The National Council of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said it couldn’t say for sure how many other chickens had already perished by the time its officers arrived at several abandoned poultry farming sites due to the “mass cannibalism” that occurred among the birds. The NSPCA said in a statement that it had successfully saved over 500,000 chickens from starvation and cannibalism, and that more than 350,000 chickens had been forced to be put down by hand after a South African state-owned poultry company ran out of cash to feed them.
“Skeletal chickens huddled together, feeding lines stripped bare, chickens eating each other.”
Daybreak Foods, a significant poultry supplier owned by Public Investment Corp., the state asset management firm in South Africa, was the owner of the chickens.
On April 30, NSPCA officers were initially notified of a situation at a single farm.
According to the group, it discovered that at least five further farms in northern South Africa had several locations where birds had been allowed to starve.
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