 Hello, everyone. Welcome to the 2021 Hot Topics in Environmental Law Summer Lecture Series. I'm Jenny Rushlow, Director of the Environmental Law Center and Associate Dean for Environmental Programs here at Vermont Law School. We're very pleased to welcome everybody here today. If you're looking for CLE credit, each talk is worth one CLE credit in Vermont, so please keep track of any talks that you attend for your records. We'll have time for Q&A after the presentation today, and you can type questions in the chat box at any point during the lecture, so go ahead and put them in there so you don't forget. And we'll get to as many as we can after the talk concludes. Today, we are very pleased to welcome Professor Delceana Winders. Professor Winders is a visiting Associate Professor of Law and Director of our Developing Animal Law Program here at Vermont Law School, which is a very recent development, and we're very excited to welcome her to VLS. Professor Winders joins VLS from Lewis and Clark Law School, where she directed the world's first law school clinic dedicated to farmed animal advocacy. Her primary interests in her work in scholarship are in animal law and administrative law. Prior to academia, she served as Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at the PETA Foundation, the first academic fellow of the Harvard Animal Law and Policy Program, and a visiting scholar at the Elizabeth Hobbs School of Law at Pace University. Her work has appeared in multiple law reviews, but she's also lead author of a book chapter on captive wildlife in the recently published book, Endangered Species Act, Law Policy and Perspectives. She's also published extensively in the popular press, including National Geographic, Newsweek, USA Today, Salon, and many other outlets. This is Professor Winders' fourth year teaching in the summer program here at VLS, where she teaches animal welfare law. Today, her talk is titled Bird Brains, Our Evolving Understanding of Chickens and Their Lacking Legal Status. Please join me in welcoming Professor Winders. Thank you so much, Jenny. And thank you everyone for being here and thank you VLS for having me. I'm so excited to be part of this new animal law program and expanding the field of animal law. So as Jenny said, we will be leaving time at the end for questions. I love fielding questions. I think it's one of the most interesting parts of doing these things. That said, I do have to teach promptly at one o'clock, so I will not be able to stay on past that, so I normally would like to if Jenny would let me. So, bird brain. I think we've all heard that phrase at one time or another, perhaps many times, to be an insult. And according to Maryam Webster's dictionary, bird brain means, quote, a stupid person. And probably no bird is more widely regarded as unintelligent than chickens. So while the intelligence of African great parrots and crows, for example, is starting to gain attention in the popular media. Many people, if not most people generally continue to continue to consider chickens to be basically stupid. The truth is, as is so often the case, much more complicated and much more interesting. Yes, chickens' brains are small. There is no denying that. But it may be that we humans are the stupid ones for assuming that brain size is somehow the be all and all determiner of intelligence. So chickens are the single most populous birds on the planet. They're actually widely considered a symbol of the Anthropocene, the geologic epoch that we are in the midst of which is defined by China's increasing impact on climate and on the environment. In fact, a 2018 article published by a group of scientists in the Journal Royal Society of Open Science concluded that today's broiler chicken, which is how we refer to the chickens raised for meat, quote, symbolizes the unprecedented human reconfiguration of the Earth's biosphere. At any given moment, as in right now, for example, there are about 23 billion chickens on Earth. That's at least 10 times more than any other kind of bird. It's more than any other kind of bird has existed ever in the Earth's history. But most Americans rarely, if ever, actually encounter chickens in real life. We see birds all the time. You probably have or will see some birds before today is up. You probably have not seen chickens. Maybe a few of you have back our chickens or your neighbors do, but most of us do not encounter chickens regularly, despite the fact that they are really everywhere. So despite the prevalence, the public really knows very little about chickens. And what we do know or what we think we know is often quite wrong. So today what I'd like to do is dispel some widespread misconceptions about chickens, sharing a little bit of a growing body of peer reviewed scientific literature, and what it's teaching us about these remarkable animals. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about the conditions that these animals are kept in and I will warn you now it is upsetting. I will try to give you a warning before I show a particular image that's upsetting I am going to show one short video and I will warn you before that but I think it's very important to understand the conditions in which we are keeping billions of birds. It's, it's hard to grasp this issue without seeing what is happening behind closed doors. I will, I'm avoiding showing you some of the most gratuitous routine practices, because that seems like a contradiction to gratuitous and routine. Some of the really cruelest practices that never the less happen every single day to many, many animals. And then of course we'll talk about the role of the law and all this because we are after all at a law school. So, starting with a little chicken history, chickens descended from wild jungle south in Southeast Asia, and we don't know for sure how long chickens have been domesticated. It's believed to be at least six to 8,000 years, but it's possible that it's as many as 58,000 years. Physically, today's chickens look very different from their wild counterparts and we're going to talk about that very shortly. But I want you to understand first that psychologically, mentally chickens are still very similar to their ancestors. There's no evidence that their cognitive or perceptual abilities have been substantially changed by the domestication process. And that's because our manipulation of chickens, unlike safe dogs has really focused almost entirely on their physical characteristics, not on their personalities and adapting those. So as Dr. Lori Marino summarizes, both domestic chickens and wild jungle file tend to perverse social groupings of one dominant male and one dominant female subordinates of each sex and chicks all occupying a home range during breeding season. And then within that home range, they have regular roosting sites, including high up in the branches of trees. And a lot of folks are surprised to realize that if given the chance given opportunity, domesticated chickens will still roost very high. Growing up, we had some chickens who were way up high in the eulogist trees. So that that drive is very much still still part of these animals. Their diet, again, both wild and domesticated is highly varied. If given the opportunity, it ranges from berries and seeds to insects and even small invertebrates. So in natural conditions, chickens will spend between half and 90% of their time foraging. They'll pack more than 15,000 times a day. So it's a very important genetically driven behavior for chickens. They also sign bay, they dust bathe, and these are again deeply genetically ingrained behaviors as the group United Poultry Concerns explains, even on wire floors, their need to dust bathe is so strong that hens will go through the motions of dust bathing, which is a hygienic equivalent of a water bath or a shower for human beings. The hens are given access to litter material, earth, straw, peat or sand. They do it over and over again. Biologist Marianne Stout Dawkins explained that if hens have been kept all their lives on wire floors with no site or contact with anything that could be scratched or raked over, they're suddenly at four months old, given access to, say, wood shavings or peat. Even though they have never seen such a thing, never been taught such a thing, they have a very immediate and strong preference for that type of substrate over the wire substrate, and they will dust bathe, they will eat peat, and they will scratch with their feet. But it's not just that they have these behavioral drives. I think as folks who've actually spent time around chickens will tell you, and science is now documenting, they're intelligent, sensitive emotional animals. So just to give you a few examples, scientists have mapped the neurological pathway of sadness in chickens using functional MRI, and this pathway is actually nearly identical to that in guinea pigs and very similar to humans. They have shown that a mother hen has empathy for her chicks, so she sees her chicks being exposed to situations like a puff of air. She'll have physiological reactions that we know to be indicative of empathy. They're capable of basic arithmetic. And some other statements from scientists, Dr. Leslie Rogers states, quote, it is now clear that birds have cognitive capacities equivalent to those of mammals, even primates. Discovery magazine noted, chickens do not just live in the present, but can anticipate the future and demonstrate self control, something previously attributed only to humans and other primates. And then last, Dr. Bernard Wallen, a professor of animal science, very well regarded says chickens are complex behaviorally do quite well in learning show rich social organization and have a diverse repertoire of calls. Anyone who has kept barnyard chicken also recognizes significant differences in personality. And then just one more sort of trying to capture all of this. This is from scientist Carolyn L Smith. I think what would have been shown to possess sophisticated cognitive abilities, their communication is not simply reflective, but is responsive to relevant social and environmental factors. Chickens demonstrate an awareness of themselves as separate from others. They can recognize particular individuals and appreciate their standing with respect to those individuals, and show awareness to the attentional states of their fellow individuals. Further chickens have been shown to engage in reasoning through performing abstract and social transitive preferences. But these complex the psychologically complex animals are trapped in bodies that have been severely manipulated by humans that make it very hard for chickens to be chickens. I'm going to pull up my slides now. The first slide is not terribly graphic. Give me a moment. All right. So, in less than 100 years, humans have manipulated chickens, broiler chickens specifically, like I said, that's how those raised from me are referred to. To grow to more than quadruple the body mass that they used to grow to. So the chickens that you see here in this image are all the same age. They've just been manipulated to grow much more quickly over time. Chickens breasts in particular are now 80% larger than they were about 50 years ago. This process was initiated in the 1940s through a program we did or not called the chicken of tomorrow. And that was aimed at creating chickens who would yield more meat and thus more profits. Both rates, not just the size of the animals with the rate at which they grow has also gotten much faster. And that is thanks. Partly in large part to genetic manipulation, but also feed manipulation, the routine administration of antibiotics, not to treat illness but specifically to promote growth. According to the US Food and Drug Administration, well over half of all medically important antibiotics sold are administered to harm animals. Some put this number as high as 80%. So as a result of these interventions, today's so called broilers grow much faster about three times faster than their wild counterparts. And they're just five to seven weeks old when they're slanted to slaughter. And as you can imagine, this extreme rapid growth causes a lot of pathologies that are not seen or very rarely seen in the wild. So they find it very hard to actually support their own weight, which results in frequent lameness crippling. Sometimes because they become unable to move, they then cannot access food, especially if they're crowded with other chickens and will start to death. This rapid growth also strains their organs, including their hearts and lungs, which can also result in death. And all of this death is just considered a cost of doing business because the focus is on the overall aggregate and not individual animal lives. The conditions that these animals are kept in does not help the situation. So broilers in the United States are raised, not in cages, but it's effectively a very large crowded cage. So it's a large windowless shed referred to as a quote finishing unit that can hold up to 50,000 individual birds in a single shed. A New York Times reporter, if you've had a rare opportunity to see and smell inside one of these sheds reported quote, I was almost knocked to the ground by the overpowering smell of feces and ammonia. My eyes burned and so did my lungs and I could neither see nor breathe. There must have been 30,000 chickens sitting silently on the floor in front of me. They didn't move, didn't clock. They were almost like statues of chickens living in merely total darkness, and they would spend every minute of their six week lives that way. So these animals are overcrowded and they're stressed, and one response to that is to pack one another in order to reduce pecking injuries rather than giving them more space. So broilers typically cut their beaks off. So chickens beaks are extremely sensitive organs. They are sensory organs. They're used for a wide variety of things, including touching, tasting, detecting temperature. And so they have a lot of nerve endings in them and the tip of the beak in particular has a cluster of especially sensitive receptors. This process called de-beaking or sometimes misleadingly called beak trimming as it beaks were toenails is done without any pain killers, which results in both acute and chronic pain. So studies have shown that DB chickens show pain related behaviors, sometimes for months after the procedure is done that includes things like talking what's left of their beaks inside of a wing and reduced use of their beak. Sometimes it will be so too painful to eat and the animal will die as a result, again, cost of doing business. So removing such an important organ from a chicken has a wide range of additional impacts beyond just both the acute and chronic pain because it interferes with their ability to engage in some of their most basic again genetically driven behaviors, not just eating and drinking but nesting, preening, exploring the things that make a chicken a chicken. Remember, they send 50 to 90% of their time foraging with their beaks pecking up to 15,000 times a day, and they've now lost the ability to do that. So to give you a sense of standard conditions for boiler hands in the United States and really worldwide now, I want to show you a short clip from a recent undercover investigation done by a group called Mercy for Animals. It is upsetting. There is no way around that. It's pretty short. Obviously, if you need to look away, please do. But if you're able to watch it, I think it's really important to see it. There are practices taken inside a Costco supplier, but these conditions, these practices are absolutely routine across the industry. So I'm going to show that. This is Costco chicken. New hidden camera footage recorded by a Mercy for Animals investigator. It exposes extreme animal suffering and assistance set off by Costco to supply themselves with cheap chicken. The amount of rotisserie chicken comes in a huge hidden cost. The horrific suffering of millions of animals. Many chicks arrive at the farm injured, mangled, or dead. Tens of thousands of birds are planted in overcrowded, filthy warehouses, forced to live for weeks in their own feces. But the worst cruelty is the chicken breeds Costco uses. Costco chickens are bred to suffer. They grow on naturally large and naturally fast. The result is devastating for the birds. Chickens often struggle to walk them in their own unnatural way. Some birds flip over due to problems caused by their fast growth. They are trampled and injured by other birds. They can't get out because their legs are too weak. Their size makes moving uncomfortable. So the birds spend most of their time sitting. The litter causes red and raw birds to extend. Some can't even make sure six weeks is long. These chickens are played by side. From the moment they're recklessly tossed on the ground, for the time they're sucked up, spit out, crammed into crates, and transported to a Costco owned slaughterhouse. Hundreds of companies have taken. Okay, thank you for watching that. That is the worst thing that we're going to see. And I know it's not easy. So, I really think it's important to stress that this is routine practice. As people started to become more aware about how animals raised for food are treated. I increasingly hear from folks that they only purchase so-called humane products from so-called better welfare facilities. And I know the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems here at the ALAS is doing really important work around labeling. But the really important thing to know is that analysis has found that 99.9 of all chickens raised for meat in the United States are raised in these sort of factory farm or industrial, CAFO, whatever you want to call it, conditions. These are the practices that dominate the industry. And I, in my own analysis and also the USDA's Office of Inspector General has documented that the agency routinely approves labeling claims about animal raising without any evidence whatsoever to document those claims. So be very, very careful about labels. So what about chickens used for eggs? A lot of folks don't realize that we use two very different types of chickens for meat and eggs. Each is extensively manipulated to maximize production, one for eggs and one for meat. As a result, egg laying hens don't produce particularly good or particularly abundant flesh. And of course only females lay eggs. So this means that we have a surfeit of male chicks born to egg laying hens breeders every single day in the United States. They are not useful for producing eggs and they don't produce some meat. So as soon as these babies hatch, they are discarded, typically by maceration being ground up alive. And I am sparing you that footage, you are welcome. Here, many 300 million male chicks are called by the egg industry in the United States alone. Worldwide that number is 6 billion, more than 6 billion. You should note that many backyard bar birds come from the very same hatcheries that are engaging in these practices. They also do use male chicks as packing material when they ship backyard bar birds by a snail now, which is allowed by the US Postal Service. So the females who are spared, perhaps, perhaps not, are also kept like boilers in very crowded conditions, but they are kept in cages, which are called battery cages. And these do not even afford the animals space to spread their wings to turn around. You can see a picture of pretty standard battery cage conditions here. The wire can shape their skin and can rub off their feathers. As you can see in this image, it can cause foot problems. These hens are deviated just like the boilers. They also very often suffer broken bones because they have osteoporosis because they are laying eggs so frequently and the calcium for the eggshells is being taken from their bodies, from their bones. When these animals stop producing so frequently, just after a year or two, they are then slaughtered. They'll often not be for one last shock to their system in a process called force molting, which is intended to jar them into another round of plentiful egg production. So this practice, which is routine in the US, still involves starving the hen for a week or two until she loses about 30 to 35% of her body weight, which causes her body, including her ovarian function to shut down. Light availability is often manipulated during this time as well, so the animals are exposed to prolonged periods of either dark or light. And then once normal conditions are assumed, if the process is working as intended, the hen will resume productivity for about another eight months. And some hens endure this process for two or even three times before they are sent to slaughter. And similar to boilers, analysis has found that 98.2% of all chickens raised for eggs are in these factory farm type conditions. The last chapter of chicken short lives, whether they're boilers or egg laying hens is in the same place at the slaughterhouse, and it's grueling. The boilers because they aren't caged have to be rounded up and this is done by workers who are called catchers and they round up and create more than 6000 birds in an hour. Obviously no time with careful handling at that rate, bones are routinely broken. One industry study found a quote, unacceptably high rate of both freshly broken bones as well as healed bone breaks at slaughter. There are more bone breaks that occur at the slaughterhouse in addition to those happen that happened during catching. Once they arrived at the slaughterhouse, they are dumped onto conveyor belts and then on very fast moving process, picked up turned upside down shackled by the legs by workers. They're often struggling as you can imagine. And so it makes this process very difficult for the workers. One undercover investigator at a produce slaughterhouse explained quote, the screaming of the birds and the frenzy flapping of their wings was so loud that you had to yell to the worker next to you. So once these animals are shackled, they go through an electrified water bath that is meant to stun them, but it does not always work. There are often issues with the stunning. Sometimes the line is moving too quickly and so the animal is still conscious when she comes out of the sun bath. If that is not noticed, then she goes straight ahead to the where her throat is lit and she's still conscious during that point and she's conscious. She is likely to struggle and therefore be able to avoid the blade. There is a backup blade, but that does also miss the animals, especially if they're conscious. So the next destination is a tank of scalding water. It meant to loosen the feathers on birds who are dead. But if a chicken has avoided the blade and the backup blade, she is going to die of scalding or asphyxiation once she's dropped into that tank. And according to US Department of Agriculture data, nearly one million chickens and turkeys, mostly chickens, but also some turkeys die in scald tanks at slaughterhouses in the United States each year. I don't think anybody would dispute that what I have described causes suffering. And I think there are probably a lot of questions like how is this even legal. This is so egregious. So I'm going to talk about how it's legal, why it's legal and what changes need to be made if we want to remedy the situation. So first, and perhaps most important, there is no federal law governing on farm treatment of animals raised for food. None. I'm going to say that again, there is no federal law governing on farm treatment of animals raised for food. In fact, the federal animal welfare act goes far so far as to state that animals raised for food are not animals for the purposes of that statute. So that's a gap, a gaping lack of oversight for a massive industry. And we do have federal laws that are supposed to govern how animals are transported and slaughter. That is the 28 hour law and the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, respectively, and they don't provide robust protections, but they do limit how long an animal can be transported for and they require that an animal be both handled and slaughtered humanely at the slaughterhouse. However, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has decided not to include chickens within their enforcement of those two statutes. They have decided effectively, as in other contexts, basically that chickens are not livestock or animals. So chickens have extremely limited protections under federal law. They do have some under the poultry products protection act. Which, as you can imagine, is really focused on consumer safety, but the USDA has recognized that there is a link between the quality of the meat and the way that the animals were treated. So they do require, in theory, humane handling of chickens at slaughter. However, their stated policy is only to enforce this if it rises to the level of what they call a process control issue. What that means is they do not regulate the law on a bird by bird basis. There has to be an ongoing pattern or trend of inhumane handling or slaughter of birds. It has to be a lot of birds. As a result, we often see the USDA documenting not one or two or three, but many birds going into the small tank fully conscious, yet not taking enforcement action as a matter of policy. The group Animal Welfare Institute is currently suing over this with the help of Harvard Law School's Animal Law and Policy Clinic. This issue at slaughter of conscious animals going into skull tanks and dying in that way is further aggravated as we speed up the rate of slaughter. So for a very long time, 140 birds per minute was the maximum that was allowed. And on a case by case basis, the US Department of Agriculture has allowed some slaughterhouses to increase that to 175 birds per minute. That is a very fast rate. I'm going to just quickly play a metronome, nothing graphic here, just to give you a feel for how many chickens we're talking about. A lot of chickens, very, very fast. Not hard to imagine that it's more difficult to ensure that they're properly rendered unconscious and handled humanely when you're operating that fast. So the USDA has been gradually over the years under a waiver program that allowing select large slaughterhouses to increase their speed to 175 birds per minute. In the midst of the pandemic, they issued an unprecedented number of these waivers so you can see a list of all of the ones that were issued in April 2020. And this was at precisely the same time that slaughterhouse workers were being disproportionately hit by COVID-19, very high rate of them becoming sick and even dying. And the companies were taking out full page ads saying things like we need to supply our families in America, we have a responsibility to feed our country. Basically, instilling the notion that if slaughterhouses could not stay open, despite the risks, the very role with risks to workers, we would be facing supply issues here in the US. And that was also used as a justification to try to speed up these borderline speeds. What came to light is that we were actually exporting record amounts of poultry and eggs as well as other meat products. At this very same time, there was really no threat of a shortage. Nevertheless, they did press for these faster line speeds and they got it. And then immediately after the last election, so early in November 2020, the USDA submitted to the Office of Management and Budget, a proposal to basically allow all chicken slaughterhouses to increase their line speeds to 175 birds per minute. My clinic at Wilson Park engaged swiftly on this issue, we were monitoring it and helped organize a series of meetings with a bunch of groups to discuss with the OMB the problems with this proposal, problems for animal welfare, as well as the environment, because when you are watering faster, the primary goal is to slaughter more animals. And slaughtering more animals has serious environmental impacts at both the slaughter level and the CAFO level. There's a huge amount of water usage and other resources and pollution. Other groups engaged as well. It's really amazing coalition work happening among animal protection environmental worker consumer and other groups. And that proposal was ultimately withdrawn. However, it does remain on the USDA regulatory agenda. They indicate that they still do intend to increase chicken slaughter line speeds. So, what about state law? That is basically the situation on the federal level, no oversight of how animals are treated on the farm. USDA has opted not to extend transport protections to chickens. Slaughter protections are very minimal and basically being reduced due to pressure from industry. So, at the state level, unfortunately, they are not filling that void left by the lack of federal oversight. There is no regulatory regime that expects factory farms. Most every industry has some sort of licensing and inspection regime, they need to meet minimum standards. And if they cannot, they're not allowed to continue to operate. We don't have that for farm animals. Instead, what we have are criminal cruelty to animals laws, which are a really ineffective way to regulate an industry. For a large variety of reasons. There are no inspections for one. So you are relying on evidence that is brought forward by whistleblowers or undercover investigators, both of whom are risking increasingly more because there is legislative backlash to try to reduce evidence that's coming out of these facilities. Under criminal regime, you also have very high burdens of proof. You have men's rare requirements. You have prosecutorial discretion. It's just layer upon layer upon layer, which makes it exceedingly unlikely that any repercussion is ever going to follow. There is no cruelty to animals on farms unless it's truly egregious. Add to that, that most states have some sort of exemption for farm animals. It is not in most instances of blanket exception. I think it's the impact of these exemptions has been overstated. It has become something of self fulfilling prophecy and has let prosecutors off the hook and I'm working on some scholarship related to that, but it does remain that that adds a significant additional layer and hurdle to enforcement. Typically, they're, they're pretty broad. So it's like a, it's different in every single state, but something like a common and accepted husbandry practice. But sometimes they're really, really broad and Oregon, I think it's particularly bad for chickens. Oregon exempts commercially grown poultry in less gross negligence can be shown. So for this particular category of animals, there's an even heightened burden. That said, there have been a number of prosecutions around abuse of chickens on factory farms. So one example in Washington, an egg farmer, Washington state, an egg farmer shuttered and he left tens of thousands of hens to starve. And that was a state with an exception for quote accepted husbandry practices used in the commercial raising or soldering of livestock or poultry. The prosecutor's office initially refused to prosecute because they thought that exemption left the guy off the hook, but they were persuaded otherwise. They did file charges on the farmer pleaded guilty. Another case, I believe this one was in New Jersey, two live hens were discarded on a pile of dead birds. I also have seen the USDA document that pretty routinely and not do anything. But in this case, there was an investigation. And there was a common farming assumption in place. I think it's arguable that that is a common practice, but the defense did not invoke the exception. That conviction was ultimately overturned on a keel, but it was not because of the exception. Last example I'll give is a case in Missouri where so called spent 10 so egg line pens whose production has waned were dumped alive into a dumpster. Again, not that uncommon. And then I was sorry. No, this is the last one. A main egg farmer where there were dead and decomposing birds in cages with live birds again not that uncommon improper euthanasia. A host of practices including some more egregious abuse like kicking birds. Many instances of live hens left on dead piles, birds with bloody open wounds and so on and so there was prosecution there. So, there's some possibility I don't want to leave you with thinking that we can never enforce existing laws against farmed animal abuse. I think that is a common misconception for those who start studying these issues, and I think it's a much more nuanced situation. And that said, I also think there is no doubt whatsoever that we need better laws to govern this very large and very abusive industry. And so I think there are a number of things that we can do. I mean, one thing of course is that we can all make choices personally about whether or not to support this industry, but we also need broad policy change. And certainly we need to have, if we're going to continue raising and soldering animals on this scale. We need to have regulatory oversight on the federal level of the process. More urgently, we can prevent a bad situation from getting worse by fighting against these increased line speed and I've been very involved in a lot of that coalition work. There's an amazing array of groups working together on it. And it's really important to understand that these practices make it more likely that millions more chickens will be factory farms and slaughtered. That is the whole intent of increasing line speed. And like I mentioned before, there are environmental impacts that follow from that and just one example at the slaughterhouse level alone more than nine gallons of water is used per bird. So, and I have some scholarship coming out on the line speed issue, and I put some other resources here if you're interested in endowing into some of these issues more. There are a lot of others too. I'm happy to recommend there's a particular aspect of it that you're interested in. I will say, lastly, just before I open it up for questions, there is some progress being made on the state level where a number of states are banning the most egregious practices. There's a lot of debate about whether or not that makes a real difference for chickens and I think we can have a serious discussion about that. It's really hard to say, but that is stuff that is being taken. There's been efforts now to ban things like de-beking or the calling of male chicks. So tackling some of these most egregious practices is one avenue that folks are pursuing. So I'm going to end there and see what questions I can answer. Great. Thank you so much, Professor Winders. Depressing though it may be important to talk about. For our listeners, our viewers, we have a few minutes to take some questions. And as a reminder, if you're watching on our website live stream, you click on the icon at the bottom of the video to bring up the chat box where you can log in to add your question, which is easy. Or if you're watching on our Facebook live stream, just add your questions to the comment box below and we'll get to as many as we can. First question, you spoke about the criminal penalties, criminal rather than civil lawsuits to address the conditions that chickens are receiving. I mean, is that a criticism you have of all animal enforcement, or is there something specific to the treatment of chickens that makes criminal penalties particularly inadequate? That's a great question. And I think we could spend the rest of the time talking about that. I will try not to do that. So both. So there, there are very strong critiques being made about the deployment of the criminal justice system against animal users. And Justin Marceau is the leading scholar on that if folks are interested in looking into that more. As a strategic matter, what we often see happen is that there will be an undercover investigation and then sort of the low hanging fruit, the really disempowered workers who often have precarious status and are just really exploited already are prosecuted and that doesn't really help dismantle what's happening. The practices seem to still continue. So I think if we're talking about an institutionalized setting and exploitation, I think criminal penalties are a limiting tool, especially when they're being used against low level employees. If we want to start talking about prosecuting CEOs or something like that, that that changes the terms of the discussion. But ultimately, I think we need to be looking at mechanisms like taking licenses away, disenabling them from continuing to engage in these practices, because really the goal is to stop the abuse, not just put yet another person in our prison system. If chickens aren't animals or livestock, what are they and why do they receive less protection than other animals under federal law. So really, really great question. I think, I mean, so in the leading animal law casebook actually starts out with a discussion of what is an animal, which you would think would be a seemingly straightforward question. You know, science tells us who's in and who's not, but law actually is very informed by culture. So you actually have to look at each and every statute in each state. There's a certain type of animal, perhaps a chicken, there have been cases where it's argued that chickens are not animals. So we really, they end up looking at legislative history, historic notions of animals. So, I mean, my position is that they are animals and they are livestock within the meaning of the existing human methods slaughter act and the 28 hour law and the USDA has the discretion to apply those laws to them and should perhaps under this new administration exercise that would be a big issue because it is the vast vast majority well over 90% of all land animals that we raise for food. So right now they're occupying sort of a nebulous overlooked space and that's part of my intent in in giving this talk is to get us thinking about this huge number of animals who are being unattended to you. You spoke a lot about federal protections or lack there of really what's the role of states or even local governments in addressing these issues are they stepping into the breach at all given the lack of federal oversight. Another great question. So, in general, in terms of animal protection, I think state and especially local governments have a huge role to play and I think they really left charge and a lot of areas including other areas that I worked on retail sales of pets, traveling aquatic animals. And we're starting to see local governments ban practices and then that will trickle up into state level bands and then ultimately the hope is federal. We haven't seen that as much with farm animals and it's it's different than some of these other areas but in some ways, it might be easier because there is no other law as I talked about to speak of to interfere with so yes there is the humane methods of slaughter act and there's a very clear preemption provision as a Supreme Court of Health. But beyond slaughter there's nothing there's no federal law to get in the way of anything so there's a lot of potential for states. We are starting to see the state and local government I should say we're starting to see local governments do things like try to prevent huge cases from coming into their boundaries. And I really think there's a lot of opportunity here that said we are also seeing industry rush to the state houses and get laws passed to preempt local regulation of CAFOS and so it's a time right now where we need to really vigilant about those efforts to preempt protections before they're even put in place. So there's a lot of work to be done. There's a lot of opportunities on the state level like I said there are those bands on intensive confinement systems I believe it's about 13 states now have banned either battery cages or similar systems for other species or some combination there of so there is definitely progress we made on those levels certainly more so than the federal level but we have a long way to go. Okay. How legitimate are labels on eggs that state cage free pasture raised or organic can we trust such labels to imply that the chickens were raised more humanely or humanely at all. And finally I would not trust such labels for for a wide variety of reasons and I will have a point people to caps resource on labeling farm forward also released a really important report on humane washing recently, but there are a few things to bear in mind. One slaughter, and that pertains to the A-line hence as well because as they talked about they are ultimately slaughtered. All of these animals end up at the same slaughter houses there's no some separate accredited slaughterhouse. So the slaughter process is pretty horrific no matter what sorts of conditions the animal was raised on they have to be slaughtered at a USDA house in order to be sold in interstate commerce and those slaughterhouses are very large and centralized for the most part, which that means transport as well. Two, there's just so little oversight of this labeling claims, like I mentioned, the USDA's food service, food service inspection service FSIS, which is the entity that approves animal raising claims routinely does so without any documentation that those are accurate at best they'll have an affidavit from the company and not not supporting evidence but often they will not have anything you will ask them through a choir request what documentation do you have what's the basis on which you made this approval and they'll say we do not have anything. And Inspector General of the USDA released an audit report just recently just a few months ago confirming that in a significant percentage of label approvals there is not supporting evidence. And lastly, I mean, even where you have a system like organic, and they're supposed to have access to the outdoors, it's been documented that there will be a very small opening to the outdoors for a large number of animals that's only open sometimes for example so it might mean something that animals are not good, I would be very wary, and given that you know 98 to 99.9% of whether we're talking about eggs or poultry are from factory farm conditions and it's very unlikely that there was the conditions that you believe from the package existing. We're getting lots of great questions but I'm going to pick just one more, so that we can wrap up in time for Professor wonders to start her class at one. The ASPCA is pushing their humane certification program. Do you think it's sufficiently strong and enforced, even if it is does such a certificate muddy the waters and disincentify broad change. So I am not familiar enough with that program to, to make an informed opinion on it. I will look into it I will say generally, I think, you know, third party certification and labeling is something I've looked at in a variety of contexts in from you know cruelty free labeling of cosmetics to accreditation of Zeus and sanctuaries. I do think there is a space for meaningful standards that are enforced through a third party inspector. There's also a lot of potential for abuse within those systems there's a wide range. I, I suspect the ASPCA has the best of intentions, I think that, and again I do not know enough about the system to a kind about it. I think it's always risky there are always problems, even within the gold standard accrediting body so when we're talking about a product that is increasingly easy to avoid because there are so many alternatives available. That would be all might always be my first recommendation. Thank you for that and apologies to the folks that asked questions we haven't been able to get to. But Professor windows maybe you could put up that slide with your contact information one more time. So that folks can find you if they do want to reach out. Awesome. I think Professor windows again for such a compelling presentation and thank you to everybody that joined us today. Next week is our last week of hot topics this summer so we'll have two more lectures next week and then that's it. The next talk is Tuesday, August 3 at noon Eastern time and we hope that you can join us then. Thank you so much everybody have a good rest of your day.