A Delaware chicken plant is being forced to slaughter up to 2 million chickens that won’t make it to market due to coronavirus staffing shortages.

Allen Harim Foods sent a letter to the company’s livestock growers that chickens are being “depopulated” at its processing plant because of staffing shortages, Fox News reported Wednesday.

“Unfortunately, reduced placements will not make an impact for six weeks, and with the continued attendance decline and building bird inventory daily, we are forced to make a very difficult decision,” wrote Michele V. Minton, the director of live operations at Allen Harim.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an animal rights organization, reacted to the news by sending an open letter to Minton, asking that the chickens be killed as humanely as possible.

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“These millions of chickens don’t deserve be tossed into an old wood chipper or struck with a two-by-four, as PETA has documented in other ‘depopulation’ efforts,” said Daphna Nachminovitch, PETA’s senior vice president of cruelty investigations. “The law, veterinary guidance, and common decency all mandate that the chickens receive the quickest and least cruel death possible.”

Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie warned last week that the United States could face food shortages due to the “brittle” supply chain, bankrupting farmers and forcing them to euthanize livestock.

“I'm afraid you're going to see ... cattle and hogs being euthanized or incinerated and buried while we have shortages at the supermarket. And you talk about civil unrest when you start seeing that. And it’s all because of the brittle food supply chain,” he said.

“The shocking thing is that farmers are watching the value of their hogs and steers, cows, go down. In fact, they're going to some of the lowest levels ever,” he continued. “So, the question is: Why is the price of meat going up in the supermarkets and the price of cattle going down at the auction ring? It’s because our supply line is brittle."

"You have to take cattle, steer, beef, whatever, hogs, to a processing plant. And these processing plants, like much of industrial America right now, are shutting down because of absentees, which has been exacerbated by the unemployment program the federal government has instituted — plus the $1,200 checks that are about to hit, plus some of the regulations that the states have put in place," he explained.