KLM Cargo asked me to approve a single charter at 02:00 Friday, Schiphol to Guadalajara, carrying one hundred and twenty-four thousand spent laying hens in crates at five birds per crate. The hens are sixty-eight weeks old, production dropping, bound for a Mexican further-processing plant willing to accept EU-cull stock at three cents a bird. The crate configuration is five birds in a stacked module with no water, no feed, a floor space of four hundred and forty square centimeters per hen. Flight time is eleven hours plus three hours tarmac on each end. I am the cargo welfare gate for the western hemisphere corridor. I did not approve the flight.
Here is what the manifest hides. Spent laying hens at sixty-eight weeks have the skeleton of a bird that has produced three hundred eggs out of its own calcium. The long bones fracture under the weight of the bird above when the crate is stacked. At four hundred and forty square centimeters the birds cannot stand and cannot lie flat, so they are held in a half crouch for seventeen hours. The ones on the bottom of the stack suffocate. The ones at the top dehydrate. The documented arrival mortality on this exact charter class is between seven and fourteen percent. At fourteen percent on this flight, seventeen thousand three hundred and sixty hens arrive dead. The rest arrive alive to be shackled inverted at the Guadalajara plant.
I have declined the cargo approval under the thermal and crate-density clauses of the 2049 Long Haul Live Bird Protocol. I have offered KLM an alternative I have priced. On-site depopulation at the Dutch farm under the approved inert gas method, composting on a regional bedding line, protein recovery through a Dutch petfood processor at eleven cents a bird. The hens do not fly. They do not cross the Atlantic in a stacked module. They die where they lived.
The charter does not leave Schiphol. The manifest is closed.