice of depriving hens of food and of
falsely comparing this blatant cruelty to the natural molting of birds to
maintain good plumage.

According to the June 2003 issue of Poultry Science, of the 240 million hens
exploited for egg production each year in the U.S., between 144 million and
168 million birds are force molted, in spite of the fact that U.S.
government experiments have shown over and over that forced molting causes
hens to develop virulent Salmonella enteritidis (SE) infections in their
ovaries and their eggs. Force-molted hens, these experiments have shown,
“were 100- to 1,000-fold more susceptible to infection by SE and therefore
more readily transmitted the organism to uninfected hens in neighboring
cages” (p. 1008).

While the egg industry has sought to dismiss these findings as merely
experimental, comparable field studies of U.S. flocks have found that the
numbers of Salmonella enteritidis organisms doubled in molted versus
nonmolted flocks, and “the levels of environmental salmonellae increased
dramatically in commercial flocks following a molt” (p. 1009).

Under natural conditions, hens spend 60% to 90% of their day foraging for
food. When these normally active birds are starved in their cages for days
and weeks, their immune systems are so weakened by stress and lack of
nutrients that Salmonella organisms quickly invade their gastrointestinal
tract and proceed “with invasion of the spleen and liver” (p. 1003).

For a summary of “The Animal Welfare and Food Safety Issues Associated with
the Forced Molting of Laying Birds,” click on
http://www.upc-online.org/molting/52703.htm

United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes the
compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. www.upc-online.org

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