Imagine being trapped in a nightmare in which you are seized by your legs and carried upside down. You thrash wildly to try to free yourself from the grip of your captor. But resistance is futile. There is no mercy, no regard for your life. Your last conscious experience is the terror of being thrown into a gas chamber connected to a machine from which your body will emerge a few minutes later in the form of ground hamburger. What I’ve just described to you, and what you will see in this video if you watch it, is not a bad dream but the reality behind what “humane farming” advocates are calling a compassionate alternative to commercial slaughter of hens used for eggs.

According to the “Chickpulp” website, “Chick Pulp opens up a new dimension for the efficient processing [slaughter] of spent laying hens [hens used for eggs are killed at only 1.5 to 2 years of age when their egg output declines]: “With its closed system the unit slaughters the animals as stress-free as possible and produces a mash that can be used for [livestock] feed and the petfood industry…”

Slaughtered laying hens are also used in foods like frozen chicken nuggets, canned soup, and fast food chicken sandwiches, where their badly bruised and degraded muscle tissue cannot be detected in the pulped and processed ‘meat’.

But while bringing the mobile slaughterhouse to your farm might spare your animals the horrors of transport, this does not make exploiting and killing animals any more ethical.

Is slaughter made “humane” simply by doing it on a smaller scale, in your own backyard or under the pretext of “strengthening your local food system” as author Ali Berlow would have us believe in her new book the Mobile Poultry Slaughterhouse? How can slashing the throats of 6-week-old baby birds for profit and pleasure — not from necessity — be consistent with acting humanely? Especially when we have an abundance of cruelty-free alternatives?

Why define what is “humane” against the worst case scenario of factory farming instead of the best case scenario: a world that can thrive on a plant-based diet and no longer needs to breed animals into existence for the purpose of enslaving, exploiting and slaughtering them, at all? How can we claim to value animals’ welfare during the short period of their lives we allow them to exist, yet so easily and violently dispose of their lives as if they held no value at all? What does it say about our culture when people like Berlow, who comes from one of the most affluent regions (Martha’s Vineyard) in one of the world’s most affluent countries, still feel entitled enough to harm animals needlessly, for their own pleasure, even after claiming to believe that animals count morally and should therefore be given moral consideration?

Isn’t this notion of humane meat yet another example of Orwellian doublespeak? If you were bred into this world merely to be enslaved, exploited and slaughtered for completely unnecessary reasons, would you maintain that you had been humanely treated? In the words of Voltaire, “If we believe in absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.”

Learn more at our feature, A Closer Look At What Humane Farming Really Means.

Learn more about chickens used for eggs at our Egg Industry Factsheet.