ShareThisThe Humane Society of the United States is accusing a mammoth hatchery in central Minnesota of abusing baby turkeys as it winnows out those unworthy of America's dining tables.
An investigator whom the society sent to work undercover for 11 days last month at Willmar Poultry Co., the nation's largest turkey hatchery, captured video images of practices that included workers tossing sick, injured or surplus animals into grinding machines while still alive.
Willmar said much of what the video shows is acceptable industry practice but acknowledged that some of its employees' actions appear to "violate the company's animal welfare policies."
Spokesman Rick Vanderspek said the company might use the video to retrain employees.
In releasing the video two days before Thanksgiving, the society said it documents a variety of mistreatment of poults, or day-old turkeys. Workers amputated parts of turkeys' toes and snoods without painkillers, according to the society, and jammed their heads into a machine that sears off parts of their beaks with lasers.
The society, which picked Willmar to investigate because of its size, said workers also threw sick or injured poults into plastic bins or left them suffering on the floor.
"Our latest investigation exposes a callous disregard for animal welfare in the turkey industry," said Wayne Pacelle, Humane Society president and CEO.
After viewing the video, Vanderspek said that "birds on the floor are just not acceptable. Grabbing a whole lot of birds ... they are going to drop birds handling them like that."
The undercover employee "obviously found things that we might not have seen," he said. "We might use this as a training tool. ... We've got to just slow the process down and train people properly."
Shirley Noll, a poultry expert with the University of Minnesota Department of Animal Science, said that disposal of live poults by grinding is "a fairly common practice" carried out with high-speed equipment. "Death is instantaneous," Noll said.
Noll also said an infrared laser is used over five to 10 days to "gradually wear down" the tip of the beak, and microwave energy is applied to the poults' toenails to deaden tissue. She said these methods are virtually pain-free and prevent the birds from harming one another.
Mike Martin, a spokesman for Minnetonka-based Cargill, one of Willmar Poultry's customers, said his company has reviewed the Humane Society's findings and found the activities were "pretty much industry standards."
Willmar Poultry, founded in 1945, hatches about 30 million poults a year at its Willmar facility and another 15 million in Foley, Minn.
Along with Cargill, its customers also include Sara Lee Foods, Farbest Farms and independent turkey growers, making up about 40 percent of what the turkey industry produces. "Almost every brand of turkeys could have some of our poults," Vanderspek said.
The Humane Society wants hatcheries to adopt more humane practices, such as controlled-atmosphere killing or stunning. These systems use a mix of gases to painlessly kill or render birds unconscious before removal from their transport crates. The society says these methods eliminate abusive handling and ensure that the birds aren't conscious when their throats are cut.
The society says no federal laws address how poults are handled in processing. Calls to various federal agencies found none that have jurisdiction.
(Contact Paul Walsh at pwalsh(at)startribune.com. Staff writer Mike Hughlett contributed to this report.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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