Shackled upside down, paralyzed by electrified water, dragged over mechanical throat-cutting blades - while conscious ! This is the faith that awaits chickens in slaughterhouses. Although more than 168 million chickens and around 9 billion broiler chickens are killed per year for food in the U.S., the Humane Slaughter Act does not include poultry, leaving them fully unprotected from the worst slaughter abuses. 

The Humane Slaughter Act is designed to protect livestock during slaughter. There are no federal laws governing the raising, transport, or slaughter of poultry in the United States. Billions of birds suffer prior to slaughter because the U.S. Department of Agriculture exempts birds from its enforcement of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, which requires that farm animals be insensible to pain before they are killed.

The conventional procedure to kill poultry today is to use electric immobilization. The conscious birds are hung by their feet from metal shackles on a moving rail and dragged in electrified water in order to immobilize them and expedite assembly line killing. The electric current levels are generally too low to render birds insensible to pain, because of concerns that too much electricity would damage the carcasses and diminish their value, leaving the birds fully capable of feeling pain in the following steps. After the stunning tank, their throats are slashed by a mechanical blade. Inevitably the blade misses some birds, instead mutilating them. Still alive, they then hang upside down for 90 seconds in a bleed-out tunnel where they're supposed to die from blood loss, but millions of birds do not die, while an unspecified number of birds drown in pools of blood when the conveyor belt dips too close to the floor. Dead or alive, the birds are then dropped into tanks of semi-scalding water in order to defeather them, thereby boiling many of them alive.

Though there could never be a truly humane system of animal slaughter, a suggested alternative to minimize their suffering is controlled-atmosphere killing (CAK), which is allegedly fast, painless and efficient. CAK has been described as "the most stress-free, humane method of killing poultry ever developed."

For more information, read this report by United Poultry Concerns:

http://www.upc-online.org/slaughter/report.html

Please urge the USDA to expand the Humane Slaughter Act to include poultry and to enforce an alternative method, such as CAK, to electric immobilization as a standard slaughter practice !