“So Many Dead Chickens, It Looks Like a Field of Cotton”


Responders rescue one of hundreds of chickens saved from a destroyed broiler facility in Mississippi. (HSUS/Peter Wood)

HSUS response teams save over 1,000 birds from a fate that millions have already suffered

By Carrie Allan

Over the course of two long and exhausting nights this past weekend, a response team from The HSUS, Farm Sanctuary in New York, and Animal Place in California rescued more than 1,000 chickens from a hurricane-damaged broiler farm in rural Mississippi.

The week after the hurricane, driving down rural highways of the state, people could smell the chicken farms long before they saw them. Mississippi is the fourth largest poultry-producing state in the country, and even in the sheds which didn't sustain physical damage, the massive power outages meant that the cooling fans for the immense sheds where the birds are usually housed stopped working. The unbearable heat, combined with a lack of food and water, resulted in the suffering and death of literally millions of birds, and the scent of rotting chickens and fecal matter has been saturating the air near farms across the state.

Many Dead Ends, But Over 1,000 Live Birds

With HSUS staff in D.C. researching the locations of storm-damaged factory farms, Kim Sturla of Animal Place and Kate Walker of Farm Sanctuary were tracking down leads in Mississippi. They met with the state farm bureau to get maps of the areas with a high concentration of poultry farms and sought permission from owners to take whatever live chickens they might find.

They met with a lot of dead ends: Many of the farms here are owned by "contract growers," which means that while the farmers raise the animals according to guidelines set by larger processing companies, they do not actually own the birds. The birds are owned by the larger company contracting with the grower. Of the farmers Sturla and Walker spoke with on their drives around the state, they found most to be quite receptive to their offers of help. "We didn't get any derogatory comments at all," Sturla said. "Some were kind of puzzled by what we wanted to do, but most of them were very friendly."

Unfortunately, most said they couldn't allow the team to rescue and remove birds who didn't belong to them. But while they were talking to the workers at a slaughter plant in the southern part of the state, one of them mentioned that his brother owned a broiler farm farther north. The directions he gave were sketchy at best: Down a highway, past a blinking yellow light, and turn. But the team managed to find the farm and talked to the farmer and his family. They had five sheds, one of which had been totally demolished; two others had been damaged. One of the sheds had been bulldozed already, and there were dead chickens everywhere, says Miyun Park, director of Farm Animal Welfare for The HSUS. The farmer and his workers had captured around 15,000 birds who had survived the damage and put them into the remaining undamaged sheds, but he told Sturla he didn't like crowding the birds so much, and that any surviving animals they could catch, they could take away with them.

Responders from The HSUS and the other groups returned that night; chickens are calmer at nighttime and easier to catch. "Some of the birds were so still we thought they were dead, but then we would touch them and they would very slowly open their eyes," said Park.

The team managed to rescue 300 chickens the first night. The next day, they learned of another facility that had been damaged: Someone unfortunate enough to live near one of the farms had called to complain about the smell. The caller had reported that on a nearby road, there were so many dead chickens it looked like a field of cotton. She was willing to let the response team onto her property so that they could assess the situation. They'd been told that Tyson, the company which owned the birds, would be coming in to clean up in a few days—but when they reached the farm, Tyson's crew was already on site, bulldozing the remaining sheds.

"We were devastated," Park says. "We knew that meant that any of the birds who had been left were dead. We only managed to save six there."

Night Rescue

It was nighttime by then, and disappointed and exhausted, the team emailed headquarters to tell them they were too late to help the birds at the second site. "We told them that we were going to make one more stop at the first farm to see if we could get any more there," says Park. "We thought we'd get maybe a dozen."

They got over 700.

The birds who had escaped from the sheds and from the cleanup crews had spread out into the dark woods and were huddled quietly in small groups.The team, wearing headlamps to see, would surround the chickens in a circle and then close the circle, forming a tight perimeter in order to gather the animals up and get them onto the transport vehicle.

During one of their final searches, the team came upon a deep pit full of empty beer cans and dead chickens. "You could actually see steam coming out of the pit from the decomposition," Park says. They were horrified to discover that the pit also held live birds who had either fallen or been thrown in. Using a long pole and a net, responder Peter Brandt of The HSUS was able to scoop 21 live chickens out of the pit and get them onto the transport.

Many of the birds are now safe at the Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch, a 1,300-acre animal sanctuary in Texas operated by The Fund for Animals in partnership with The HSUS. Others are now on their way to Animal Place on the West coast and Farm Sanctuary on the East. With millions of farm animals dead in the Gulf Coast region, it's nice to know that at least 1,000 lucky chickens are headed for a better existence.

Carrie Allan is the associate editor of Animal Sheltering Magazine at The HSUS.

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