Megaphone please.
I want to introduce myself.
I am Meat Chicken.
Those who cursed me with birth call me ‘Broiler’.
I came into this world to fulfil a purpose for you, which is to eat my flesh. For this, I must suffer extreme physical and emotional suffering that endures throughout every stage of my existence.
I want you to spare a moment to hear the story of my life and death. As a newly hatched baby I and my brothers and sisters were poured from buckets onto the floor of a large shed, tens of thousands of us into that one building. There was quite a bit of room at first because we were small – lively little yellow balls of fluff! I remember running with my little legs, and stretching my little wings. Our ‘peep peep’ vocalisations made us feel good, but it didn’t last. Things deteriorated quickly. As we grew, doubling our size every week, the air became thick with the ammonia from our droppings and our baby chick peeps took on a desperate tone. Soon I could hardly walk a couple of steps in any direction. I couldn’t open my wings and my eyes were always stinging from the thick ammonia and dust. After a few weeks standing or sitting in my own feces, competing with other chickens for the grain and antibiotics put out for us, I lost all hope and sunk into despair.
Nature has given me an alert mind, and my body remembers the life I was designed for. Within me there is still the desire to run with my flock, procreate and care for my young, dust bathe. I want to roam free, to root around in vegetation, devouring seeds and berries, earthworms and insects. I want to feel the wind blow through my rich plumage and be free. My ancestors grew and matured slowly over many months, but the Poultry Industry has bred us to reach slaughter weight in only six weeks, making us lame and debilitated. We are bred to be ‘non-survivors’. Even if we were rescued from this hell we wouldn’t live longer than a year. Every day birds’ hearts give out and they flip over and lie with their legs in the air, or with their faces buried in their own shit. They will be thrown in rubbish bins in the corner of the shed, swarming with flies and filling the air with the smell of rot. We cry out ‘peep peep peep’ like the babies we are, but the humans who walk through the ailes are not moved. To them we are commodities. There is no kindness anywhere, only indifference and sometimes deliberate abuse.
I won’t have long to wait now until I am delivered of my suffering but I am frightened that the end will hurt me too much. Any day now men will come into the shed. They are called ‘catchers’. We panic and try to run away from them, but we have nowhere to go, and are powerless against their mighty strength. They grab us by our legs, four chickens in each hand, and cram us into crates to be loaded onto trucks. Their rough handling dislocates our hips, breaks our wings and legs, and bruises our flesh. For many of us the pain as we travel to the slaughterhouse is excruciating, but even those of us who are not injured, suffer fear and dread at what is about to happen.
At the slaughterhouse they remove us from our crates and shackle us upside down by our feet. The moving line we hang from dips, and we are dragged through electrically charged water bath designed to stun us. Our necks are cut by an automatic heck cutter and then we are given a minute to bleed out before being put in the scalding tank to make plucking our feathers easier. That is how it is supposed to work for the billions of chickens killed by this method every year. But it often doesn’t go as planned. Some of us try to look around and raise our heads at the wrong moment. We are not stunned, and go on to feel the pain of the blade that automatically severs our neck. Some of us also miss having their neck severed, and endure the final agony of being plunged alive and conscious into boiling water. Drowning fully conscious in boiling water is what terrifies me the most. Will I cry out in agony or will my fate have rendered me so passive that I stay silent while the water burns my flesh?
t’s over now, my life. Like billions of others, I was anonymous. Nobody saw that I was smart and loveable. But now you know who I really am. I hope that next time you are in the supermarket you will linger over my corpse, and ask yourself a question. Is your desire to gnaw on my wings, thighs and breast really worth putting me through all this? Is there not a better way?
I am vegan because it is the kind thing to do. I like the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. I include members of other species as “others” because they have feelings just like us, experience the world like us and suffer as we do.
Kindness is central to the Golden Rule. Kindness is an essential part of justice, and justice of progress. Without kindness there is no justice, no happiness and no progress. The Golden Rule therefore obligates us to be vegan because there is no alternative.
The entire animal industry, including food animals, and animals used for fabrics, research and entertainment, is monstrously brutal. Suffering is integral to it; it requires suffering. Anyone supporting the animal industry is therefore directly responsible for causing immense suffering. It is despicable that we should require others to suffer to satisfy our pleasure when there are alternatives that cause no suffering. We cannot live by the Golden Rule if we support this industry. This is why I will always be vegan.
There is more to kindness than at first meets the eye. It has consequences for both parties, perpetrator and recipient. Treating others unkindly is a lose-lose situation. The victims of our unkindness are harmed by it, but so are we. To be unkind is to act beneath ourselves. As a result we lose hugely. Unkindness degrades us and destroys our dignity. When we casually cause and ignore the suffering of others we become pathetic people indeed; we become small, hard and mean – ignoble. In the end we lose our umanity itself, the very essence of what it is to be human.
By contrast, being kind to others is a win-win situation. The recipients of kindness benefit from it, but the person who performs the kindness gains immensely. We feel elevated; we become bigger, happier people. Paradoxically, we gain even when we apparently lose, when donating blood for example. Kindness elevates and ennobles us. Kindness bestows undreamt of joy upon us. Our hearts glow. Only by being kind to others can we know true happiness. There can be no justice, no joy without kindness. In rejecting cruelty and adopting a life based on kindness we regain and expand our humanity. That makes the world a better place for all.
I am going to tell you the story of an animal in a factory farm. I want you to imagine and visualise in your minds what I have to say:
This is the story of a sow.
My entire life I am kept in a metal gestation crate in half darkness on a graded concrete floor. I can’t even turn around. Confined and unable to engage in any of my natural behaviours, I suffer depression, frustration and neurotic behaviour sometimes screaming and biting at the bars that surround me. My limbs are swollen, I have open wounds, and I am lying in my own excrement. After giving birth from being forcibly impregnated, my babies are taken away from me and I am slaughtered at the age of only 3-5 years old. We pigs, like the other animals in factory farms, are supposed to be stunned into unconsciousness before being killed, but many of us are still alive as we are hoisted upside down, our throats slit, and we are lowered into boiling water to remove our hair.
But did you know I have a sense of self just like you. I am more intelligent than a dog or a cat and even a three-year old child. I am a highly social creature, intuitive and emotional, just like you. I have memories, and I can recognise myself in a mirror, just like you. I love to play even computer games, just like you. I care for my young with a bond that is as strong as any human mother, even singing to my babies during nursing.
I am not something, I am someone.
I am not pork. I am not bacon.
I am a living, feeling being, just like you.
Put these on your holiday watch list. The end of slaughtering and eating animals in the western world is approaching fast.
In this week’s Safe and Sound, activist and three-time world champion unicyclist Christian Huriwai talks about his background, and passion for animals. As a child he saw decapitated roosters running around and this turned him vegetarian.
Later, after watching ‘Earthlings’ he became vegan. Chris discusses his public challenge to Fonterra over the Milk for Schools project, believes the time has come to sit down with farmers. Christian also talks about his future plans to help more Maori adopt a plant-based diet.
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Gisborne GP Dr Nick Wright is this week’s Safe and Sound guest. Dr Wright is passionate about lifestyle medicine, and has had a lot of success in prescribing a plant-based diet as part of his patient treatment.
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Safe and Sound’s guest this week is gifted vegan chef Damian Oehlrich, who has just opened Whanganui’s first vegan restaurant. He talks with Sandra Kyle about his love for food and hospitality, the benefits of a vegan diet, and his desire to turn New Zealanders into healthy eaters.
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