'Jane - one tiny chicken foot. . . .
By Twyla Francois

[images at link]

At Animals' Angels, we do something called a Wailing Wall as a kind of
memorandum for animals who have touched us in a particular way. While
in Toronto, Ontario on investigation into the Maple Leaf chickens slaughter
plant located in the city, I saw an empty chicken transport trailer. It was
completely clean (it had just gone through their pressure washer), except
for one tiny chicken foot that had become lodged in one of the red and
yellow crates. I though it important to give the owner of this foot a name,
and to tell her story as I imagine it might have been.

Jane was a baby broiler chicken who lived in a barren, crowded, filthy
barn with 5,000 to 50,000 other baby birds. Bred to grow too quickly,
she most likely suffered from crippling skeletal problems, and the foot
that was left behind in the trailer could well have been part of a leg that
was in constant pain.

When the day came for her to be trucked to slaughter, Jane would have
still been a baby, blue-eyed and peeping, only 42 days old. Terrified, she
would have been violently yanked by her feet and carried upside down
with three or four other terrified birds and shoved roughly into a transport
crate. Here in Canada, she could have been trucked for up to 36 hours
without food or water in the cold and rain.

It was probably at the slaughterhouse that Jane's leg was amputated.
Probably as she was being ripped from the crate, her foot jammed, and
her body was pulled and separated from her leg. She would have
screamed, but no one would have heard.

Inside the slaughterhouse, Jane's other leg was snapped into a shackle,
where she hung, upside down from the conveyer belt, with her heart
beating in terror, and her bleeding leg stump, and quite possibly she
slipped from the shackle and fell to the floor before they cut her throat.
With only one leg and one bleeding stump, she would have flopped
around on the slippery surface of the kill floor, until someone kicked her,
or threw her against the wall, or worse (as numerous investigations have
shown).

If Jane was rehung in the shackle (as often happens), chances are she did
not enter the electrified "stun" bath properly, but "properly" or otherwise,
she suddenly feels to the core of her skeleton violent electric shocks
pulsing and boring through her face, her eyes, her eardrums, her feathers,
her skin, and her internal organs down through her legs and into her feet -
into her foot and her leg stump. Now, she is not only mutilated but
immobilized, because as research has shown, the electrified waterbath
stunner is not designed to relieve pain and suffering, but only to paralyze a
chicken's muscles so that her feathers will come out more easily after she
(or he) is dead.

Conscious, mutilated, pulsing with the burning sensations of the electric
shocks - unable to move or cry out - Jane was dumped with other
chickens into a tank of scalding water, and no one saved her. All that
remained was her story to tell, the story that I saw imprinted in her sad,
helpless little foot left behind in the trailer, recalling the life of Jane, a baby
broiler chicken who was tortured to death.