These chicken farms are already cruel before you consider this
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Last year, I wrote a great deal about the rise of “ventilation shutdown plus” (VSD+), a method being used to mass kill poultry birds on factory farms by 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.
In America’s peer countries, ventilation shutdown has been effectively banned because it’s so inhumane; last year, Danish bioethicist Peter Sandøe told me he was “shocked” by the method’s prevalence in the US and that in the European Union, relying on it would be illegal.
But a growing body of evidence obtained through public records requests shows that the poultry industry, in partnership with agricultural and veterinary authorities, is quietly normalizing ventilation shutdown and planning its further use — even though the USDA’s own policy says it can only be used as a last resort.
USDA regulations specify that VSD+ is meant to serve as a stopgap when one of two other depopulation methods aren’t available in time for producers to rapidly cull their farms: firefighting foam, which is sprayed over the birds to suffocate them, or carbon dioxide poisoning (neither of these is painless, especially the former, but both are widely considered less cruel than ventilation shutdown).
In February, Pennsylvania’s Department of Agriculture spent $119,000 to buy 14 heaters and related supplies to carry out ventilation shutdown plus during bird flu outbreaks, according to documents obtained in a public records request by AWI and shared exclusively with Vox.
By classifying the method as “permitted in constrained circumstances” (a designation that then became federal policy) rather than recommending against it, they argue, the AVMA has made it possible for factory farms to kill vast numbers of animals with heatstroke and claim they’re doing it with veterinary approval.
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The animal agriculture industry will always go with the cheapest option. The only surprising thing is that they weren’t doing this already for their mass killings.