MOARK Must Pay $100,000 and Overhaul Its Spent Hen Procedures to Settle Animal Cruelty Charges

October 25, 2005

Rick Bussey

MOARK Industries, the giant Missouri-based egg producer, must overhaul its euthanasia procedures for spent hens and spend $100,000 to finance a new local humane society shelter in its area in exchange for a state prosecutor dropping landmark animal cruelty charges against the defendants.

In late July, lawyers with The HSUS asked Newton County (Missouri) Prosecutor Scott Watson to file class A misdemeanor charges against MOARK Industries, the company's Midwest regional manager, and two subcontractors, based largely on an amateur videotape that showed live chickens being tossed into a giant Dumpster. Watson agreed and filed charges against the defendants for purposely killing chickens "in a manner not allowed by the law," according to the filing. The HSUS believes that this was the first time a district attorney had charged an egg-producing corporation with cruelty to animals.

Last week, Watson agreed to drop the charges against MOARK after the company reportedly deposited a $100,000 check to the New-Mac Regional Humane Society, which has been fundraising to construct a new shelter. As part of the deal, MOARK has also agreed to purchase new "state of the art machines" to euthanize so-called spent hens, those laying birds considered too unproductive to keep, and to put a supervisor on site every time the company kills birds. It's not known how much the new carbon dioxide (CO2) equipment will cost, but MOARK will likely shell out tens of thousands of dollars.

These are not the only costs MOARK has paid since the animal cruelty charges were filed, either. The company has also received countless column inches of bad publicity and has lost a major contract when Trader Joe's promptly dropped the giant egg producer during the summer.

"We're happy to see the local humane society receive the money," said Paul Shapiro, manager of The HSUS's Factory Farming Campaign. "The fact that MOARK had to pay $100,000 to get the animal cruelty charges dropped shows just how serious the charges were against the company."

Even though the case largely originated due to the efforts of local residents and The HSUS—Watson had initially shown reluctance to take on deep-pocketed MOARK, but changed his mind after HSUS attorneys presented him with a detailed legal brief with supporting statements from farm animal welfare experts—The HSUS had no involvement with this settlement. Nor is The HSUS affiliated with the New-Mac Regional Humane Society, which covers Newton and McDonald counties in the far southwest corner of Missouri.

While the deal clearly pleased the local humane society—which according to newspaper accounts had raised only about $18,000 toward its construction project—it apparently did not sit well with the man who recorded the videotape that led to the charges. According to The Joplin Globe, Rick Bussey, who videotaped the chickens being dumped at MOARK's Hathaway Farm near Neosho, would have preferred to put the defendants on trial so the company's spent hen practices could have been placed under a microscope. That, in turn, could have influenced Missouri Department of Natural Resources officials who will decide soon whether to allow MOARK to expand operations at its Neosho facilities.

The Building Blocks of a Landmark Case

Rick Bussey and his wife were driving their 14-year-old daughter to softball practice on Thursday, July 7, when they drove by the MOARK operation outside Neosho. Out of the corner of his eye, Bussey noticed something that looked "out of place"—chickens, apparently live ones, were being tossed into a garbage container. After dropping his daughter off at practice, Bussey quickly stopped at home, grabbed his video camera, and returned to the MOARK facility to tape the event. Bussey shot only about five minutes of video, but it was enough for him to form an opinion. "This was cruelty," he said nearly a month after the videotaping. "I can't go for that, and I don't even consider myself an animal person."

Bussey's tape came to The HSUS's attention via another Neosho-area resident, Mark Adams, who is also fighting MOARK's expansion. Adams informed The HSUS about the tape, and after Bussey sent a copy to HSUS campaign staff and lawyers, we began working with prosecutor Watson, the local sheriff, and farm animal welfare experts to investigate the allegations and prepare the case for prosecution.

During the course of the case, Watson allegedly interviewed a witness who told him that MOARK's euthanasia procedures for spent hens were by no means unique to the company. Watson, in fact, said the very same thing to a reporter with the Neosho Daily News. "From my research, what MOARK does is an industry accepted practice," Watson told the reporter in a story than ran on July 22. "And from what I understand, they were euthanizing these birds in 55 gallon drums, cramming in 45 or 50 in a drum at a time. It's no wonder that the CO2 didn't get down to the bottom of the barrel."

Laying hen factory farms are cruel in other ways, too.

The modern egg industry is arguably the most abusive in all animal agribusiness. Egg-laying hens are intensively confined in barren battery cages, wire enclosures that afford each bird less floor space than the area of a single sheet of notebook paper. Inside the restrictive cage, the hen can never stretch her wings nor engage in nearly any other natural behavior, including dustbathing, nesting or foraging. Every day, nearly all of the approximately 300 million egg-laying hens in the United States suffer due to the routine abuses inflicted upon them by the egg industry.

But despite the abuses, state authorities file few cases targeting this form of agricultural cruelty, mostly because many states exempt routine agricultural practices from their cruelty laws. In the Missouri case, the prosecutor was prepared to show that MOARK's euthanasia procedures were negligently inhumane, and therefore should not be exempt from cruelty laws, no matter how common they are among egg producers.

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