Customer Reviews

Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Dr. Karen Davis postulates "[c]an one regard a fellow creature as a property item, an investment, a piece of meat, an `it,' without degenerating into cruelty and dishonesty towards that creature? Human slavery was brutal. Does anyone really believe that nonhuman slavery operates on a higher plane?"

The first portion of this very important book beckons the reader to view chickens as more than mere food, more than simply an aspect of agribusiness, but rather sentient beings capable of a wide range of emotions not too different from our own. Davis accomplishes this by incorporating various personal stories and anecdotes regarding her own chickens, as well as quotations from other chicken owners and those who have visited slaughter houses and hatcheries first hand.

After making this key point, the reader is treated to the appallingly repulsive goings-on at hatcheries and slaughter houses, as well as other malevolent profanities we humans put chickens through so we can continue to eat "well." Davis describes in excruciating, brutally honest detail the horrid environment in which chickens (particularly egg-laying) spend their lives, in their entirety. This lack of a proper, more naturalized, environment leads to disease and malnutrition in these chickens, as well as "cannibalistic" behavior (in actuality a manifestation of their natural pecking instinct), which in turn lead to hideous vaccination and de-beaking processes. Furthermore, the actual process of slaughter is described in meticulous detail, including electrocution, gassing, and neck-slicing (all of which most chickens are still alive for). In addition, it isn't exactly news that broiler chickens are being genetically "engineered" to have larger breasts in order to enlarge profits, and that these chickens frequently suffer ill effects such as broken legs and orthopedic disorders.

If the atrocities that chickens experience aren't enough to spur the reader into disgusted amazement, Davis points out ill effects for humans as well. For example, uric acid from the fecal matter abundant in the close confines of egg-laying hens releases ammonia into the atmosphere, which has been shown to absorb into the eggs slated for human consumption. Not to mention the illnesses and diseases running rampant in chickens that still find their way onto dinner tables across the globe. Is ignorance really bliss, or would you prefer to be enlightened as to what exactly goes into the chicken contents of canned soup, school lunches, pet food, and chicken nuggets?

By the end of this book, Davis is stating that vegetarianism, or more specifically veganism, is the answer to the aforementioned problems. Though that may seem extreme for most people, Davis does make a thorough and well-researched argument.

Though most of this information is somewhat dated (most data coming from 1995), the issue is no less pertinent. I would, however, be curious to see more recent data. This is a book everyone should read before their next flesh-devouring feast. Indeed, non-human slavery should not operate on a higher plane, and it would seem that there are those who need to be reminded of this.

but, "you could reduce it." Karen Davis is commended for the passion and dedication she shows when taking on the topic of poultry production. This book opens our eyes to the truth about just what animal suffering and environmental degradation goes into that chicken soup. No educational program is complete without a course in modern food production...not the side presented by the factory farming industry, but by those who have a different slant. Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs shows us what the poultry producers don't want us to see. A must read for those who want to know how to change the world, for those who wish to "reduce the suffering."˙

I bought Karen Davis' book at the Vegetarian Summerfest 2000, an event from which omnivores and herbivores alike can gain a lifetime worth of empowerment. I read her book in two days, despite the density of information within. Inspired, curious, and horrified, I checked out the University of Georgia's poultry science department and the local Goldkist "processing" plant (more accurately referred to as a slaughterhouse), and found them to boast of the same atrocities Dr Davis had rightly condemned. It's a must-read!

This book does a very thorough job of being convincing about becoming vegan. The book talks about how chickens are crippled because their skeletons can't keep up with the enormous amounts of flesh they're genetically bred to grow. It talks about how unwanted male chicks are ground up alive as feed, how chicks are carelessly crushed underfoot when loading them, how the chickens' uteri are forced out of their bodies to be pecked at by fellow hens because the eggs they bear are too big for their bodies. Even being lacto-ovo vegetarian is contributing to this cruelty because this is what happens so the egg industry can flourish and provide us with cheap eggs. It talks about how hens are de-beaked because they are stressed into cannibalism, they are starved and dehydrated to force them into another laying cycle, and how they are exposed to levels of ammonia that it drives them blind. After reading this book, I have concluded that unless one raises ones own chickens for eggs and meat, there is no way to eat chickens with a confortable conscience. Even ritual killing supposed to be more humane is cruel, letting the chicken bleed itself out in pain and panic. Even if it were not for animal rights, the fact that the chicken carcasses have huge amounts of antibiotics, hormones, cancerous tumors, pus-filled innards...would be enough to convince me that eating the meat does me no good at all, karma or no karma. I've heard it said that cooking something in your toilet is about the same as eating a chicken...after reading this book, I'm inclined to believe what I once thought was just hype.
I would have given this book 5 stars but for the fact that the author doesn't really go into what eating these products over time could do to humans. I think that if she had gone into that, it would probably be more effective at convincing people. After all, nothing better to deterr people from eating too much meat than to tell them it's potentially cancer-causing. Which, considering they say you are what you eat...eating carcasses that had cancerous tumors...

This was a great book. The first few pages were hard to read but the rest of the book made up for it. It gavea detailed account from poultry,government and scientific sources. Youll never feel the same way about eating chicken or eggs in the same way again. Great job!!!

Karen Davis shows with passion, science, and close-up observations how we take billions of delightful, smart, social animals and put them through Hell each year because we like the taste of their flesh or eggs.

It's all unnecessary and easy to stop. Veggie chicken, either out of the freezer case at your local grocery store, or made from a recipe, tastes like chicken but without the bitter aftertaste of knowing that you've supported severe confinment, mutilations, forced starvations and other cruelties.

If you're thinking about reducing meat consumption, adding more vegetarian dishes into your diet, or just wondering how you can help make the world a more peaceful place, buy this book, and before you're halfway done you'll be saving lives.

(Dr. Davis' book on turkeys is superb, also. It's amazing how we put animals down, and use that as an excuse to make them suffer.)

Chickens don't get no respect.... But the fact is that the suffering of commercially raised poultry is the world's largest animal welfare problem. And because the demand for chicken meat and eggs continues to rise at an astounding rate, the problem is getting worse rather than better. For every baby seal that is clubbed to death, 30,000 chickens will die in the United States; for every dog euthanized in an animal shelter, 3,000 chickens will die; for every animal used in a biomedical experiment, 150 chickens will die; and for every game rooster that dies in cockfight, 9,000 commercial broilers will be killed for the culinary pleasure of Americans. Further, in the United States, commercially raised chickens, turkeys, and ducks are excluded from coverage under either the Animal Welfare Act or the Humane Slaughter Act.

In the newly revised edition of Prisoned Chicken, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry, Karen Davis provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the poultry industry, a natural history of chickens, and a scathing critique of the ways that broiler chickens and battery hens live and die on modern factory farms. The new edition contains hundreds of new references and current information on the bird flu epidemic, genetic engineering of poultry, the expansion of the chicken industry, global warming, and recent changes in the rearing and processing of commercial poultry.

While, as the title suggests, this is a book of animal advocacy, the information is up to date and accurate. Davis, who runs an animal shelter for poultry, is director of United Poultry Concerns. She has spent over 20 years tirelessly arguing that chickens merit our moral concern.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the contentious debate over the use of animals. But be careful -- this book could change your life. That's what happened to Ira Glass, host of the National Public Radio show This American Life. He traveled to Davis' poultry sanctuary in Virginia to play the "chicken rights lady" for laughs on his radio show. But few years later, he admitted to David Letterman, she got the last laugh. "I became a vegetarian because of that woman," he said.

The same is true of her book.

The original (1996) edition of Karen Davis' "Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs" was a groundbreaking study of the poultry industry that focused worldwide attention on the plight of chickens in factory farms and moved chickens to the top of the animal rights agenda. It literally changed the direction of the animal rights movement.

Dr. Davis is a former English professor who left her position in academia to campaign full-time on behalf of domestic fowl, and much of the book's impact can be traced to her university background. First, it was thoroughly researched from primary sources, usually the publications of the poultry industry itself. Davis has made herself an internationally recognized expert on chickens and turkeys, their physiology, psychology, natural history, and treatment in modern agriculture. As a result, "Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs" is an authoritative treatment of its subject, and its claims are backed up with ample citations from reliable sources (most often, as I said, from the poultry industry)and have never been shown to be false or exaggerated. Second, Davis writes extremely well, and "Prisoned Chickens", despite its sometimes shocking subject matter, is gracefully written and accessible to the layperson.

The revised and updated 2009 edition is similar to the original, only newer and better. It is expanded and brought up to date in all respects, and people who have read the original edition will still find the revised edition worth their while and then some.

If you are worried about the cruelty inherent in modern industrial agriculture, or if you are concerned about the health and environmental implications of modern chicken and egg production, the new, updated edition of "Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs" is an indipensable book.

Chickens are one of the world's most embraced food animals, but the modern handling of them could make their tasty flesh not so sweet. Now in a newly updated and expanded revised edition, "Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry" is an exploration of how chickens are handled in today's livestock farms. Focusing on the imporatnce of animal rights as well as environmental concerns, author Karen Davis calls out the industry as cruel and wasteful, and possibly endangering the world's chicken eaters. Arguing for a more vegetarian world, "Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs" is an intriguing look at the world of modern chicken farming.

It seems more people than ever are talking about chickens, and I love it. From California's Proposition 2 -- which will, among other things, ban the use of battery cages for egg production in the state -- to undercover investigations inside factory farms, there's never been a larger spotlight focused on the US poultry industry. And trust me, they hate it.

Much of the credit for this, I think, goes to Karen Davis, who founded an advocacy group for chickens and turkeys, United Poultry Concerns, in 1990. Few people have done as much as Karen to raise awareness about the plight of birds people want to eat. She is one of those tireless activists many of us wish we could be like: a consistent, well-informed, dedicated voice who never seems to miss an opportunity to speak up for animals. Take International Respect for Chickens Day, for example. Karen launched this annual event four years ago to celebrate chickens throughout the world and protest the bleakness of their lives in farming operations.

A considerable amount of her activist time is engaged in writing, and Karen's latest effort is a complete revision of her book "Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs," first published 13 years ago. This is without a doubt one of the most important books an animal advocate can read. Not only is it critical for activists to be up to date on issues involving animal cruelty, but chickens are by far the most abused beings in animal agribusiness -- indeed, Karen describes them as "creatures of the earth who no longer live on the land" -- making it even more essential that we're able to speak from a place of knowledge in order to defend them.

The statistics regarding humanity's abuse of chickens are staggering, as Karen observes in the book's preface:

"While much has happened since 'Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs' first appeared in 1996, little has changed for the chickens themselves, except that their lives have become, as a global phenomenon, even more miserable. Instead of 7.5 billion chickens being slaughtered in the mid-1990s in the United States, nearly 10 billion chickens are now being slaughtered, with parallel rises in other countries reflecting the expansion of chicken consumption and industrialized production into Latin America, China, India, Africa, Russia, Mexico, and elsewhere. Throughout the world, over 40 billion chickens are now being slaughtered for meat each year, and over 5 billion hens are in battery cages, many of them in egg-production complexes holding up to a million or more birds."

Covering the history, lives, and deaths of chickens, Karen explains how poultry farming grew from a relatively small endeavor (in 1830, the average US farm had only 23 chickens) into a global, mass-production enterprise that has invented such miseries as "debeaking" (cutting two-thirds of the beak from an egg-laying hen's face without pain relief); cramming hens into battery cages so they can barely move; bleeding out birds who are still conscious; forced molting, during which a hen is starved for up to two weeks; a host of infectious diseases, routinely combated with heavy doses of antibiotics; transporting birds, many of them now missing wings or legs, long distances without food or water; and the callous extermination of hundreds of millions of male chicks in the egg industry each year, to name but a few.

This is a well-documented indictment of the poultry industry and what can only be called its *contempt* for the very birds it relies on to make a profit. I don't know what other word to use to describe a business that would let a laying hen whose egg production has declined starve in the last days of her life just to save the farmer a few pennies in feed. That's some thanks to a sentient animal who has endured 17 to 24 months crammed into a battery cage and denied nearly every natural instinct. As Karen notes, factory farmers have become adept at defending themselves, even to the point of being ridiculous. "The egg industry thinks nothing of claiming that a mutilated hen in a cage is 'happy,' 'content,' and 'singing,'" she writes, "yet will turn around and try to intimidate you with accusations of 'anthropomorphism' if you logically insist that the hen is miserable."

One of the characteristics of Karen's books I've always appreciated is her considerable talent as a writer. It can be challenging to transform a vast amount of research and information into a readable narrative, and Karen does it with such style that her books never read like dull, academic texts. Moreover, it is clear that she regards fowl as very special creatures. Karen has devoted her life to them, and, in addition to her outreach efforts, she provides a home to many chickens, turkeys, and other birds rescued from avian concentration camps. This book is obviously a labor of love.

Chickens have been labeled cowardly and "bird-brained," but Karen debunks these myths with examples demonstrating their courage and intelligence. For instance, she writes that "Far from being 'chicken,' roosters and hens are legendary for bravery.... Our tiny Bantam rooster, Bantu, would flash out of the bushes and repeatedly attack our legs, his body tense, his eyes riveted on our shins, lest we should threaten his beloved hens."

Though Karen encourages readers to visit factory farms and see what goes on behind closed doors, the reality is few of us will ever have the opportunity to venture inside the houses of horror in which "broiler" chickens are raised for meat or hens are confined to produce eggs. Fortunately, she is able to guide us through these animal factories, explaining in great detail precisely what goes on inside, and that knowledge not only solidifies our commitment to protecting animals, but it aids our ability to effectively communicate, making our activism much more powerful.

With the world alert to the threat of a pandemic flu virus, as well as concerns about food safety, global warming, genetic engineering, and the growing taste for "healthier" animal flesh, there's never been a better time to pick up a copy of "Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs."