Washington, DC: The Humane Society of the United States announced the filing of a class action lawsuit against the nation's third-largest poultry producer, Perdue Farms, over the company's alleged false adverstising of factory farmed chicken products as "humane."
The suit—filed by an HSUS member on behalf of consumers duped by Perdue Farms—alleges that Perdue is illegally marketing its "Harvestland" and "Perdue" chicken products with "Humanely Raised" labels in violation of the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act. The complaint seeks a jury trial and compensatory damages for the class members, as well as injunctive relief against further use of the "Humanely Raised" claim by Perdue.
"Companies like Perdue are exploiting the dramatic growth of consumer demand for improved animal welfare for their own profit," said Jonathan Lovvorn, vice president and chief counsel of Animal Protection Litigation for The HSUS. "Rather than implementing humane reforms, Perdue has simply slapped 'humanely raised' stickers on its factory farmed products, hoping consumers won't know the difference."
Hardly humane The standards upon which Perdue has based its "Humanely Raised" claim are the so-called "Animal Welfare Guidelines" of the National Chicken Council—the trade group for the chicken industry. The suit alleges that those guidelines allow for treatment that no reasonable consumer would consider "humane."
Temple Grandin, Ph.D., among the world's foremost farm animal handling and slaughter experts, put it bluntly in an industry trade journal: "The National Chicken Council Animal Welfare audit has a scoring system that is so lax that it allows plants or farms with really bad practices to pass." In her book Animals in Translation, Grandin explained, "Today's poultry chicken has been bred to grow so rapidly that its legs can collapse under the weight of its ballooning body. It's awful."
The industry guidelines permit numerous inhumane practices, including painful handling and shackling of live birds; near continuous, dim lighting that prevents normal resting behavior and is linked to painful problems associated with fast growth; the transport and holding of birds on cramped trucks for long periods of time in extreme temperatures with no food or water; and egregiously inhumane slaughter practices.
