PETA supports Animal Partisan’s petition that the Board of Agriculture and Consumer Services promulgate regulations setting minimum standards of care for the transportation, handling and lairage of birds prior to slaughter within the Commonwealth.

In the United States, more than 9 billion birds are slaughtered for their flesh each year—more than all other land animals combined—yet not a single federal law protects them from abuse, neglect, suffering and distress in transport and at slaughterhouses.

These animals are effectively denied such protection under the Commonwealth’s laws, as well. Va. Code § 3.2-6570 (D) exempts “farming activities” (including transportation of birds in ways consistent with the poultry industry’s practices) from prosecution. Meanwhile, local law enforcement agencies often mistakenly believe that federal regulation of slaughterhouses preempts criminal liability under state law for cruelty that occurs there.

As a result, these animals routinely suffer and die—in clearly illegal ways—on the Commonwealth’s roadways and in its slaughterhouses, with no legal ramifications for the culpable parties. For example:

• In December 2022, a winter storm brought freezing rain and temperatures of 33 degrees to the Dayton area. Despite this, turkeys were transported in a trailer with no protection from the elements to the Cargill Meat Solutions slaughterhouse in Dayton. At the slaughterhouse, a federal inspector found that 24 dead turkeys on the trailer were “diffusely soaked wet and cold to the touch,” “consistent with death due to hypothermia.”
• In November 2022, a federal inspector discovered a container of live chickens which had fallen off a trailer at Shenandoah Valley Organic’s Harrisonburg slaughterhouse onto the pavement below, with the birds “piled on top of one another, at least three or four deep.” The inspector counted “67 chickens [who] were dead or dying … due to trauma and/or suffocation ….”
• In July 2022, a man hauling chickens to that Harrisonburg slaughterhouse ran off a straight stretch of road, struck two utility poles, crossed the oncoming lane of traffic, ran off the left side of the road, crossed back, overturned in the right lane, and struck a third pole. The crash killed many chickens who were crushed or ejected from crates on the overturned trailer, and left many other maimed birds to suffer for several hours along the roadside.
• In May 2020, workers at George’s, LLC left thousands of chickens overnight on two trailers—as the temperature dropped to 37 degrees—at its slaughterhouse near Edinburg. Up to 2,525 of the animals died as a result.
• Circle S Ranch, Inc. trucks carrying turkeys to the Cargill Meat Solutions slaughterhouse in Dayton crashed on at least five occasions between 2012 and August 2023 in Henry and Pittsylvania counties alone. Eyewitnesses reported that turkeys with broken bones and other serious injuries were not relieved of their suffering on site. Workers allegedly tossed them against coops, causing their heads and wings to strike the metal frames. After this August’s crash, State Police struggled for two hours to even reach Circle S, and another three hours passed before turkey industry representatives arrived to start recovering survivors. After the 2012 crash, approximately 540 turkeys—piled on top of one another in transport cages and denied shade—slowly suffered and died from apparent heat-related stress on the side of the road.

Avian species handled, transported and held for slaughter in the Commonwealth are as capable of suffering as are the exotic and native birds (and other companion animals) the Board has wisely regulated the transport of in Virginia Administrative Code, Chapter 150.

Given this—and the abject suffering of poultry in Virginia currently unaddressed by law enforcement and regulatory agencies—PETA urges the Board to regulate the transportation, handling and lairage of such birds prior to their slaughter within the Commonwealth. Some of the worst abuses of these animals would be mitigated to the extent the poultry industry complied with the proposed rule.