The Tragedy at Buckeye Egg, Croton

It will be two weeks Wednesday night that the still-living birds at Buckeye had their last meal.

Bulldozing at various layer sites has been going on throughout, as has gassing. But bulldozing goes a lot faster than gassing, and, of all the forms of dispatching these birds, rescuing is the slowest.

Because of this, I suspect management is now ready to start bulldozing in earnest. This will mean large numbers of live birds will die in the upheaval. It's all cruel, but bulldozing, like the suffocating of male baby chicks that is the routine form of euthanasia at Pohlmann's "family farm," can lead to prolonged suffering.
Every human's worse nightmare is being buried alive. These birds will actually experience what we as humans fear the most.

Many groups and individuals have done their best to save several thousand of the Buckeye birds. If all the placements are as promised, these "girls" will live out their lives, we hope, in a protected environment.
It's now a race against the clock as to what will "do in" the rest of this evidence of human greed and callousness: deprivation or the shovel.


Thanks to Nathan Runkle for taking the photographs. Visit Mercy For Animals to find out about other issues they are addressing.

It's late Monday (9/25) night. Ritchie has just gotten back from delivering some survivors from the pullet operation to an activist in Marysville who started her own farm animal sanctuary this summer.

Another caravan of trucks headed back to the sanctuary in Pennsylvania tonight. (The same place that took in nearly 800 birds Sunday night.) Thank you to Nathan Runkle of St. Paris, Oh and Molly Fearing of Cable, Oh for volunteering to make the long drive to New Stanton, Pa. Bill Long and Amie Hafner got back at 8:00 AM Monday and reported that the barn for the hens in Pennsylvania is wonderful. The hens are adapting beautifully which pretty much wrecks the argument by poultry scientists that today's selectively bred hens are little more than laying machines incapable of behavior exhibited by their free-range ancestors.