Chickens

(Author's Note: I wrote this essay for a class I took in the fall of 2008 at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. The assignment was to write something inspired by a piece of art on exhibit at the Weisman Museum. I was instantly inspired by a Douglas Argue painting called "Untitled 1991-1993". Please take a minute to look at it here.)  

Red and white chickens stuffed in floor-to-ceiling cages loom over both sides of a narrow aisle. The cages appear to continue into the inevitable future. The banks of imprisoned chickens have no end; they only get smaller and harder to see. The weathered blue ceiling holds fans that whiz constantly, sending feathers floating about and only slightly diffusing the rank smell of poultry eating, shitting, pissing, and sleeping in a cube the size of a milk crate. The floor consists of two wooden platforms running along either side of the aisle. Feathers and other fowl filth cover the platforms and sub-floor underneath. Some of the chicken litter actually makes it down the floor drains when pressure-washed. The rest just stick to the surface of the floor.

The chickens seem unaware of their substandard living conditions. How would they know how beautiful their lives could be? Running around the chicken coop, pecking and clucking to their little hearts’ content. Some of the chickens look at me, a curious spark alive in their eyes. Others peer at their neighbors through the wire walls of their cages. A few hens manage to stick their heads through holes in the wire, bending their necks downward to snoop on friends below. One chicken has her wings spread, pressed against the front of the cage as if she could actually fly away to freedom. A couple of adjacent hens appear to be talking intimately through their cages. Upon first glace, I think they are kissing.

These thousands of fowl were born in a factory farm and there they will die. The sole purpose of their lives is to involuntarily sacrifice their bodies for human consumption. What made these chicken souls choose this putrid, pointless existence? Is it, perhaps, practice for the soul to become accustomed to the physical laws of the earth life system? If so, it can’t be the best choice since factory farm chickens don’t move much.

Nobody will ever love these innocent animal spirits, save for the exclamations of yumminess by toddlers enjoying their Chicken McNugget Happy Meals. The only pleasure these creatures will themselves experience is of filling their stomachs when hungry, excreting when full, and drifting, when somnolence finally arrives, into the sleeping realm where they can cluck and flap about in their dreams until the cruel sun rises again. Then they will be reminded that they slept all night in their own waste. Or maybe their simple minds can’t tell the difference, in which case they most likely won’t realize they will eat some of their own dung with breakfast. Either way, we will eventually eat them.

I suppose their existence isn’t too far off from those of some humans. The agile mind could create all sorts of comparisons that might look foreign to one another, but relate back to the caged, feathered beasts of eating in this painting. I am reminded of indolent Americans who sleep walk through their lives. Basically eating, pissing, shitting, and sleeping in the same small space without ever exploring or imagining that there is more to existence. Or Latino migrant workers who travel dangerously to America only to toil and sweat in fields or factory slaughterhouses, making a meager wage that only allows them to survive, but very rarely to thrive.

I also think of sweatshops in Asia, the kind where young women live in dorms connected to factories. Where they work hellishly long hours in obscenely uncomfortable conditions, only to wake up and do it again, and again, and again, and again. No further opportunity means no end to the redundancy. And American consumers, myself included, demand the low prices that corporations point to as justification for paying such small wages to international workers. I could go on. But all of these examples truly do pale in comparison to the life of a factory farm bird. Even though they are only measly fowl, one would think they should be allowed the luxury of moving beyond the confines of a small cage.

Chickens roam freely in St. Thomas, VI. Instead of gray squirrels and deer running wild, they have lizards and chickens. They are wild. You see them often scavenging around the communal dumpsters (there is no garbage pick-up service on this island). I’ve visited St. Thomas twice. Standing outside of a yellow and aqua convenient store named Friendly’s, I witnessed a chicken just chillin’ in a tree. A chicken in a tree! It baffled me. Chickens can fly? How did this hen sputter and flutter up to that branch, seven feet off the ground? More astonishingly, over a year and a half later, upon visiting the same spot, there was another damn chicken in the same tree. If anyone could prove to me that this was the same chicken, I don’t know what I’d do. For sure my jaw would drop and my belief in God would strengthen.

In the United States, we prefer to keep the large majority of our chickens in huge corporate-owned farms where we entrap them in small cages and offer them a quality of life less than that of lab rats. All the while, we pump them full of antibiotics and hormones to make them grow quicker and develop muscle, since exercise is not an option. And then we eat them.

Despite all this, I eat chicken. Yes I do, yes I do. I prefer free-range chicken with no synthetic substances; I buy Gold n’ Plump. But I also eat chicken from restaurants and fast food joints from time to time. I know this chicken is in many ways quite vile. Yet I chomp away, determined to fill my stomach, even out my blood sugar levels, kill the munchies. I understand this is hypocritical. Which is why I thank Douglas Argue for devoting two years of his life to depicting the wretched life of factory-farm chickens and the unique spirit that remains within them. It reminds me, in vivid detail, of what I’m tacitly agreeing to when I eat mass-produced corporate meat. And what I’m offering my body as nutrition.

I wasn’t sure how to end this piece. Less than twelve hours after Americans voted in the first black President to the White House—the most inspiring leader this generation has ever seen—it is hard to stay cynical. But I also have trouble believing that people will ever take enough interest in animal treatment and human nutrition and consumption that I will see a day when this type of food source does not exist.

And then a few moments ago, I heard on the radio that California just voted in a referendum that chickens mainly, but other animals too, will be required to have more free space to move. And then I think, “Get rid of factory farms?” Yes we can.