Humane Society Sues Perdue Farms Over Humane Chicken Treatment

The HSUS filed the lawsuit on behalf of all duped consumers (though we may say that people should know by now that grocery store meat does not include humane treatment) and is seeking a jury trial, compensation for class members and injunctive relief against further use of the “Humanely Raised” claim.

Perdue’s response? It based the humane labeling on the “Animal Welfare Guidelines” of the National Chicken Council, the trade group for the chicken industry. We doubt we’re surprising you when we tell you that those guidelines allow for shackling of live birds, transporting and holding of bids in tightly packed trucks without food or water and many other joys including inhumane slaughter. Why is this not an U.S. Food and Drug Administration (USDA) issue? Well, for some reason (ie: food industry lobbyists), the USDA interprets the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act to exclude poultry. That’s right! That means that there isn’t any federal requirement to slaughter chickens by methods that render them insensible to pain before being killed. So your chicken can be inhumanely slaughtered and still labeled “Humanely Raised” by the letter of the law.

How is the Humane Society’s legal team addressing this? By saying that Perdue’s marketing is illegal in violation of the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act.

Said Jonathan Lovvorn, vice president and chief counsel of Animal Protection Litigation for HSUS, “Companies like Perdue are exploiting the dramatic growth of consumer demand for improved animal welfare for their own profit. Rather than implementing humane reforms, Perdue has simply slapped ‘humanely raised’ stickers on its factory farmed products, hoping consumers won’t know the difference.”

Well, here is the fact: Consumers won’t know the difference. But, clearly, bad on Perdue. These people know that even if by the letter of the law their product meets “humane” standards that by the letter of what consumers will understand that term to mean, the products do not.

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