Photo c/o Animal Outlook

United Poultry Concerns, Inc.
PO Box 150, Machipongo, VA 23405-0150
Phone: 757-678-7875
www.upc-online.org • [email protected]

7 December 2022

W. Randolph Woodson
Chancellor & Provost
North Carolina State University
Via Email: [email protected]

Dear Chancellor Woodson:

Re:

• They Shut Their Ears to Her Cries as She Died a Merciless Death
• NCSU Student Paper Censors Our Chicken Cruelty Ad

The issues addressed in this letter are twofold.

First is the fact that North Carolina State University’s Poultry Science Department is conducting extremely inhumane experiments on birds. The particular experiment at issue here involves ten hours of torturing chickens slowly to death in Ventilation Shutdown experiments in which hens were placed in individual see-through isolation boxes and subjected to oxygen deprivation, extreme heating and carbon dioxide poisoning in varying combinations designed to induce suffocation and heatstroke in the victims whose voices were intentionally muted by the researchers who cavalierly fanned themselves and drank ice water as they watched the agony they had arranged the birds to endure.

Second is the fact that the Technician’s editorial board rejected, without an explanation to us, the ad we submitted disclosing this experiment, after the Technician’s marketing department had already approved it for the back page of the newspaper’s December 1, 2022 edition. This, despite the Technician’s claim to be dedicated to promoting free speech and the dissemination of information about university activities that campus residents (students, administrators, faculty, and staff) have a right, even an obligation, to know about, especially in consequential matters of ethics and human decency.

The university’s Statement on Free Speech cites two examples of several that are particularly pertinent to the rejection of our ad:

• Protecting the most vulnerable in society from being silenced.
• Allowing students, faculty and staff to voice concerns about the university and the larger society.

It happens that birds and other animals being experimented on at your university, although – and because – they belong to other sentient species, fit the description of “the most vulnerable in society.” They are trapped, in this case and in similar ones, in a laboratory environment in which their voices were and are silenced by their abusers and in which they are completely disvalued as fellow creatures and beings with feelings. Significantly and symbolically, the researchers who conducted the VSD experiments in 2016 blocked out the cries of the hens as they baked and suffocated slowly to death, gasping and throwing themselves against the walls of the see-through boxes. Why were the hens’ voices silenced? Were the researchers fearful that even they might be upset by those piteous cries? Or was it merely that they did not want anybody else to hear?

By rejecting our ad, the Technician’s editorial board deprived students, faculty, and staff the opportunity to voice their opinions about the VSD experiments, which are still being conducted by the NCSU poultry science department in order to obtain grants. Campus residents cannot voice their opinions and concerns about a campus activity that is intentionally kept hidden from them by the very organization claiming to uphold precisely such disclosures: The Technician.

On behalf of United Poultry Concerns, I respectfully ask that you investigate the rejection of our ad by the Technician’s editorial board, and encourage the board to reverse its rejection and publish the ad. Further, I request an investigation of the poultry science department’s experiments, those in which the infliction of torture and death is intrinsic to the experiments being conducted, with a view to eliminating them.

Thank you for your attention. We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Karen Davis, PhD, President

 

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