Report From a Chicken Plant

Re “A Killing Floor Chronicle,” Dec. 8: Denials by Tyson Foods of the horrors perpetrated in its chicken slaughterhouses, as recounted by a former worker, as well as the shrug-and-yawn findings of “no corroboration” by authorities ostensibly charged with oversight, is an old story -- at least as old as Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” and the chorus of virtuous denials from the meatpacking industry that greeted its publication.

Virgil Butler’s Web log and his work of personal witnessing may do as much for vegetarianism as did the work of the estimable Sinclair, by continuing to send a simple message of truth: This is what you are really eating.

Andrew Christie

North Hollywood

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Thank you so much for the amazing story on the horrific abuses in the poultry industry, as told by a former slaughterhouse worker. The management claims he’s exaggerating the cruelty. Then show us. America demands to see the inside of that factory and others like it, now!

Jane Velez-Mitchell

Marina del Rey

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As I sit eating my chicken soup and reading your article about the “horrors” of one man’s experiences slaughtering chickens, I finally understand why the animal rights movement has been enjoying a growing following lately. Few people fully comprehend or appreciate where their food comes from. For two generations of Americans the phrase “food chain” has come to connote a fast-food chain, not animals eating other animals. So estranged from reality have we become that when groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals dramatize the “awful” truth to us we recoil as if Wilbur from “Charlotte’s Web” had been slaughtered to make our ham sandwiches.

But animals do eat other animals. It’s actually quite natural. And despite what Thomas Jefferson once wrote, no animal, including us, possesses an inalienable right to life, liberty or even happiness. Rights are a human invention intended to control our behavior toward each other or, if we so choose, toward other animals. Though some humans may choose to extend our rights to other animals, I choose to finish my chicken soup.

Tom Higgins

Granada Hills

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It is easy to pretend Old MacDonald’s farm still exists and that animals live idyllic existences while waiting to be slaughtered. Thanks to Butler and The Times, we know this is not the case. Decomposing flesh of tortured chickens is not on my menu anymore.

Rory Freedman

Mahwah, N.J.

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Most people seem to think chickens are scarcely more alive than viruses. Since acquiring chickens, my view has changed. I see my hens almost as people. They answer individually to their names. They greet me whenever they see me. Sometimes when I pass by, a whole bush comes alive with the burblings of hidden birds. They imitate each other. One figures out how to get into the yard next door; next thing, they’re all over there.

On a recent morning one of my white hens rushed down the hill, across the driveway, and up to the car where I was loading in sack lunch and briefcase. She was squawking at me with great purpose. I remembered suddenly that the chickens were in a fix. The night before I’d locked eight in the coop and three outside, because they’d chosen to roost in a tree. The prisoners wanted freedom, the outsiders food and nesting spots.

I walked across the driveway toward the hill. The white hen stopped squawking. I climbed up the flights of stone stairs. The hen raced up the back way, through the shrubs and trees, and met me at the coop. The other 10 ladies, inside and out, burbled hello. I set the door ajar, descended the hill and went to work. That hen had communicated with me better than most people do!

Stephenie J. Frederick

Altadena