FOR RELEASE September 22, 2010                  CONTACT:  Michael Weber, 301-221-4555

Animal Activists Unfurl Anti-Egg Banner at House Hearing

Two animal rights activists unfurled an anti-egg banner at today’s Congressional hearing on the recent massive egg recall.  The banner read “Recall All Egg Production.”

“Egg production kills animals and people,” noted Jen Riley, one of the activists. “Each year, 1.4 million Americans suffer and die prematurely from heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases that have been linked conclusively to consumption of animal products,” she explained. " Each year, 230 million male chicks are ground up or suffocated at birth, while an equal number of females are slaughtered after wretched lives, crammed into tiny wire mesh cages that cut painfully into their feet and tear out their feathers.”

The hearing, at the Rayburn House Office Building, was called by the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce to delve into the massive recent salmonella contamination and record recall of eggs produced by Austin “Jack” DeCoster’s Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms. The egg industry has attempted to portray the contamination as an isolated incident, but DeCoster’s lawyer countered that “contamination is common in poultry operations” and “the notion that eggs will ever be free of salmonella is ludicrous."

One of the egg industry’s dirty secrets is that DeCoster has already paid millions of dollars in fines for violating food safety, worker safety, immigration, sexual harassment, animal cruelty, and water pollution laws in Maine, Maryland, New York, and Iowa. Iowa’s attorney general labeled him a “habitual violator.”

Some of animal agriculture’s other dirty secrets:

• The meat purchased by the US government for school lunches is so low-grade that even McDonalds won’t use it.
• Chicken and turkey feed contains chicken manure, roadkill, and ground up carcasses of cats and dogs killed at local pounds.
• Waste discharges from animal farming are accountable for an ecological “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, much larger than that associated with the BP oil spill.

Animal Agriculture’s Dirty Secrets is a project of World Farm Animals Day, dedicated to exposing and memorializing the needless suffering and deaths of 58 billion land animals annually in the world’s factory farms and slaughterhouses. The world-wide observance has been coordinated since 1983 by the Farm Animal Rights Movement, a national nonprofit organization working to end the use of animals for food.

For more information, go to www.animalagribusiness.com

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