Cypress Egg Farms Disaster

	HSUS

You're standing in a long, low building among rows of small metal cages which stretch as far as the eye can see. The smell hits you first: the noxious odor of decomposing bodies and animal waste. Your eyes adjust to the darkness, and you make out a sea of small white bodies crammed together; mixed among the carcasses are living birds. You see them softly moving, as much as they can in their tightly packed cages.

What you've just read is not morbid storytelling. It's what one person witnessed at a Cypress Foods barn in Dade City, Florida after the company declared bankruptcy in January and left nearly 200,000 laying hens to starve on its site in Pasco County. But this scene is more than just a harrowing picture of a failed ag business. It's also a case study of a huge issue involving factory farms: When disasters strike, who is responsible for the animals?

By the time concerned citizens contacted the Florida Department of Agriculture, the birds had already been without feed for 10 days in the Florida facility and for more than 20 days at another Cypress Foods plant in Georgia. A judge had initially refused to release company assets to feed and to care for the birds until Georgia's State Agriculture Commissioner interceded, explaining what should have been obvious—that withholding food constitutes willful neglect and cruelty to animals. Feed was donated by industry after the Georgia Department of Agriculture assumed responsibility for dealing with the disaster.

In Florida, 30,000 hens are said to have died of starvation, and the remaining 170,000 were gassed and buried. Of the 1.2 million birds in Georgia, approximately 426,000 were deemed "unsalvageable" and were killed by cervical dislocation and rendered; 705,000 were sent to other poultry companies; and the remaining 40,000 birds were shipped to slaughter. Inmates from a local prison were brought in to remove the dead chickens from the sheds in Florida.

The details of this incident may be shocking, but it is not the first time that animals in factory farming systems have been victims of a disaster, natural or of human origin. Similar fates befell hens at the Buckeye Egg Farm in Ohio in September 2000 when a tornado struck the facility and hens were trapped in their cages, suffering from hunger and exposure. Some birds were rescued, and euthanasia attempts were made on others. But ultimately most of the birds that survived the tornado died when workers bulldozed the disaster site.

Two other examples occurred in the past year: Ice storms in Arkansas killed thousands of chickens when their long barns collapsed, and the rolling blackouts in California threatened the water availability for thousands of dairy cows. And who can forget the images of drowning and dead pigs in North Carolina after Hurricane Floyd in September 1999? The pictures have been burned into our memory as terrible reminders of the inappropriate housing that factory farms provide for pigs and chickens, who were trapped in their cages as the floodwaters rose.

These disasters are horrible for animals who are often valued at less than the amount of money it would take to rescue them. These disasters are also indictments of the factory farming system, which does not make allowances for animals' natural behaviors, such as foraging for food and water when none is provided. Because most producers do not have contingency plans for disasters, the onus falls on external entities, such as state agriculture agencies and animal protection organizations, to provide relief to the abandoned animals.

The Sheriff's Office in Pasco County, Florida, is considering filing animal cruelty charges against Cypress Foods. However, a disaster much like this is still likely to occur again when the next tornado, hurricane or bankruptcy threatens the animals housed in factory farms.

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