A hen, hooked up to electrodes, stands alone in a glass cage. She starts panting, thrashing, slumping over, and lunging at the enclosure’s walls, appearing to look for an escape. Outside the cage, researchers point, take notes, and watch her die.
These scenes, which took place at North Carolina State University, were documented in 10 hours of video footage recently obtained via public records requests by the organization Animal Outlook and shared with The Intercept. The experiments were funded by the U.S.
Poultry and Egg Association, a major industry trade group, and took place in the wake of the 2015 outbreak of an aggressive bird flu that resulted in the culling of about 50 million farmed birds — not all of them necessarily infected — across the United States. The researchers were testing what was then a relatively new set of disease control methods: known as “ventilation shutdown,” the process kills the animals through heatstroke and suffocation, similar to dying in a hot car. According to Will Lowrey, the Animal Outlook attorney who obtained the videos, “the suffering is extremely profound.”
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