When a company goes out of business, in addition to all the people losing their jobs, there are a lot of other unintended consequences. For example, if back taxes force a poultry farm into bankruptcy, what happens to all the cute little baby chicks?

Well, you have to dispose of them somehow.

Baby chicks were dumped into barrels outside in the winter air before water was added to drown them. Adult birds were thrown into a pit and buried alive with a tractor.

This article is ridiculous. It describes the workers tasked with destroying the 400,000 baby chicks, sobbing as they did it:

“It was breaking my heart seeing the little ones die like this in the frost,” said poultry worker Svetlana Grivko. “We worked round the clock to keep them healthy and comfortable and now we are killing them with our own hands.”

They tried to sell some or give them away, but there were a total of 1 million birds to be disposed of. And the worst part? There’s still another 3 million birds left. The disposal is just beginning.

If this is not the saddest story you read all day (or at least the pictures in the article), then I don’t know what to tell you.