5 million chickens, 2 hours to die: DxE, basketball and the truth about ventilation shutdown
An egg-laying hen found still alive by DxE investigators at the Rembrandt Enterprises farm where 5.3 million birds were killed by ventilation shutdown. Credit: Direct Action Everywhere
SPECIAL REPORT: On April 23, DxE activist Sasha Zemmel attempted to storm a Timberwolves game, a team majority owned by business magnate and egg tycoon Glen Taylor. While the action was short-lived, it drew much-needed attention to the hours-long cullings of farmed animals by ventilation shutdown.
Adorned in her makeshift referee jumper, lone Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) activist Sasha Zemmel, sitting courtside at an NBA playoff game between the Memphis Grizzlies and the Minnesota Timberwolves, made an audacious attempt to have majority team owner Glen Taylor removed from his own team’s arena.
Suffice to say, the stunt in which Zemmel had planned to blow her whistle and issue a “technical foul and ejection” and a fine against Taylor - Forbes’ richest billionaire in Minnesota - didn’t go exactly as planned. But then it didn’t have to when all that was needed was a significant enough disruption to garner national and international media attention.
Zemmel’s stunt was in fact the third in a series of similar actions from DxE over the last fortnight targeting Timberwolves games in an attempt to call out Taylor, whose company Rembrandt Enterprises was responsible for murdering a staggering 5.3 million egg-laying chickens in March this year following an outbreak of avian influenza.
Add to this the 5.6 million laying hens Rembrandt destroyed in 2015 when bird flu reached a peak in its home state of Iowa, US, where Taylor also owns several thousand acres of agricultural land, and the tycoon is directly responsible for the prolonged suffering and panicked deaths of at least 11 million chickens.
Because prolonged and panicked their deaths would have been, not to mention agonising and with unimaginable suffering, because that is the reality of a savage method of culling known as ‘ventilation shutdown’ (VSD). As the name suggests, doors and windows to the animals’ sheds are closed and the ventilation turned off, slowly suffocating the individuals within. And not just hens, but pigs too as a DxE investigation and testimony of a whistleblower revealed that Iowa Select Farms had started to “depopulate” pens in this way from April 2020 to alleviate backlogs caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. As the whistleblower told The Intercept at the time:
“They shut the pit pans off, shut the ventilation fans off, and heat up the building. That’s what the plan is. It’s horrific as it is. It was first used on test cull sows: those were first given the VSD treatment. The first day they shut off all the fans and turned the heat up and the hottest they could get the building was 120 degrees. After four to five hours, none of the animals were dead. There was an attempt to induce steam into the building, along with the heat and the ventilation shutdown, and that is how they ultimately perfected their VSD operation. Every time they’ve been euthanizing the animals, it’s been a test in a sense. Piglets were killed off in a barn with gas generators.”
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Not that it takes a scientific study to understand how unimaginably cruel any of this is, but in 2016, experiments into the controversial method of killing conducted by North Carolina State University (NCSU) researchers found that hens took longer than 91 minutes to die from VSD alone, and that’s in small cages under controlled conditions. With the addition of heat to induce heatstroke or carbon dioxide to induce suffocation - referred to as VSD+ - death occurred after 54 minutes and 11.5 minutes respectively.
“These are birds in extreme distress,” said Sherstin Rosenberg, a veterinarian who has cared for thousands of chickens at an animal sanctuary in California, after reviewing the research footage. “They are literally fighting for their lives, they’re gasping for air, they’re struggling.” While the videos don’t have audio, Rosenberg added: “These birds look like they’re vocalizing to me. I think they were probably crying out.”
However, in a separate study published in 2017, conducted by some of the same researchers, in conditions more closely resembling factory farms rather than individual cages, time to death was significantly longer: 3.75 hours from VSD alone, 2 hours from VSD plus heat, and 1.5 hours from VSD plus carbon dioxide. This means that in the case of Rembrandt’s egg layers, even in the ‘best case’ scenario that carbon dioxide was used to achieve the fastest death, most would still have taken close to two hours to die. To call this simply ‘inhumane’ doesn’t really do it justice.
The 2015 study was particularly significant because while the images and footage of chickens connected to electrodes were obtained by the animal protection group Animal Outlook via public records, the disturbing material cannot be dismissed as not representative of the truth or embellishment by animal rights activists, as is so often the case with investigations. Rather, the study was funded by the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association, an industry trade group, and available for anyone to verify in the public domain.
How are farms and authorities able to justify VSD, despite the findings of the North Carolina study? It will probably surprise you to read that it’s actually because of the study that the use of VSD is increasing in several states across the US. The American Veterinary Medical Association’s “depopulation” guidelines - to use the industry’s euphemism for the mass murder of millions of sentient individuals once again - lists VSD+ as “permitted in constrained circumstances” - in other words, the last resort and not necessarily the most humane one.
The impetus behind this is the apparent need to kill large enough populations of animals in the most contained way possible, minimising the risk of spreading diseases such as highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). With Rembrandt’s hens, shutting off ventilation and containing them was seen as justified to prevent transmission, and as such the time it takes is seen as something of a necessary evil. However, as we saw from DxE’s visit to Rembrandt immediately after the most recent VSD attempt, the method isn’t even 100 per cent effective with chickens either left to starve or buried alive as their dead companions were left to compost in the barns before being removed.
“The tragedy here is that our current methods of raising birds for food production, in enormous sheds with millions of stressed, nearly genetically identical birds in close proximity to one another, has resulted in a situation where outbreaks of diseases like HPAI are nearly inevitable and few options exist for humanely killing infected birds,” Reyes-Illg, the Animal Welfare Institute veterinary adviser, told The Intercept. “Killing methods that are more humane than killing via heatstroke require planning and preparation, and some … require more research to be commercially viable, and none of this seems to be a priority for the industry.”
Europe this year has seen unprecedented numbers of outbreaks of avian influenza, and in the UK, a bird flu lockdown zone now covers the entire country. The disease and its various strains are here to stay, and the same can be said of the US, meaning that we won’t see the last of mass killings as preventative measures. In short, the deaths of millions of birds and other farm animals - most of whom won’t even test positive for a disease - is now an inevitable part of intensive animal agriculture. Is this really the price we’re willing to pay for chicken wings and pork ribs?
With such an undeniable ethical burden, surely the real solution is obvious. End factory farming forever.
Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.
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