Respect for Chickens Day

To Know Them
Is To Love Them

             Saturday, May 4, is International Respect for Chickens Day. United Poultry Concerns, an advocacy organization centered in Machipongo on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, originated the annual observance in 2005 and this year is calling for a demonstration at the White House from noon to 3 p.m. to petition the government for legislation authorizing the compassionate and respectful treatment of chickens.

            The organization also advocates a vegan diet, which excludes all meat and animal products, including dairy.

Proud and Free

            I grew up in Pennsylvania farm country. I’ve never killed a chicken but I saw a neighbor lay one’s head across a stump and whack it off with a hatchet. People laughed as the headless chicken ran to and fro about the yard until it fell dead. To me, about nine years old at the time, it was a distressing, sickening sight.

            Still, chicken is such a major part of the American protein diet there seems little hope people would willingly give it up. They consume it mindlessly, as I once did, never seriously considering that they’re eating the flesh of an individualized creature who lived and died in pain and terror, just to satisfy human appetite.

            (Though I gave up eating chicken long ago, I confess I eat eggs, hoping the “free-roaming, grain-fed” claim on the carton is the truth.)

             It was the conventional wisdom in my early environment that chickens are about as dumb as they come. Maybe even as dumb as turkeys. That justified raising them en masse in what we used to call hen houses. In the 1950s these were long, narrow, poorly ventilated barns, usually single story but sometimes two, in which ten or fifteen chickens lived together in 10-by-10 feet enclosures separated from each other by makeshift slats or chicken wire. They had straw covering the floor and someone shoveled out the shit every so often. Rarely if ever did they see the world outside the hen house until they were packed into crates and hauled to slaughter on open-air trucks.

            And those were humane conditions compared to the factory farms where chickens are raised today. 

Factory Farm Chickens Today

            My first real job, the summer I turned 17, was for a chicken service. It ended all childhood innocence. I had to adapt to a class of men who were not like my parents, relatives, or teachers. They had foul mouths and regarded chickens as insentient objects, as I was also expected to do or be dismissed as too soft for the job.

            And so I went with the program, quickly catching on and participating in the various tortures these birds are put through on their way to our plates. They scream like terrified human beings. I can still hear it in my head.

            Eventually—years later—I came to my right senses. The way that happened is told in the brief memoir that follows. I wrote this piece many years ago, but it was never published until now, here in The Thinking Dog’s Journal.

—————

 

 The Little Flock

            In the summer of 1973, a friend, thinking to help us out, brought us a mini-flock of five chickens—two roosters and three hens. We welcomed the additions. At that time we were an impoverished rural commune of hippies with no idea how we would get through the next winter. We accepted the chickens as future food.

            I set to work patching up the window and securing the door of the old shed we had out back. I built nesting boxes, spread around a bale of hay, and fenced in a section of yard for the newcomers. I enjoyed the work.

            The first morning after they came they flew over my fence. We tried to catch them, but they escaped into the trees. In the evening, though, they flew back over the fence and returned to their nesting boxes. That became their daily routine on our little two-acre homestead and surrounding woodlands. A sack of feed came with them, but when that was gone we fed them field corn we pinched from a neighboring agribusiness. For the rest, we let them forage.

            It might have been an ideal life, except that, from the beginning, we intended to eat the hens’ eggs and kill the roosters for meat. None of us had ever killed a chicken before, but one young brother, determined to try, found a library book with instructions, and so execution day arrived for the first rooster. I’ll spare the details, except to say the affair was like a lynching, and our brother, after several botched tries at cutting the poor bird’s throat, finally ended the ordeal by blowing his head off with a shotgun.

            Not long after, he moved out because of love problems. None of us left had the stomach for killing the second rooster, so our little flock, though shaken to the core—for they’d seen what we were capable of—went free from further harm.

            But the surviving rooster, especially, was a paranoid wreck, peering around wildly and ducking as he walked, a sharp eye always out for danger. The hens surrounded him like body guards, and the four—Nina, Shirley, Linda, and Jack—went everywhere together as a module.

            When they wanted fed, they’d come in a delegation to the house. Nina, the boldest, would hop up on the porch and peck on the kitchen door while Linda and Shirley waited down on the patio, covering Jack, who peeped out from behind them. I’d come out, sit with them, and shell them some corn. That’s how I got to know them—Nina first, then Shirley, Linda, and even Jack, a little bit.

            I discovered they were sweet-natured individuals whose company became precious to me. I mourned what we’d done on the day we’d botched the execution of that first rooster. Even now, thinking of it fills me with horror.

            Later in the fall, the commune was falling apart. Some nights I fled the discord, finding refuge curled up in my blankets in the hay of the chicken shed, where the sighing and cooing of my friends’ soft night song brought me peace. I’ll never forget that. Back in the house, where the humans lived, there was no peace.

            After the commune finally broke up, a friend adopted our flock on his farm, where they lived out their lives in freedom. No one deserved it more. Though I was temporarily homeless, it was a relief to me that at least they were okay. It was about the only thing that came out right back then.

—————

            For more information on International Respect for Chickens Day and United Poultry Concerns, go to www.upc-online.org.

The Labrador Pact

Not Just Another Dog Book

             I’ve just finished reading The Labrador Pact, a novel by Matt Haig, an English writer. I don’t know where the book came from. It turned up one day among loose books lying around our house, and, though published in 2008 in the U.S. (2004 in the UK) had the brand-new look of a book no one had read before.

            I thought it might be a perfect novel for me to read in bed at night, a few pages at a time until my head drops and the book starts to fall from my hands. I’ve worked my way through any number of public library novels that way, but there are some, like Dickens’ Little Dorrit, that draw me in so that I also read them during the day in place of more useful work.

            The Labrador Pact is one of those. I could hardly pull myself away to meet my other obligations. I read it cover to cover—341 pages—in less than three days instead of six or eight weeks.

            It’s a dog book. The narrator is a Labrador retriever. Novels featuring dog narrators have had a pretty good run in the past few years—Marley and Me being the most popular, though I’ve never read it or seen the movie. I have read The Art of Running in the Rain by Garth Stein and A Dog’s Journey by W. Bruce Cameron, books which draw us into a dog’s life experiences in depth and without sentimentality.

            But not even those two excellent speculations can top The Labrador Pact for its insight into the very probable gap between the reality of animal consciousness and the human perception of it. My wife and I have had a lot of dogs in our time and a good number of cats. To me, Matt Haig’s take on the relationship between humans and our household pets is startlingly real, an example of “what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.”

            The plot of the book is simple enough. Prince, a Lab, is a devotee of the Labrador Pact—a sworn duty to defend, protect, and preserve the Family in which s/he is placed. Only Labs uphold this solemn code of honor any more, though time was when all dogs were united in it.

           But the institution of the Family in modern times has all but self-destructed. (The book’s title in the original, UK edition was The Last Family in England.) And except for Labs all the other breeds now live for their own pleasure. In fact, things have deteriorated so badly that even some Labs have abandoned the Pact. The conventional wisdom among dogs today is that humans are beyond hope, not worth saving from their own destructive behavior.

            Prince, his own Family teetering toward disintegration, is struggling against this outlook, rising in the process to heroic deeds beyond even the self-sacrificial norms of his own noble breed. Aside from the fact that Haig draws the line too narrowly—in his scheme of things our 11-year-old boxer is definitely a Lab—there is just too much truth in his conceit to ignore.

            Dogs do talk to each other. I’ve witnessed that. They also talk to cats and probably squirrels, too, as Haig has written. And they try to talk to us. But human beings are most likely the only creatures in Nature left out of the common, ongoing conversation.

            This underlying but stark picture of us, shut off from what’s really going on all around us, hit me like an epiphany. If animals have all manner of communication skills we humans don’t recognize or understand, it turns our collective human world view upside-down.

            Ongoing scientific research, meanwhile, has confirmed that some animals may be able to communicate at more sophisticated levels than humans have generally assumed. They just don’t do it in spoken language but in a wide variety of sounds, signals, and sense impressions human beings have no awareness or knowledge of.

            Haig makes that proposition believable—that our pets and other small animals are pretty much aware of everything we do and frequently talk among themselves about our foibles and our blunders. In the process he captures a picture of our human-centered world that is none too flattering yet all too human. At the least, he clearly knows dogs and cats very well.

            I recommend taking it seriously. Observe your pets, notice the thoughts that come into your mind. Are they yours? Especially notice how often your dog seems to understand what you’re saying, beyond “Sit,” “Come here!” “Get down!” and “Shut up!”

            Also, become aware of what’s happening at those times when your pet turns its backs on you and walks away.

            I’m a Johnny-Come-Lately to Haig’s work, and I don’t know what elf or fairy brought this particular book to my home or what spirit now compels me to write about it. But sooner or later the vision will go global, as I understand Brad Pitt’s film company has bought the movie rights. Until then, if you have compassion for animals I think you’ll find the print version of The Labrador Pact entertaining, gripping, and—yes—sobering.