As they gathered in the huge barns that housed stacks of hens in cages, the workers said to forget their usual routine of collecting eggs and feeding the birds. Overnight, the factory had begun slaughtering more than 5 million chickens using a horrific killing method after detecting a single case of bird flu. Even supervisors were tasked with dragging dead hens out of packed cages as Rembrandt Enterprises struggled to curb the spread of the virus amid the largest bird flu epidemic in the United States in seven years. The slaughter has been repeated on chicken and turkey farms in Iowa and 28 other states from Maine to Utah. More than 22 million birds have been killed in an effort to contain the epidemic – the majority in Iowa, the US largest egg producer. The slaughter of 5.3 million chickens in Rembrandt is the largest slaughter in any factory in the country. The workers spent almost a month pulling the dead poultry out of the cages and throwing them in carts before piling up in nearby fields and then burying them in huge pits. After the killing, about 250 people were briefly fired from their jobs with a few dozen staff members left. In the weeks that followed, animal rights protesters targeted Rembrandt’s billionaire owner Glenn Taylor for the massacre, including the suspension of games played by a professional basketball team owned by the Minnesota Timberwolves. But few voices have been raised in favor of Rembrandt’s workers, some of whom are undocumented immigrants. Others fired from the factory contrast the seriousness with which the bird flu epidemic has been received by the Rembrandt administration in what they describe as the company’s lax approach to the Covid-19 workers’ threat as it swept farms and slaughterhouses in Iowa and elsewhere. . “So right now everyone is worried about the chickens,” said Oscar Garcia, a former factory supervisor. “It simply came to our notice then. The way they were killed was really inhumane. But chickens are chickens, right? People worked in these barns pulling dead birds in terrible conditions, feces everywhere, doing 12 or 14 hours a day. They could not protest because then they would be fired and would lose their dismissal fee. “Then they get fired and no one talks about them.” Rembrandt’s external critique focused on the method of murder. Chicken farms have slaughtered chickens in the past by drowning them in foam or pumping barns full of carbon dioxide, methods that have been criticized as inhumane. Oscar Garcia, former factory supervisor at Rembrandt Foods. Photo: Dan Brouillette / The Guardian But Tom Cullen of the Iowa newspaper The Storm Lake Times revealed that birds in Rembrandt were killed using a system known as Ventilation Shutdown Plus (VSD +) in which air is locked in barns and heat is pumped until the temperature rises above them. 40 degrees Celsius. ). “They cooked these birds alive,” said one of Rembrandt’s workers involved in the massacre. Animal rights group Animal Outlook used freedom of information laws to obtain North Carolina State University experimental records that show VSD + causes “extreme inconvenience” to chickens as they ‘squeeze, gasp, gasp they stagger and even throw against them. the walls of their confinement in a desperate attempt to escape. “ “Eventually the birds collapse and eventually die of heat and suffocation,” the team said. Members of another team, Direct Action Everywhere, have stopped playing Timberwolves in recent weeks wearing T-shirts that say “Glen Taylor Roasts Animals Alive.” James Roth, director of the Center for Food Safety and Public Health at Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine and a federal government biosafety adviser, acknowledged that VSD + causes more pain than other forms of killing, but said it was more effective than of the spread of avian influenza because it is relatively rapid. “No one wants to see it used, but sometimes it’s the last resort. The rationale is that if the flu virus spreads so fast that it will pass through a poultry farm very quickly, all these birds produce huge amounts of virus in the air. Then you have a large plume of virus coming from this house that spreads to other poultry farms. “It’s critical to get the birds euthanized before this virus becomes a huge column of virus to spread,” he said. USDA workers in the area where millions of chickens were dumped in a pit owned by Rembrandt Foods. Photo: Dan Brouillette / The GuardianThe Rembrandt Foods. Photo: Dan Brouillette / The Guardian Roth said authorities seem to have learned important lessons from 2015, when a bird flu outbreak led to what the US Department of Agriculture calls “the biggest poultry health disaster in U.S. history,” with the slaughter of about 50 millions of chickens and turkeys. This time federal regulators moved quickly to curb the outbreak, shutting down the movement of workers between flocks of poultry, a major cause of the spread of bird flu in 2015. But Roth said the virus appears to have reached the United States this year. from waterfowl from Europe and better adapted to spread by wild birds, which are more difficult to control. This prompted the USDA to push for rapid killing in infected poultry farms. On March 17, Rembrandt informed his superiors that bird flu had been detected at the site. “They emailed us at 10.30pm informing us that they had a confirmed case,” said a former Rembrandt employee who was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement in order to receive dismissal payments. When the worker arrived the next day he discovered that the company had already started slaughtering millions of chickens. “Once they die, we had to take them out by hand one by one, put them in a cart. This is really hard manual work. They are not very large cages. Twelve chickens are crammed in there. “Tragic conditions,” he said. Once the birds were killed and buried, the company fired most of the workers. Photo: Dan Brouillette / The Guardian “After it was over, we were told to attend a meeting. We are in. There was a large stack of yellow envelopes. It’s like pointing a knife at a chicken. You know what’s going to happen next. We worked alone without a job. I saw people who had years and years of experience just being let go. It was completely unexpected. “ Some workers thought the layoffs might be temporary, as happened at the 2015 outbreak. But they were given redundancy payments and told to find other jobs, suggesting the move was permanent and raising questions about the future of the plant. Some of the skilled former workers found it difficult to find another job. Others have fought. “I’re just in a hurry to find a job to support my family,” said a former Rembrandt employee with many years at the company. Those competing include undocumented workers who, Garcia said, were hired indirectly through third-party contractors. In February, the Storm Lake Times reported that a lawsuit filed by the family of a Guatemalan migrant worker who was crushed to death when cages collapsed on him revealed that he was working under a false name through a subcontractor. Garcia also countered the seriousness with which Rembrandt dealt with bird flu in the company handling Covid-19 as it grew in Iowa, especially among workers working near factory farms and slaughterhouses. He said Rembrandt seemed more interested in bird flu than in Covid. He criticized the management for failing to require employees to wear a mask or get vaccinated. “They really liked the fact that we did not require our employees to be vaccinated, because they hoped that we would receive employees from the surrounding areas who demanded that their employees be vaccinated. “They use it almost as a recruiting tool,” he said. Other employees said that when they were infected by Covid, they were forced to use the breaks they had earned as holidays instead of giving them sick days. “It’s a company that makes millions of dollars. “I guess I should not be surprised that he does not care about people,” Garcia said. Rembrandt Enterprises has been approached for comment.
