Last week, we told you about TWJ Farms, an egg factory farm in Nebraska that planned to kill 70,000 unwanted chickens by placing them in an industrial machine and grinding them up—while still alive. According to a whistleblower, TWJ has killed hundreds of thousands of hens this way in recent years, and TWJ CEO Joe Claybaugh seems to confirm it in news reports. A witness stated that many of the birds were maimed or mutilated during the process and suffered in agony for hours before they died.

After PETA sent an urgent plea asking local and state law enforcement officials to intervene—and thanks to your calls and e-mails to the company—we have received confirmation from the Nebraska State Patrol that TWJ will not grind up the 70,000 chickens as planned.

We're still waiting to hear directly from TWJ and its primary egg customer, Minnesota-based Michael Foods, Inc., that TWJ and all Michael Foods egg suppliers will use only legal, approved means to kill sick, injured, or unwanted chickens. But you don't have to wait to make a difference: You can help spare millions of birds from unimaginable suffering by cutting eggs out of your diet.  

Written by Paula Moore

There's been an update to this case. Please check here for the good news.

Thanks to a courageous whistleblower, PETA has learned that Nebraska egg company TWJ Farms is allegedly planning to grind up approximately 70,000 chickens … while they are still alive. Brace yourself: This barbaric practice is reportedly standard operating procedure at the company's factory farms. The witness told PETA that in recent years TWJ has ground to death hundreds of thousands of "spent" hens—those whose exhausted bodies have stopped producing eggs at a rate high enough for the company to justify continuing to pay to feed them. The witness also said that many of the birds were not killed outright but were ejected from the grinder with missing wings and limbs and left to suffer in agony for hours before finally dying, sometimes a day later.
 

We've sent an urgent letter to the company's CEO demanding an end to these horrific killings. You can do the same by calling the company at 402-585-4867 or by writing to TWJ@huntel.net. Please keep your correspondence polite—anything less may jeopardize the hens’ welfare!

We've also called on local law enforcement to intervene, pointing out that grinding animals to death falls outside even the cruel egg industry's own standards and thus likely violates Nebraska's Livestock Animal Welfare Act. We've also asked officials to investigate and—if warranted—to file criminal charges against all appropriate parties.

Of course, cruelty is par for the course on factory farms that jam chickens into stacked wire cages in which they can barely move. But when an industry that's cruel enough to allow chicks' sensitive beaks to be hacked off does not "approve" a killing method—in this case, dumping chickens into a grinder as if they were nothing more than tree branches to be tossed into a wood chipper—then you know the method must be particularly cruel!

Watch for updates to this case. In the meantime, you can help millions of chickens who live and die in misery by cutting eggs from your diet and going vegan.

Written by Jennifer O'Connor