Green - An environmentalist community

I worked at a chicken hatchery when I was in high school.. we would hatch about 150k birds twice a week (Tues and Fri, typically). My step-dad was the manager so I was a “whatever you need right now” employee. Did nearly every task there other than things you need specific licenses for, or killing.

We only shipped female chicks, so they were sexed and the males were killed.

They were supposed to be plunged into ice water to shock them before they drown, supposedly that’s better, but due to the volume we went through (~70k killed per hatch day) and the fact that the temp inside in summer got well over 100 degrees (f) due to the incubators and hatchers, it was never colder than tap water.

That was back in 2004, and I still remember the guy who did the killing. He was super fucking creepy and weird and we were pretty sure he enjoyed it. The rest of us gave him wide berth… and I tried to avoid going anywhere near where they were killed because it was horrific. I won’t go into detail, but whatever you are thinking, it’s probably worse.

They were then turned into mink food. Dunno what we need to farm mink for, but whatever.

It took like 15 years before I could stomach eggs, and I only forced it because it’s cheap protein and I can get them from locals rather than factory farming, or raise my own fowl humanely (free range as friends, neutral gas asphyxiation for slaughter when it comes time. Humane as death gets and what I want for myself - we know it feels like almost nothing because people pass out from it all the time, mostly helium, and there have been some notable casualties which led NASA to add iirc 6% co2 to un-oxygenated nitrogen-filled chambers so people felt themselves suffocate before collapsing)