[wordup] Farmers Put Live Chickens in Wood Chippers

[Adam Shand]

And I have to leave this comment from JWZ's blog:

<invdaic> seriously, think about it, 30000 chickens at around .25 cubic
           feet each, yeilds 7500 cubit feet of raw chicken chips. what
           do you do with all that rotting flesh?
<invdaic> plus, if it takes an average of 2 seconds to feed a chicken
           through the chipper, with 2 chippers (one for each farmer)
           that's 8 hours 20 minutes to chip them all
<ish>     oh my god
<invdaic> in california after 8.3 hours the first thousand or so
           chickens ought to be really ripe

Via: http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/186725.html
From:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=573&e=1&cid=573&u=/nm/20030414/od_nm/odd_chickens_dc

Farmers Put Live Chickens in Wood Chippers
Mon Apr 14,10:32 AM ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Two California poultry farmers who fed some 
30,000 live chickens into wood chippers will not face criminal charges 
because they had permission from the U.S. Department of Agriculture 
(news - web sites), prosecutors said on Friday.

But a spokesman for the Humane Society of the United States called the 
farmers "callous and barbaric" and disagreed with the decision not to 
prosecute them.

The farmers needed to destroy the chickens because they were "spent" -- 
or no longer able to produce eggs -- and could not make chicken soup out 
of them because the farms were under quarantine for the poultry virus 
Exotic Newcastle Disease, District Attorney's spokeswoman Gayle Stewart 
said.

Stewart said the men, who run a poultry farm near San Diego, asked a 
senior veterinarian with the Agriculture Department if they could employ 
the wood chippers and were given permission.

"Once they had permission we decided that they did not have any criminal 
intent," Stewart said.

Brothers Arie and Will Wilgenburg, who run Escondido-based Ward Poultry 
Farm, could not be reached for comment on Friday. Earlier, they told the 
San Diego Union Tribune newspaper that they were doing "what we thought 
we had to do" based on expert advice and stopped as soon as they learned 
otherwise.

Wayne Pacelle, a spokesman for the Humane Society, said that explanation 
was unacceptable.

"The act of feeding live chickens into a wood chipper is an 
extraordinarily callous and barbaric act and I can't imagine any person 
with a whit of common sense would use a wood chipper as a killing tool," 
he said. "No person with any experience in killing animals would 
sanction the use of this technique."

Pacelle said the District Attorney's decision not to prosecute the 
brothers rested on the "faulty assumption" that using wood chippers to 
kill chickens was an accepted practice.