UPC United Poultry
Concerns
April 2018
New York State residents are urged to help ban classroom chick-hatching
projects in the state. Learn about Assembly Bill No. A06905, including
contact information for all NYS Assembly members:
Assembly Bill No. A06905.
This bill has the potential to stop the use of thousands of chicks
throughout New York State and could set a precedent for other states as
well.
Please express your support to the bill’s sponsor, Assembly Member Linda
Rosenthal, here:
Linda B. Rosenthal -- District 67
230 West 72nd Street
Suite 2F
New York, NY 10023
212-873-6368
LOB 627
Albany, NY 12248
518-455-5802M
[email protected]
Also, please FIND AND URGE your own
NYS District Assembly Member to support Assembly
Bill A06905.
Thank you for taking action!
Photo of a mother hen and her chick in the Florida Everglades by Davida
G. Breier
Background on Classroom Chick-Hatching Projects
Many people fail to perceive chickens as having and needing their
parents. In the tropical forests where chickens evolved and continue to
raise their families, hens and roosters are actively involved with their
chicks from the moment they search together for a desirable nesting spot.
They engage totally with their family and flock. Their life is vibrant and
vigilant, not sterile and barren.
The school hatching programs that began in the 1950s mislead children (and
some teachers) to think that chickens come from mechanical incubators.
Supplemental facts about the role of the rooster and the hen, even if
provided, cannot compete with the barren mechanized classroom experience.
Each year, kindergarten and elementary schools place thousands of fertilized
eggs in classroom incubators to be hatched within three or four weeks.
They’re encouraged to do this by the school district’s science coordinators
and the biological supply companies, which advertise fertile eggs and
“easy-to-use” incubators in their catalogs.
Hatching-project birds are deprived of a mother hen. This is a big reason
why many classroom chicks are sickly, dehydrated and crippled at birth.
Chick organs often stick to the sides of the shell as a result of not being
properly turned in the mechanical incubators. By contrast, a mother hen
turns each of her eggs, individually, as often as 30 times a day, using her
body, her feet and her beak to move each egg precisely to maintain proper
temperature, moisture, ventilation, humidity and positioning of each embryo
she is sitting on. The embryos signal their needs and she responds with the
necessary adjustment of her eggs. Mechanical incubators do not match the
care and precision of the mother hen.
When the hatching project is over, the survivors must be disposed of. Since
most children bond with young animals (a bond these projects cynically
exploit), students are told, and some teachers want to believe, that the
chicks are going to live “happily on a farm.” In reality, most chicks are
going to be destroyed by cervical dislocation, grinding machines,
suffocation or electric shock. Commercial farms do not assimilate
school-hatching project birds into their flocks for fear of importing
diseases picked up in the classrooms.
In other instances, classroom chicks are sold to live poultry markets, fed
to captive zoo animals or left to die of hunger and thirst as a result of
ignorance and neglect. Some end up in animal shelters where they are either
destroyed or, in rare cases, adopted out. All of us who run sanctuaries are
familiar with this never-ending situation.
Hatching projects encourage children to view baby animals as disposable
objects and cute little toys instead of fellow creatures requiring a
lifetime of care and commitment. They encourage children to want to bring
more baby animals into the world, like litters of puppies and kittens that
no one wants after the “miracle of birth” has worn off. They place a burden
on overwhelmed animal shelters and busy parents who can’t keep the birds,
especially when they turn out to be roosters.
And while children should be learning the responsibility of veterinary care
for animals who depend on them, most schools do not provide veterinary care
for birds who are born sick and deformed in these projects. Reports of
schools flushing sick birds down the toilet and tossing them into Dumpsters
are among the many stories that have come our way, including a classroom
quail-hatching program in New Jersey created to provide quails for canned
quail “hunts.”
So while these projects may appear “innocent,” they are not. School hatching
chicks and fertile eggs come from factory-farm hatcheries. They are part of
the industrialized poultry industry developed and promoted by federal, state
and county agricultural extensions in the 1940s and 1950s to indoctrinate
children, teachers and school administrators to view and treat chickens,
ducks, and other domestic fowl as mass-production objects suited to machines
and a barren existence.
For these reasons, teachers are urged to replace chick-hatching projects
with programs and activities that teach life cycles and inspire students to
appreciate, respect, and learn about the amazing life of birds on our planet
and in their own neighborhoods. There is an ever-growing wealth of video and
sanctuary education on the Internet and a growing network of farmed animal
sanctuaries for student field trips.
Thank you for everything you do for animals!
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