A Look at Personalities On Our Plates

Excerpts From Barbara J. King's 'Personalities on the Plate: The Lives... http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/03/16/520364913/a-look-at-the...
Getty Images
The following ar e two edited excer pts fr om Bar bar a J. King's new book Personalities
on the Plate: The Lives & Minds of Animals We Eat.
Chickens may be resplendently different one from the other, as was immediately
apparent when I made six hen acquaintances at Wilder Ranch State Park near Santa
Cruz, Calif., in the summer of 2015. These beautiful birds, with names like Goosey and
Bella, ranging in color from white to gold and yellow, sometimes with patches of a soft
1 de 9 20/03/2017 15:42
iridescent blue, live in an outdoor coop outfitted with a chicken swing for exercise.
During my visit they were turned out into a vegetable garden; there among the planted
rows, one sunbathed and several foraged. Some invited human interaction, and others
did not. I gently picked up Bella so white, so soft and held her against my chest in
a serene encounter that I enjoyed greatly and that Bella seemed to soak up pleasurably
as well.
That I held, stroked and talked to a chicken for the

first time in my 50s is very much a product of my
time and place. In her book Chicken, Annie Potts
notes that before WWI, many families raised
chickens on small farms or in their backyards, where
The Lives and Minds of the birds moved around freely and soaked up the
Animals We Eat
sunshine. Confined to barns or cages, the birds fared
by Barbara J. King
poorly; the lack of sun, and thus vitamin D, caused
Hardcover, 229 pages
leg weakness. Research in the 1920s led to a
purchase
commercial chicken feed fortified with vitamin D
additives, a critical change that paved the way to
where we are now, a time when 10 million birds may
be confined on a single egg farm. It is all too easy to become desensitized to these
staggering numbers and what they mean for the lives of animals.
If chickens are "birdbrains," that derisive term deserves a shiny new connotation. In
impressive feats of memory, chickens keep straight more than 100 chicken faces and
recognize familiar individuals after months of separation. They reason out the best
outcome when given two choices: Hens trained to peck colored buttons choose nine
out of 10 times to forgo an immediate (lesser) food reward for a slightly later (greater)
one. Potts notes that this feat involves some consideration of the present moment
versus the future.
********
All of us who eat have to find ways to listen to each other across our breakfast, lunch
and dinner tables. This goal isn't as modest as it might first sound. I've lost count of
the number of times I've written a blog post about pigs, cows or chickens who suffer in
the food industry only to run up against gleeful, mocking responses, along the lines of:
2 de 9 20/03/2017 15:42
"Can't wait for my barbecue tonight!" Online interaction isn't the same, though, as
one-to-one conversation carried out in person and mediated by mutual gaze; in direct
personal encounters, most human beings are just well-enough-socialized primates to
rein in any knee-jerk or "gotcha" tendencies most of the time.
People do get to say that animals taste good to them: That's a completely subjective
matter. (It's apparent to me at this point that I'll never lose my craving for chicken pot
pie, even though I won't eat it again; at least so far, faux-chicken substitutes just don't
do it for me.) But not everything that's relevant here is so subjective. Kate Murphy
concludes her 2015 New Yor k Times article, "Blessed Be My Freshly Slaughtered
Dinner," by remarking that "we are all free to use our individual feelings, desires and
experiences to shape eating ethos," and then adds, "There is no definitive scientific
evidence that animals experience emotion as we do." Here she has veered right into
trouble, because she's wrong about that claim, at least up to those last three little
words "as we do" and that phrase is a red herring.
The animals I write about in this book octopus, fish, chicken, goats, cows, pigs, and
even some insects think their way through their days and experience feelings about
what they make happen and what happens to them. The "as we do" clause misses the
point entirely. In the end, pain is pain: That species' sensory systems differ one from
the other (and from ours) doesn't change that fact a bit, as is abundantly clear in the
emerging consensus about the ability of fish to feel pain even though they lack the
mammalian neocortex. No animal need be sentient like us to be sentient, just as no
animal need be smart like us to be smart or feel emotions like ours to be known as a
feeling being with a distinct and sometimes vivid personality.
Few of us are called upon in our daily lives to decide if we should cook and consume
the animals with whom I conclude this book: chimpanzees. We are, though, faced
every day with whether to eat chickens, pigs, cows and other others who are routinely
labeled as food through much of the world. With a cross-cultural lens in place, I've
come to think those decisions are not so qualitatively different from the decision
whether or not to prepare an ape for dinner or a dog.
Read an excerpt of Personalities on the Plate
3 de 9 20/03/2017 15:42
Bar bar a J. King is an anthr opology pr ofessor emer ita at the College of William and
Mar y. She often wr ites about the cognition, emotion and welfar e of animals, and
about biological anthr opology, human evolution and gender issues. Bar bar a's new
book is Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat. You can
keep up with what she is thinking on Twitter : @bjkingape
4 de 9 20/03/2017 15:42
5 de 9 20/03/2017 15:42
6 de 9 20/03/2017 15:42
7 de 9 20/03/2017 15:42
8 de 9 20/03/2017 15:42
2017 npr
9 de 9 20/03/2017 15:42

A Look at Personalities On Our Plates

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

A Look at Personalities On Our Plates

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Excerpts From Barbara J. King's 'Personalities on the Plate: The Lives... http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/03/16/520364913/a-look-at-the...

That I held, stroked and talked to a chicken for the

Read an excerpt of Personalities on the Plate

You might also like