The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), Oakland's East Bay Animal Advocates (EBAA), and five poultry consumers filed suit challenging the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s policy of excluding chickens, turkeys, and other birds killed for human consumption from the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act of 1958. The animal protection organizations, representing more than nine million members and constituents, assert that current poultry slaughter methods are cruel. "These birds ... are being slaughtered by methods that are not humane," said Paul Shapiro, spokesman for the Humane Society of the United States. "It's only because the USDA fails to define poultry as livestock even though any dictionary definition demonstrates that farmed birds ought to be." The groups filing suit estimate that 9 billion birds, or about 95 percent of domestic animals raised on farms, are unprotected during the slaughter process. U.S. industry practices include hanging live birds upside down in metal shackles, then moving them through an electrified water bath that paralyzes them while still conscious, and sometimes drowning conscious birds in tanks of scalding water. The lawsuit said recent reports of abuse in slaughter plants in West Virginia, Maryland and Alabama, where workers jumped on, kicked and slammed chickens against a wall, increased the need to protect poultry. In those cases, neither the workers nor the plants could be prosecuted because poultry are not covered under the federal law for human treatment of livestock.

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HSUS's Still a Jungle Out There | EBAA's California Turkey Industry

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