In honor of the 250,000 hens who burned to death when a massive shed at Kreider Farms—a top egg producer in the Northeast—caught fire on Tuesday, PETA plans to place a sky-high memorial in the area pointing out who’s responsible for their deaths: everyone who still buys eggs.
“Each one of these hens was an individual who surely felt pain and fear as smoke and flames engulfed her,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA urges everyone to help prevent birds from being crammed into barns by the tens of thousands in the first place by taking the easy step of going vegan.”
Hens used for egg production are confined to cramped barns, where each bird has no more than a square foot of space. Few farms bother to go to the trouble or expense of installing smoke detectors or fire alarm systems, as they consider the lives of the birds to have such little value. When hens’ bodies wear out and they’re no longer considered profitable, egg producers stuff them into metal boxes and crudely gas them with carbon dioxide, which is distressing and painful—or send them to slaughterhouses, where workers cut their throats, often while they’re still conscious, and scald many to death in defeathering tanks.
PETA notes that Kreider Farms previously scrapped its tour program after the animal rights group asked to see the farm. By going vegan, locals can avoid Kreider’s “humane washing,” spare animals immense suffering, and help prevent future epidemics and pandemics. Pennsylvania is one of the states hardest hit by this year’s outbreaks of avian flu. Confining and killing animals for food has also been linked to SARS, swine flu, and COVID-19.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
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