US egg factory roasts 5.3 million chickens alive in bird flu cull – then lays off nearly all workers

Workers from one of the largest egg factories in the world arrived at the factory in Rembrandt, Iowa, early one morning in March to find they were about to lose their jobs.

As they gathered in the huge barns housing piles of caged hens, workers were asked to forget their usual routine of collecting eggs and feeding the birds. Overnight, the factory had begun slaughtering more than 5 million chickens using a gruesome killing method after detecting a single case of bird flu. Even supervisors were tasked with the daunting task of dragging dead hens out of crowded cages as Rembrandt Enterprises rushed to contain the spread of the virus amid the largest bird flu outbreak in the United States in seven years.

The slaughter was repeated on chicken and turkey farms in Iowa and 28 other states, from Maine to Utah. More than 22 million birds have been killed in an attempt to contain the outbreak – the majority in Iowa, the United States’ largest egg producer. The slaughter of 5.3 million hens at Rembrandt is the largest factory slaughter in the country.

Workers spent nearly a month pulling dead poultry out of cages and dumping them in carts before they were piled up in nearby fields and then buried in huge pits. With the killing completed, around 250 people were summarily fired with only a few dozen skeletal employees remaining.

In the weeks since, animal rights protesters have targeted billionaire Rembrandt owner Glen Taylor over the slaughter, including disrupting games played by a professional basketball team he owns. , the Minnesota Timberwolves. But few voices were raised in support of Rembrandt’s workers, some of whom are undocumented migrants.

Other plant layoffs contrast the seriousness with which the bird flu outbreak was taken by Rembrandt management against what they describe as the company’s lax approach to the threat to factory workers. Covid-19 as it swept through factory farms and slaughterhouses in Iowa and elsewhere.

“So right now everyone is worried about the chickens,” said Oscar Garcia, a former factory supervisor. “We understand, it was really inhuman the way they killed them. But chickens are chickens, aren’t they? People were working in these barns removing dead birds in terrible conditions, droppings everywhere, doing 12 or 14 hours a day. They could not protest because then they would be fired and lose their severance pay. Then they are fired and no one speaks for them.

Rembrandt’s outside criticism focused on the method of killing. Chicken farms have previously slaughtered hens en masse by smothering them with foam or pumping barns full of carbon dioxide, methods that have been criticized as inhumane.

But Tom Cullen of the Iowa newspaper, the Storm Lake Times, revealed that Rembrandt’s birds were shot using a system known as Ventilation Shutdown Plus (VSD+) in which the air is closed to barns and pumped until the temperature exceeds 104F (40C). ) ).

“They cooked these birds alive,” said one of the Rembrandt employees involved in the slaughter.

Animal rights group Animal Outlook has used freedom of information laws to obtain recordings of experiments at North Carolina State University that show VSD+ causes “extreme suffering.” to the hens as they “writhe, gasp, pant, stagger and even throw themselves against the walls of their confinement in a desperate attempt to escape.

“Eventually the birds collapse and ultimately die of heat and suffocation,” the group said.

Members of another group, Direct Action Everywhere, have disrupted Timberwolves games in recent weeks wearing t-shirts proclaiming “Glen Taylor roasts live animals”.

James Roth, director of the Center for Food Safety and Public Health at Iowa State University School of Veterinary Medicine and adviser to the federal government on biosafety, acknowledged that VSD+ causes more than harm. other forms of slaughter-related suffering, but said it is the most effective in containing the spread of bird flu as it is relatively rapid.

“Nobody wants to see it used but sometimes it’s a last resort. The reason is that if the flu virus spreads so quickly that it goes through a chicken coop very quickly, all those birds are producing massive amounts of virus in the house. “air. Then you have a big plume of virus from that house spreading to other barns. It’s critical to have the birds euthanized before the virus becomes a huge plume of virus to spread,” a- he declared.

Roth said authorities appear to have learned some important things from 2015, when an outbreak of avian flu led to what the US Department of Agriculture calls “the biggest poultry health catastrophe in the history of United States”, with the slaughter of approximately 50 million chickens and turkeys.

This time, federal regulators moved quickly to contain the outbreak by stopping the movement of workers between poultry flocks, a significant cause of the spread of bird flu in 2015. But Roth said this year the virus appears arriving in the United States, carried by waterfowl. from Europe and better adapted to spread by wild birds, which are more difficult to contain.

This prompted the USDA to push for a rapid cull in infected poultry farms. On March 17, Rembrandt notified his supervisors that bird flu had been detected at the site.

“They emailed at 10:30 p.m. to let us know they had a confirmed case,” said a former Rembrandt employee who was forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement in order to receive severance pay.

When the worker arrived the next day, he found that the company had already started slaughtering millions of chickens.

“Once they died, you had to take them out by hand one by one, put them in a wheelbarrow. It’s really intense manual work. They are not very large cages. Twelve chickens are piled up there. Horrible conditions,” he said.

“After it was over, we were told to attend a meeting. We entered. There was a big stack of yellow envelopes. It’s like showing a knife to a chicken. You know what will happen next. We worked ourselves unemployed. I’ve seen people who had years and years of experience get fired. It was totally unexpected.”

Some workers thought the layoff might be temporary, as was the case during the 2015 outbreak. But they were given severance pay and told to find other jobs, suggesting the move was permanent and raising questions about the future of the plant.

Some of the former skilled workers had little difficulty finding other employment. Others struggled. “I’m just rushing to get a job to support my family,” said a former Rembrandt employee with several years at the company.

Those struggling include undocumented workers who, Garcia said, were hired indirectly through third-party contractors.

In February, the Storm Lake Times reported that a lawsuit filed by the family of a Guatemalan migrant worker who was crushed to death when cages collapsed on him revealed he was working under a false name by the through a subcontractor.

Garcia also contrasted the seriousness with which Rembrandt took bird flu to the company’s handling of Covid-19 as it surged in Iowa, particularly among workers working closely on factory farms and in slaughterhouses. He said Rembrandt seemed to care more about bird flu outbreaks than Covid. He faulted management for not requiring workers to wear masks or be vaccinated.

“In fact, they liked the fact that we didn’t require our employees to be vaccinated because they were hoping that we would have employees from surrounding areas requiring their employees to be vaccinated. They almost use it as a recruiting tool,” he said.

Other workers said that when they contracted Covid they were forced to use the days off they had earned instead of being granted sick days.

“It’s a company that makes millions of dollars. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised he doesn’t care about people,” Garcia said.

Rembrandt Enterprises has been approached for comment.