Millions of Birds Are Currently Being Roasted and Suffocated to Death

The cruelest method of killing imaginable is reserved for those who commit the heinous crime of having a disease

Heat rises quickly in a windowless, airless shed. With no running ventilation, there’s no relief from surging temperatures—especially as heat gets pumped in from the outside. For the chickens trapped inside, it becomes harder and harder to breathe. Eventually, after enduring hours of suffering, flocks of chickens suffocate and die in agony. This scenario is real, and the results are intentional. Ventilation shutdown plus is a brutal method of putting an entire flock—or herd—of animals to death all at once.

—The Humane League

What’s the worst conceivable way to die? For the sake of my readers, I’ll refrain from seriously investigating the possible answers, but things can get pretty bad. Two of the common answers listed are 1) burning to death and 2) suffocation. So imagine that there was some way of killing that involved very slowly, over the course of hours, simultaneously burning and suffocating someone. This would be one of the worst ways to kill another—the type of thing so grotesquely evil that it would only be employed by the most demented psychopath. Or by the meat industry.

Last year, in response to bird flu outbreaks, the industry decided to mass slaughter animals to prevent the spread. This involved the wholesale slaughter of about 61 million animals, about 49 million of whom were killed in ventilation shutdowns. Ventilation shutdowns involves “sealing off the airflow inside barns and pumping in extreme heat using industrial-scale heaters, so that the animals die of heatstroke over the course of hours.” The Humane League notes:

Imagine a windowless shed with thousands of chickens inside. That’s the only home they’ve ever known, an overcrowded room full of feathered beings forced to stand in their own excrement. Suddenly, the air stops circulating. Ventilation is sealed off, making it hard for chickens to breathe. The temperature rises.

Ventilation shutdown plus (VSD+) is a process in which barns or sheds where chickens or other animals live are closed tightly, ventilation is sealed and fans are turned off, and heat, steam, or gas is turned on. As the temperature inside the building soars above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the animals inside die from suffocation, heat stroke, and organ failure. Horrifically, this process can take many excruciating hours during which animals are essentially baked alive.

European officials, providing truly groundbreaking insights, note that this method of killing is “likely to be highly painful” and “must never be used.” And yet despite this fact, millions more animals are being tortured to death in this brutal way this year! This method has been compared to killing an animal by locking it in a hot car. That comparison, however, is an underestimate of the nightmare that millions of animals endure on the public dime. When animals die of heatstroke in a hot car, at least they don’t have to simultaneously suffocate or experience organ failure. Not so of the animals that are tortured to death in this truly brutal way; as they experience what animals in hot cars do, the airflow is cut off leading to them slowly, agonizingly suffocating over the course of hours.

Take a moment to imagine the experience of slowly roasting to death in high temperatures—sometimes up to 170 degrees, always above 120. Imagine being locked in a suitcase that is closed, with tiny airholes, slowly suffocating to death. Meanwhile, the room in which you are in is heated up so that as you suffocate, you also roast to death over the course of hours. This is the fate animals endure so that we can devour their flesh.

Compared to this, being burned to death is a mercy. Compared to this, drowning is a mercy. The methods of torture, repression, and death carried out by the factory farms would have impressed the icebox killers with the sheer extent of their depravity. The fact that things like this are mainstream practice is a devastating indictment of the meat industry and shatters the myth that animals live anything like worthwhile lives.