Animals, Slavery, and the Holocaust

by Charles Patterson

Where does all the war, racism, terrorism, violence, and cruelty that's so
endemic to human civilization come from? Why do humans exploit and
massacre each other so regularly? Why is our species so violence-prone? To
answer these questions we would do well to think about our exploitation
and slaughter of animals and its effect on human civilization. Could it be
that we oppress and kill each other so readily because our abuse and
slaughter of animals has desensitized us to the suffering and death of
others?

The "domestication" of animals--the exploitation of goats, sheep, cattle,

and other animals for their meat, milk, hides, and labor that began in the
Near East about 11,000 years ago--changed human history. In earlier
hunter-gatherer societies there had been some sense of kinship between
humans and animals, reflected in totemism and myths which portrayed
animals, or part-animal part-human creatures, as creators and progenitors
of the human race. However, mankind crossed the Rubicon when Near
Eastern herdsmen and farmers started castrating, hobbling, and branding
captive animals to control their mobility, diet, growth, and reproductive
lives. To distance themselves emotionally from the cruelty they inflicted,
they adopted mechanisms of detachment, rationalization, denial, and
euphemism, and in the process became a harder, more ruthless lot.

In 1917 Sigmund Freud put the issue in perspective when he wrote: "In the
course of his development towards culture man acquired a dominating
position over his fellow-creatures in the animal kingdom. Not content with
this supremacy, however, he began to place a gulf between his nature and
theirs. He denied the possession of reason to them, and to himself he
attributed an immortal soul, and made claims to a divine descent which
permitted him to annihilate the bond of community between him and the
animal kingdom."

The domination, control, and manipulation that characterizes the way

humans treat animals who come under their control has set the tone and
served as a model for the way humans treat each other. The
enslavement/domestication of animals paved the way for human slavery. As
Karl Jacoby writes, slavery was "little more than the extension of
domestication to humans."

In the first civilizations that emerged in the river valleys of ancient Egypt,
Mesopotamia, India, and China, the exploitation of animals for food, milk,
hides, and labor was so firmly established that these civilizations sanctified
the notion that animals existed solely for their benefit. That allowed
humans to use, abuse, and kill them with total impunity. It also led humans
to place other humans--captives, enemies, strangers, and those who were
different or disliked--on the other side of the great divide where they were
vilified as "beasts," "pigs," "dogs," "monkeys," "rats," and "vermin."
Designating other people as animals has always been an ominous
development because it sets them up for humiliation, exploitation, and
murder. As Leo Kuper writes in Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth
Century, "the animal world has been a particularly fertile source of
metaphors of dehumanization."

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From Slaughterhouse to Death Camp

THE RELATIONSHIP OF ANIMAL EXPLOITATION TO THE HOLOCAUST is less apparent than it is in

the case of slavery, but there is a connection nonetheless. Take the case of
Henry Ford, whose impact on the twentieth century began, metaphorically
speaking, at an American slaughterhouse and ended at Auschwitz.

In his autobiography, My Life and Work (1922), Ford revealed that his
inspiration for assembly-line production came from a visit he made as a
young man to a Chicago slaughterhouse. "I believe that this was the first
moving line ever installed. The idea [of the assembly line] came in a
general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers use in
dressing beef." A Swift and Company publication from that time described
the division-of-labor principle that so impressed Ford: "The slaughtered
animals, suspended head downward from a moving chain, or conveyor, pass
from workman to workman, each of whom performs some particular step in
the process." It was but one step from the industrialized slaughter of
animals to the assembly-line mass murder of people. In J. M. Coetzee's
novel, The Lives of Animals, the protagonist Elizabeth Costello tells her
audience: "Chicago showed us the way; it was from the Chicago stockyards
that the Nazis learned how to process bodies."

Most people are not aware of the central role of the slaughterhouse in the
history of American industry. "Historians have deprived the packers of their
rightful title of mass-production pioneers," writes James Barrett in his
study of Chicago's packinghouse workers in the early 1900s, "for it was not
Henry Ford but Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour who developed the
assembly-line technique that continues to symbolize the rationalized
organization of work."

Henry Ford, who was so impressed by the efficient way meat packers
slaughtered and dismantled animals in Chicago, made his own unique
contribution to the slaughter of people in Europe. Not only did he develop
the assembly-line method that Germans used to kill Jews, but he launched a
vicious anti-Semitic campaign that helped make the Holocaust happen.

In the early 1920s Ford's weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent,

published a series of articles based on the text of the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic tract that had been circulating in Europe.
Ford published a book-length compilation of the articles entitled The
International Jew, which was translated into most of the European
languages and was widely disseminated by anti-Semites, chief among them
the German publisher Theodor Fritsch, an early supporter of Hitler. Thanks
to a well-financed publicity campaign and the prestige of the Ford name,
The International Jew was hugely successful both domestically and
internationally.

The International Jew found its most receptive audience in Germany where
it was known as The Eternal Jew. Ford was enormously popular in Germany.
When his autobiography went on sale there, it immediately became the
country's number one bestseller. In the early 1920s The Eternal Jew quickly

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became the bible of the German anti-Semitism, with Fritsch's publishing
house printing six editions between 1920 and 1922.

After Ford's book came to the attention of Hitler in Munich, he used a

shortened version of it in the Nazi propaganda war against the Jews of
Germany. In 1923 a Chicago Tribune correspondent in Germany reported
that Hitler's organization in Munich was "sending out Mr. Ford's books by
the carload." Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Hitler Youth movement
and the son of an aristocratic German father and American mother, said at
the postwar Nuremberg war crimes trial that he became a convinced anti-
Semite at age seventeen after reading The Eternal Jew. "You have no idea
what a great influence this book had on the thinking of German youth. The
younger generation looked with envy to symbols of success and prosperity
like Henry Ford, and if he said the Jews were to blame, why naturally we
believed him."

Hitler regarded Ford as a comrade-in-arms and kept a life-sized portrait of

him on the wall next to his desk in his office in Munich. In 1923 when Hitler
heard that Ford might run for President of the United States, he told an
American reporter, "I wish that I could send some of my shock troops to
Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections. We look to
Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America.
We have just had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published. The
book is being circulated in millions throughout Germany." Hitler praised
Ford in Mein Kampf, the only American to be singled out. In 1931, when a
Detriot News reporter asked Hitler what Ford's portrait on the wall meant
to him, Hitler said, "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration."

Although Ford stopped publishing the Dearborn Independent in late 1927

and agreed to withdraw The International Jew from the book market, copies
of The International Jew continued to circulate in large numbers throughout
Europe and Latin America. In Nazi Germany the influence of The Eternal Jew
continued to be strong and lasting, with German anti-Semites advertising
and distributing it throughout the 1930s, often putting the names of Henry
Ford and Adolf Hitler together on the cover. By late 1933, Fritsch had
published twenty-nine editions, each with a preface praising Ford for his
"great service" to America and the world for his attacks on the Jews.

In 1938, on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, Henry Ford, the great
admirer of the efficient way they slaughtered and cut up animals in
America, accepted the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German
Eagle, the highest honor Nazi Germany could bestow on a foreigner
(Mussolini was one of the three other foreigners to be so honored).

On January 7, 1942--exactly one month after the Japanese attack on Pearl

Harbor that brought the United States into the war--Ford wrote a letter to
Sigmund Livingston, national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League, in
which he expressed his disapproval of hatred "against the Jew or any other
racial or religious group." By that time, Einsatzgruppen (German mobile
killing squads) in the East had already murdered hundreds of thousands of
Jewish men, women, and children, and the first German extermination camp
at Kulmhof (Chelmno) was already operational.

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From Animal Breeding to Genocide

ANOTHER AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO NAZI GERMANY'S Final Solution--eugenics--was

rooted in animal exploitation. The breeding of domesticated animals--
breeding the most desirable and castrating and killing the rest--became the
model for American and German eugenic efforts to upgrade their
populations. America led the way with regard to forced sterilizations, but
Nazi Germany quickly caught up and went on to euthanasia killings and
genocide.

The desire to improve the hereditary qualities of the human population had
had its beginnings in the 1860s when Francis Galton, an English scientist
and cousin of Charles Darwin, turned from meteorology to the study of
heredity (he coined the term "eugenics" in 1881). By the end of the
nineteenth century, genetic theories, founded on the assumption that
heredity was based on rigid genetic patterns little influenced by social
environment, dominated scientific thought.

The eugenics movement in America began with the creation of the

American Breeders' Association (ABA) in 1903. At the second meeting of
the ABA in 1905, a series of reports about the great success achieved in the
selective breeding of animals and plants prompted delegates to ask why
such techniques could not be applied to human beings. The creation of a
committee on Human Heredity, or Eugenics, at the third ABA meeting in
1906 launched the American eugenics movement in America.

Its leader was poultry researcher Charles B. Davenport, who served as the
director of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor on Long
Island in New York. Davenport, who described eugenics as "the science of
the improvement of the human race by better breeding," looked forward to
the time when a woman would no more accept a man "without knowing his
biologico-genealogical history" than a stockbreeder would take "a sire for
his colts or calves who was without pedigree." He believed that "the most
progressive revolution in history" could be achieved if "human matings
could be placed upon the same high plane as that of horse breeding."
Sterilization began in America in 1887, when the superintendent of the
Cincinnati Sanitarium published the first public recommendation for the
sterilization of criminals, both as a punishment and a way to prevent
further crime. Authorities used the same method to sterilize male criminals
that farmers used on their male animals not selected for breeding--
castration. Castration was the preferred method used to sterilize male
criminal offenders until 1899, when vasectomy was adopted because it was
more practical.

Indiana passed the first state sterilization law in 1907. By 1930 more than
half the American states passed laws that authorized the sterilization of
criminals and mentally ill people, with California leading the way with more
than sixty percent of the country's forced sterilizations. By the 1930s
compulsory sterilization had widespread support in the United States, with
college presidents, clergymen, mental health workers, and school principals
among its strongest supporters. The United States quickly became the
model for other countries that wanted to sterilize their "defectives."

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Denmark was the first European country to pass such a law in 1929,
followed in rapid succession by other European nations.

In Germany, which passed its sterilization law six months after the Nazis
came to power, eugenics established deep roots in medical and scientific
circles after World War I. In 1920 two respected academics--Karl Binding, a
widely published legal scholar, and Alfred Hoche, a professor of psychiatry
with a specialty in neuropathology--published Die Freigabe der Vernichtung
lebensunwerten Lebens (Authorization for the Destruction of Life Unworthy
of Life). In it they argued that German law should permit the mercy killing
of institutionalized patients who were lebensunwert ("unworthy of life")
and whose lives were "without purpose" and a burden to their relatives and
society. Beginning in the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation and other
American foundations provided extensive financial support for eugenics
research in Germany. By the time the Nazis came to power, more than
twenty institutes for "racial hygiene" had already been established at
German universities.

The Law on Preventing Hereditarily Ill Progeny, which the Nazi government
issued on July 14, 1933, required the sterilization of patients suffering from
mental and physical disorders in state hospitals and nursing homes. By
then, the United States had already sterilized more than 15,000 people,
most of them while they were incarcerated in prisons or homes for the
mentally ill. America's sterilization laws made such a favorable impression
on Hitler and his followers that Nazi Germany looked to the United States
for racial leadership. Hitler took a special interest in the progress of
eugenics in the United States. "I have studied with great interest the laws
of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people
whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to
the racial stock." However, Nazi Germany's sterilization efforts quickly
surpassed those of the United States. Estimates of the total number of
Germans sterilized under the Nazis range from 300,000 to 400,000.

The Germans were also impressed by America's immigration laws, which

barred people with hereditary diseases and limited people from non-Nordic
countries. In 1934 the German race anthropologist Hans F. K. Gunther told
an audience at the University of Munich that American immigration laws
should serve as a guideline and inspiration for Nazi Germany. German race
scientists also admired America's segregation and miscegenation laws. In
fact, Nazi theorists complained that German race policies lagged behind
America's, pointing out that in certain southern states a person with 1/32
black ancestry was legally black, while in Germany, if somebody was 1/8
Jewish or in many instances 1/4 Jewish, that person was considered legally
Aryan.

Americans were the strongest foreign supporters of Nazi race policies. In

1934 Eugenic News proclaimed that in "no country of the world is eugenics
more active as an applied science than in Germany" and praised the Nazi
sterilization law as an historic advance. Scores of American
anthropologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and geneticists visited Nazi
Germany where they had high-level meetings with Nazi leaders and
scientists and visited racial hygiene institutes, public health departments,
and hereditary health courts. When the Americans returned and reported

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on their visits in professional journals and newsletters, they lauded the
German sterilization program.

Like the American Charles Davenport, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi
SS and a main architect of the Final Solution, began his eugenics education
with animal breeding. His agricultural studies and experience breeding
chickens convinced him that since all behavioral characteristics are
hereditary, the most effective way to shape the future of a population--
human or otherwise--was to institute breeding projects that favored the
desirable and eliminated the undesirable. Himmler was soon in a position to
apply eugenic principles and methods to human beings in a way no
American eugenicist was ever able to do.

Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz and another strong supporter of

eugenics with a farming background, wrote in his autobiography after the
war that the original plan for Auschwitz had been to make it into a major
agricultural research station. "All kinds of stockbreeding was to be pursued
there." However, in the summer of 1941 Himmler summoned him to Berlin
to inform him of the fateful order for the mass extermination of the Jews of
Europe, an order that soon turned Auschwitz into "the largest human
slaughterhouse that history had ever known." By the summer of 1942
Auschwitz was a vast, full-service eugenics center for the improvement of
animal and human populations, complete with stockbreeding centers and
the Birkenau extermination camp for the culling of Jews, Gypsies, and other
"sub-humans." Germany's eugenics campaign entered a new, deadly phase
in 1939 when Hitler issued a secret order for the systematic murder of
mentally retarded, emotionally disturbed, and physically infirm Germans
who were an embarrassment to the myth of Aryan supremacy.

Once "defective" children were identified and institutionalized, doctors and

nurses either starved them to death, or gave them lethal doses of luminal
(a sedative), veronal (sleeping pills), morphine, or scopolamine. The
"euthanasia" program--named Operation T4, or simply T4--transported
adults to special killing centers outfitted with gas chambers. T4 killed
between 70,000 and 90,000 Germans before it was officially stopped in
August 1941. In 1942, not long after German psychiatrists had sent the last
of their patients to the gas chambers, the Journal of the American
Psychiatric Association published an article that called for the killing of
retarded children ("nature's mistakes").

The breeding and culling of animals that was at the center of American and
German eugenics produced a number of key T4 personnel, including those
sent to Poland to operate the death camps. Victor Brack, T4's chief
manager, received a diploma in agriculture from the Technical University in
Munich, while Hans Hefelmann, who headed the office that coordinated the
killing of handicapped children, had a doctorate in agricultural economics.
Before spending more than two years at the Hartheim euthanasia center in
Austria, Bruno Bruckner had worked as a porter in a Linz slaughterhouse.
Willi Mentz, an especially sadistic guard at Treblinka, had been in charge of
cows and pigs at two T4 killing centers, Grafeneck and Hadamar.
Treblinka's last commandant, Kurt Franz, trained with a master butcher
before joining the SS. Karl Frenzel, who worked as a stoker at Hadamar
before being posted to the Sobibor death camp, had also been a butcher.

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For German personnel sent to Poland to exterminate Jews, experience in
the exploitation and slaughter of animals proved to be excellent training.

The exploitation and slaughter of animals provides the precedent for the
mass murder of people and makes it more likely because it conditions us to
withhold empathy, compassion, and respect from others who are different.
Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, "There is only one little step from killing
animals to creating gas chambers a la Hitler." Indeed there is. About the
same time the German Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno made a similar
point: "Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and
thinks: they're only animals."

Indeed it does.

Charles Patterson is a social historian, Holocaust educator, editor,

therapist, and author. His first book--Anti-Semitism: The Road to the
Holocaust and Beyond--was called "important" by Publisher’s Weekly. The
National Council for the Social Studies in Washington, D.C. presented
Patterson with its Carter G. Woodson Book Award for his biography of
Marian Anderson at a special luncheon at its annual convention in St. Louis,
Missouri in 1989. His most recent book is Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment
of Animals and the Holocaust. For more information on his writings and
activities, see his website: Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and
the Holocaust: a book.

Animal Liberation Front Manifesto

by jo swift, March 1, 2005
The New Abolitionism

As black Americans and anti-racists continue to struggle for justice and

equality, the moral and political spotlight is shifting to a far more ancient,
pervasive, intensive, and violent form of slavery that confines, tortures,
and kills animals by the billions in an ongoing global holocaust.

We speak of animal liberation no differently than human liberation. One

cannot 'enslave,' 'dominate,' or 'exploit' physical objects, nor can they be
'freed,' 'liberated,' or 'emancipated.'

These terms apply only to organic life forms that are sentient--to beings
who can experience pleasure and pain, happiness or suffering.

Quite apart from species differences and arbitrary attempts to privilege

human powers of reason and language over the unique qualities of animal
life, human and nonhuman animals share the same evolutionary capacities
for joy or suffering, and in this respect they are essentially the same or
equal.

Fundamentally, ethics demands that one not cause suffering to another

7
being or impede another's freedom and quality of life, unless there is some
valid, compelling reason to do so (e.g., self-defense).

For all the voluminous scientific literature on the complexity of animal

emotions, intelligence, and social life, a being's capacity for sentience is a
necessary and sufficient condition for having basic rights.

Thus, just as animals can be enslaved, so too can they be liberated; indeed,
where animals are enslaved, humans arguably have a duty to liberate
them.

Answering this call of conscience and duty, animal liberation groups have
sprouted throughout the world with the objectives of freeing captive
animals from systems of exploitation, attacking and dismantling the
economic and material basis of oppression, and challenging the ancient
mentality that animals exist as human resources, property, or and chattel.

Stealing blacks from their native environment and homeland, wrapping

chains around their bodies, shipping them in cramped quarters across
continents for weeks or months with no regard for their suffering, branding
their skin with a hot iron to mark them as property.

Auctioning them as servants, separating family members who scream in

anguish, breeding them for service and labor, exploiting them for profit,
beating them in rages of hatred and anger, and killing them in huge
numbers'all these horrors and countless others inflicted on black slaves
began with the exploitation of animals.

Advanced by technology and propelled by capitalist profit imperatives, the

unspeakably violent violation of animals' emotions, minds, and bodies
continues today with the torture and killing of billions of individuals in fur
farms, factory farms, slaughterhouses, research laboratories, and other
nightmarish settings.

It is time no longer just to question the crime of treating a black person,

Jew, or any other human victim of violence 'like an animal'; rather, we must
also scrutinize the unquestioned assumption that it is acceptable to exploit
and terrorize animals.

Whereas the racist mindset creates a hierarchy of superior/inferior on the

basis of skin color, the speciesist mindset demeans and objectifies animals
by dichotomizing the evolutionary continuum into human and nonhuman
life.

As racism stems from a hateful white supremacism, so speciesism draws

from a violent human supremacism, namely, the arrogant belief that
humans have a natural or God-given right to use animals for any purpose
they devise.

Both racism and speciesism serve as legitimating ideologies for slavery

economies. After the civil war, the Cotton Economy became the Cattle
Economy as the nation moved westward, slaughtered millions of Indians
and sixty million buffalo, and began intensive operations to raise and
slaughter cattle for food.

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Throughout the twentieth century, as the US shifted from a plant-based to
a meat-based diet, meat and dairy industries became giant economic
forces. In the last few decades, pharmaceutical and biotechnology
companies have become major components of global capitalist networks,
and their research and testing operations are rooted in the breeding,
exploitation, and killing of millions of laboratory animals each year.

Of course, as soon as Homo erectus began making tools nearly three million
years ago, hominids have killed and appropriated animals for labor power,
food, clothing, and innumerable other resources, and animal exploitation
has been crucial to human economies.

But whatever legitimate reasons humans had for using animals to survive
in past hunting and gathering societies, subsistence economies, and other
low-tech cultures, these rationales are now obsolete in a modern world rife
with alternatives to using animals for food, clothing, and medical research.

Furthermore, however important the exploitation of animals might be to

modern economies, utilitarian apologies for enslaving animals are as
invalid as arguments used to justify human slavery or experimentation on
human beings at Auschwitz or Tuskegee.

Rights trump utilitarian appeals; their very function is to protect individuals

from being appropriated for someone else's or a 'greater good.'

In Defense of Direct Action

Although abolitionism is rooted in the logic of rights, not welfarism, there

are problems with some animal rights positions that also must be
overcome.

First, as emphasized by Gary Francione, many individuals and organizations

that champion animal rights in fact are 'new welfarists' who speak in terms
of rights but in practice seek welfare reforms and thereby seek to
ameliorate, not abolish, oppression.

While Francione underplays the complex relationship between welfare and

rights, reform and abolition, he illuminates the problem of obscuring
fundamental differences between welfare and rights approaches and he
correctly insists on the need for uncompromising abolitionist campaigns.

Francione, however, is symptomatic of a second problem with animal rights

'legalists' who buy into the status quo's self-serving argument that the only
viable and ethically acceptable tactics for a moral or political cause are
those the state pre-approves and sanctions.

In rejecting the militant direct action tactics that played crucial roles
throughout the struggles to end both human and animal slavery, Francione
and others use the same rationale animal welfarists employ against them.

Mirroring welfare critiques of rights, and serving as a mouthpiece for the

state and animal exploitation industries, Francione criticizes direct activists
as radical, extreme, and damaging to the moral credibility and
advancement of the cause.

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Like its predecessor, the new abolitionist movement is diverse in its
philosophy and tactics, ranging from legal to illegal approaches and pacifist
to violent orientations. A paradigmatic example of the new abolitionism is
the Animal Liberation Front (ALF).

ALF activists pursue two different types of tactics against animal

exploiters. First, they use sabotage or property destruction to strike at
their economic heart and make it less profitable or impossible to use
animals.

The ALF insists that its methods are non-violent because they only attack
the property of animal exploiters, and never the exploiters themselves.
They thereby eschew the violence espoused by Walker and Garnet.

The ALF argues that the real violence is what is done to animals in the
name of research or profit. Second, in direct and immediate acts of
liberation, the ALF breaks into prison compounds to release or rescue
animals from their cages.

They are not 'stealing' animals, because they are not property and anyone's
to own in the first place; rather, they are liberating them.

The ALF provides veterinary treatment and homes for many of the animals
they liberate, using an extensive underground network of care and home
providers.

The new abolitionism also is evident in the work of 'open rescue' groups
like Compassion Over Killing who liberate animals from factory farms
without causing property destruction or hiding behind masks of anonymity.

Moreover, ethical vegans who boycott all animal products for the principle
reason that it is wrong to use or kill animals as food resources, however
'free-range' or 'humanely' produced or killed, abolish cruelty from their
lives and contribute toward eliminating animal exploitation altogether.

As of yet, there are no active Nat Turners and John Browns in the animal
liberation movement, but they may be forthcoming and would not be
without just cause for their actions. Nor would they be without precedent.
According to the gospel of struggle: No justice, no peace.

The Meaning of Moral Progress

Just as nineteenth century abolitionists sought to awaken people to the

greatest moral issue of the day, so the new abolitionists of the 21st century
endeavor to enlighten people about the enormity and importance of animal
suffering and oppression.

As black slavery earlier raised fundamental questions about the meaning of

American 'democracy' and modern values, so current discussion regarding
animal slavery provokes critical examination into a human psyche damaged
by violence, arrogance, and alienation, and the urgent need for a new
ethics and sensibility rooted in respect for all life.

Animal liberation is not an alien concept to modern culture; rather it builds

on the most progressive ethical and political values Westerners have

10
devised in the last two hundred years'those of equality, democracy, and
rights'as it carries them to their logical conclusion.

Whereas ethicists such as Arthur Kaplan argue that rights are cheapened
when extended to animals, it is far more accurate to see this move as the
redemption of rights from an arbitrary and prejudicial limitation of their
true meaning.

The next great step in moral evolution is to abolish the last acceptable form
of slavery that subjugates the vast majority of species on this planet to the
violent whim of one.

Moral advance today involves sending human supremacy to the same

refuse bin that society earlier discarded much male supremacy and white
supremacy.

Animal liberation requires that people transcend the complacent

boundaries of humanism in order to make a qualitative leap in ethical
consideration, thereby moving the moral bar from reason and language to
sentience and subjectivity.

Animal liberation is the culmination of a vast historical learning process

whereby human beings gradually realize that arguments justifying
hierarchy, inequality, and discrimination of any kind are arbitrary, baseless,
and fallacious.

Moral progress occurs in the process of demystifying and deconstructing all

myths'from ancient patriarchy and the divine right of kings to Social
Darwinism and speciesism'that attempt to legitimate the domination of one
group over another.

Moral progress advances through the dynamic of replacing hierarchical

visions with egalitarian visions and developing a broader and more
inclusive ethical community.

Having recognized the illogical and unjustifiable rationales used to oppress

blacks, women, and other disadvantaged groups, society is beginning to
grasp that speciesism is another unsubstantiated form of oppression and
discrimination.

Building on the momentum, consciousness, and achievements of past

abolitionists and suffragettes, the struggle of the new abolitionists might
conceivably culminate in a Bill of (Animal) Rights.

This would involve a constitutional amendment that bans exploitation of

animals and discrimination based on species, recognizes animals as
'persons in a substantive sense, and grants them the rights relevant and
necessary to their existence'the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.

In 2002, Germany took the crucial first step in this direction by adding the
words 'and animals' to a clause in its constitution obliging the state to
protect the dignity of humans.

If capitalism is a grow-or-die system based on slavery and exploitation'be it

11
imperialism and colonialism, exploitation of workers, unequal pay based on
gender, or the oppression of animals'then it is a system a movement for
radical democracy must transcend, not amend.

But just as black slaves condemned the hypocrisy of colonists decrying

British tyranny, and suffragettes exposed the contradiction of the US
fighting for democracy abroad during World War I while denying it to half of
their citizenry at home, so any future movement for peace, justice,
democracy, and rights that fails to militate for the liberation of animals is
as inconsistent as it is incomplete.

Steven Best @ Press Action

Animal Liberation--the Social Justice Connection

By Bruce G. Friedrich

As long as humanity continues to be the ruthless destroyer of other beings,

we will never know health or peace. For as long as people massacre
animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder
and pain cannot reap joy and love.
--Pythagoras

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full
breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit
itself to humankind.
--Albert Schweitzer

Most people today understand the connections among certain movements--

abolition of slavery, suffrage for women, civil rights, feminism, gay and
lesbian rights, labor justice. All are these movements oppose oppression
and advocate liberation for the oppressed. The neglected link, for many, is
animal rights.

The philosophy of animal rights is well-stated by civil rights activist and

feminist novelist Alice Walker, who stated in an introduction to Marjorie
Spiegel's The Dreaded Comparison, a book which compares human slavery
in the 18th and 19th centuries to animal slavery today: "The animals of this
world are not here for human purposes any more than women are here for
men, or blacks for whites."

Prejudice may be prejudice on the basis of race, gender, sexual preference

or on basis of species. In each case, a line is drawn placing one group above
a line, and everyone else below it. Bias on the basis of species is as
unjustified as racism, sexism, or homophobia (in fact, Isaac Bashevis Singer
called speciesism the "most extreme" form of racism).

Believers in animal rights ask the question, What is in the animal's best
interest, rather than what is in society's best interest. In our society, the

12
areas where the most animals suffer have brought many activists to a four-
point manifesto: Animals are not ours to (1) eat, (2) wear, (3) experiment
on, or (4) use for entertainment.

1. Eating animals "Vegetarianism," explained Tolstoy "is the taproot of

humanitarianism." Our nation consumes more than 8 billion animals every
single year. The vast majority of these animals live lives which are "nasty,
brutish, and short." As just one example of current farm conditions, laying
hens spend their entire lives crammed 4-7 in wire-mesh cages stacked in a
warehouse with tens of thousands of other birds. Conditions are so
horrendous that their feet often grow through and around the wire, and
one-third of birds suffer leg breaks on the packed and painful ride to the
slaughterhouse--which often entails days without food and water. One egg
represents 24 hours of unimaginable suffering for a hen, not to mention her
ride to the slaughterhouse.

Broiler chickens, pigs, turkeys, dairy cows, and beef cows also are
separated from their families at birth, suffer the mental and physical
anguish of living in tiny spaces with no relief and no hope for escape,
endure the long and excruciating ride to the slaughterhouse. Non-
ambulatory animals are dragged from the backs of transport trucks, bones
snapping. They are killed by being hung upside down and bled to death,
often skinned, hacked to bits, and killed while fully conscious. I have been
to many of these farms and a few of these slaughterhouses. The animals
scream with fear, frustration, and pain. Arguably, the best thing and most
immediate thing anyone can do to promote justice and reject violence is to
adopt a diet free of animals or their milk and eggs.

2. Wearing animals Each year, more than 3 million animals are trapped
every year for their fur, and more than 2 million are raised on fur farms.
Trapped animals often chew off their own legs in a desperate attempt to
escape their traps. Animals on fur farms go slowly insane from the cramped
and unnatural conditions. No federal humane slaughter laws exist for fur
animals, so animals are often ruthlessly executed by vaginal or anal
electrocution, an inexpensive and "clean" killing method. The leather
industry is a by-product of the meat industry, with the same cruelties just
discussed above.

3. Experimenting on animals Medical experimentation is sick science.

Gandhi called it "the blackest of black crimes that [humanity] is at present
committing against God and [God's] fair creation." The fact is that
experimenters radiate monkeys in war experiments, cut into cats' skulls in
deafness experiments, and blowtorch pigs in burn experiments. They do
horrible things to animals whom they keep in isolated cages during their
"down" time.

I spent six years working in a homelessness shelter in Washington, D.C.,

and I saw 6-18 month waits for addicts seeking drug rehabilitation, even as
millions of dollars were spent addicting monkeys to cocaine and heroin.

Cosmetics experimentation continues, despite the fact that it does not even
ostensibly serve any purpose. More than five hundred companies do not
test their products on animals, including Gillette, Revlon, L'Oreal, and
Benneton, yet some companies continue. Testers drip shampoo into animal

13
eyes, force feed them cleansers until half of the group die, and shave their
coats to apply caustic products to bare skin. The largest company which
continues to test is Proctor and Gamble, maker of Crest, Tide, Pert,
Pampers, and a vast array of other products.

4. Animals in "entertainment" Animals raised for circuses, racing, and other

forms of human amusement are separated from their loved ones and their
natural habitats, are kept in isolation during their down time, are often
killed once they've outlasted their usefulness, and are trained using force-
tactics such as beatings and deprivation. The fact is that elephants don't
normally balance on balls and tigers don't normally jump through hoops of
fire. In order to force these magnificent animals to do such stupid and
demeaning acts, they must surely be beaten into submission.

Abolition for the 21st Century A bit of historical perspective is useful. The
13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (abolition) was passed in 1865,
just 133 years ago; the 19th Amendment (suffrage) was passed in 1920,
just 78 years ago; labor justice, including the 40-hour work week, is very
new; the first child abuse case was tried in this country in 1913.

Many good and thoughtful people did not believe that Native- or African-
Americans deserved rights, or that women and children deserved rights.
Slavery flourished from the 1520s until the end of the 1800s in this country.
Rutgers law professor Gary Francione pointed out that "If you had asked
white men in 1810 whether blacks had rights, most would have laughed at
you."

I mention these past atrocities to point out how much society has changed
in, historically, a blink of the eye. In fact, it was the mid 17th Century-just
330 years ago--which found the current Pope sentencing Galileo to the
torture chamber until he would recant his heresy that the sun did not
revolve around the earth. I used to believe that humans are the top of the
life cycle. But I came to see that the belief in humans at the center of the
moral universe is exactly as valid as our one-time belief in the earth as the
center of the physical universe. Over time, I have grown to see animal
liberation within the context of other movements for justice.

Animal liberation is an optimistic movement. We believe with Jeremy

Bentham that "The time will come when society will extend its mantle over
everything which breathes." We believe with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr., that the arc of history is long, but that it bends toward justice and
compassion (The fact that King's wife and son, Coretta and Dexter Scott
King, are vegans is evidence of this). We believe that society will look back
on human arrogance and cruelty toward other animals with the same horror
and disbelief we presently feel at slavery and other atrocities.

To quote the Latin American adage, "The struggle is one." As King stated so
often: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Isaac
Bashevis Singer, the Nobel laureate, stated that "As long as human beings
go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace. There
is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers a la
Hitler and concentration camps a la Stalin... There will be no justice as long
as a man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are
weaker than he is." If we can convince people not to harm mice and rats

14
and cats and dogs and pigs and chickens and turkeys, they will certainly
not turn around and hurt human beings. And many great humanitarians,
from Albert Schweitzer to Ellen White, from Louisa May Alcott to Albert
Einstein, felt that a peaceful society is impossible as long as we are eating
and otherways torturing animals.

A closing analogy Today is 1600; the issue is slavery. Slaves are being sold,
beaten, and killed. The vast majority of good and caring white people do
not consider it an issue that slaves are treated this way. Most people
simply look the other way. There are two groups who are concerned about
slave welfare--those who do not oppose slavery on principle, but simply
argue for basic welfare for slaves; and those who argue for the elimination
of slavery. The abolitionists agree with all of the substantive proposals of
the welfarists. Clearly, everyone should be a welfarist, refusing to
participate directly in the oppression and speaking out against the most
egregious of the abuses. However, abolition will only become reality as
more and more people see the need and endorse it in word and deed.

Albert Einstein called human bigotry according to species an "optical

illusion of consciousness." He stated that the human task is "to free
ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace
all living creatures..." This is a process, and none of us will ever be pure;
but we should do the best we can, adopting a vegan diet as a bare
minimum in support of basic animal welfare.

Animal liberation is the social justice movement for the next millennium--
abolition for the 21st century. As Gandhi said, "The greatness of a nation
and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."

A Tale of Two Holocausts

Karen Davis, PhD†

Abstract

An understandable resentment can come from the sense that the

uniqueness of one’s own group’s experience with suffering is appropriated
to fit the experience of another group. One group’s experience with
suffering is unique, but not in such a way that it precludes comparisons or
analogies with the suffering of other groups. For this reason, an experience
of oppression, such as the Holocaust, may serve as an appropriate
metaphor to reveal similarities inherent in other forms of oppression, such
as the oppression of nonhuman animals by human beings.

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“Holocaust victims WERE treated like animals, and so logically we can
conclude that animals are treated like Holocaust victims.” – Matt Prescott,
creator of PETA’s “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign

“They are being treated as if they were animals.” International Red Cross
Committee about prisoners in Iraq under American supervision.

A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase denoting one

kind of object, action, or experience is used in place of another to suggest a
likeness between them. A purpose of metaphor is to provide a familiar
language and imagery to characterize new perceptions. In the case of
atrocity, a key purpose of these perceptions is to generate concern and
inspire action on behalf of the victims. When the oppression of one group is
used metaphorically to illuminate the oppression of another group, justice
requires that the oppression that forms the basis of the comparison be
comprehended in its own right. The originating oppression that generates
the metaphor must not be treated as a mere figure of speech, a mere point
of reference. It must not be treated illogically as a lesser matter than that
which it is being used to draw attention to.

However, if these requirements have been met, there is no good reason to

insist that one form of suffering and oppression is so exclusive that it may
not be used to raise moral concerns about any other form of oppression. A
perfect match of oppressions or calculus of which group suffered more isn’t
necessary to make reasonable comparisons between them. If a person is
offended by the comparisons regardless, it may be that the resentment is
more proprietary than just, and thereby represents an arbitrary delimiting
of moral boundaries.

That there could be a link between the Third Reich and society’s treatment
of nonhuman animals is hard for most people to grasp. That nonhuman
animals could suffer as horribly as humans in being reduced to
industrialized products and industrial waste and treated with complete
contempt– a clear link between Nazism and factory farming – contradicts
thousands of years of teachings that humans are superior to animals in all
respects. Not only is this a “humans versus animals” issue in the minds of
most, but by this time the Holocaust has become iconic and “historical,”
whereas the human manufacture of animal suffering is so “normal” and
pervasive that many people find it hard even to regard the slaughter of
animals as a form of violence. Yet the continuity is there. In this article I
argue that comparing our systemic abuse of nonhuman animals to the
Holocaust can enable us to gain some concrete knowledge about the
destructive elements in human nature and what it means to be at the
mercy of these elements. And I ask whether we have the ability – the will –
to transform ourselves since we claim to hate violence and to value life.

Invoking the Pain of Others

Many Jewish people resent the comparisons that are currently being made
by some animal advocates between the human-imposed suffering endured
by millions of Jews under the Nazis and billions of nonhuman animals each
year at the hands of animal exploiters. For, as Susan Sontag says in her
book, Regarding the Pain of Others, “It is intolerable to have one’s own
sufferings twinned with anybody else’s” (2003, 113). Tellingly, Sontag does

16
not include animals in her book on the iconography of suffering or submit
her particular claim about the intolerability of “twinned” suffering to
analysis. She does, however, cite the reaction of the Sarajevans to a photo
gallery of their plight that included images of the Somalians’ plight. “For
the Sarajevans, it was . . . simple. To set their sufferings alongside the
sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?),
demoting Sarajevo’s martyrdom to a mere instance. The atrocities taking
place in Sarajevo have nothing to do with what happens in Africa, they
exclaimed” (Sontag, 113).

While noting that “[u]ndoubtedly there was a racist tinge to their

indignation” (113), Sontag assumes that sufferings can be legitimately
compared, but she does not pursue the matter. Nonetheless, two important
issues emerge. First, members of an oppressed group often resent
comparisons of their suffering with members of another oppressed group
because they believe that the analogy demotes their suffering from
something unique to “a mere instance” of generic suffering. Second, more
than this, a group may feel that their suffering actually is more important
than that of any other group. The question of just comparisons between or
among different groups is important, since it is not just any suffering, but
the unjust, deliberately imposed suffering one’s group has already endured
(suffering intentionally imposed by humans as opposed to suffering
incurred in the wake of a natural disaster such as an earthquake) which
adds to the resentment one feels in having to protect one’s own group
experience from appropriation by another goup. The original injustice
should not be compounded by the further injustice of being used, in
Richard Kahn’s words, merely as “an emblem for more pressing matters”
(Kahn 2004).

A problem that remains to be solved, notwithstanding, is how to win

attention to sufferers and suffering that most people do not want to hear
about, or have trouble imagining, or would just as soon forget. One way is
to use an analogy (a logical parallel), or a metaphor (a suggested likeness)
that already has meaning and resonance in the public mind. For example,
oppressed people, such as slaughterhouse workers, say of themselves, “We
are treated like animals,” and people who raise chickens for the poultry
industry likewise compare themselves in the situation they are in to
“animals.”

Matt Prescott, the creator of the controversial “Holocaust on Your Plate”

exhibit for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), argues that
the analogy works both ways. His exhibit, which consists of eight 60-
square-foot panels, each juxtaposing photographs of factory farm and
slaughterhouses with photographs from Nazi death camps, depicts the
point made by Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, who
in his short story “The Letter Writer,” wrote, “In relation to [animals], all
people are Nazis.”. Prescott, who is himself a Jew with relatives who died
under the Nazis, says that “when Holocaust survivors today try to relate
the horrors they lived through, this is the very first analogy that comes to
mind. They say, ‘we were treated like animals’” (Sept. 12, 2003).

Treatment versus Experience

17
However, the appropriation of animal suffering to express human suffering
is seldom accorded the justice of reciprocity. On the contrary, at the time of
this writing, many Jewish people have expressed indignation over
comparisons that are being made by animal advocates between the human-
imposed suffering endured by billions of nonhuman animals each year and
the suffering endured by millions of Jews under the Nazis. At the same
time, many Jews support the comparisons and were sensitized to animal
slaughter after experiencing or conceptualizing the massacre of Jews, as
Charles Patterson demonstrates throughout his book, Eternal Treblinka:
Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (2002). My own stance on the
issue appeared in a 1999 profile of my work in The Washington Post. In
“For the Birds,” Washington Post writer Tamara Jones declared at the
outset: “Yes, Karen Davis is serious when she says the extermination of 7
billion broiler chickens is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust” (Jones
1999, F1). After publication of the article, I received a voice-mail message
denouncing my stance as anti-Semitic, even though the article stressed
how my preoccupation with the evils perpetrated on innocent victims under
Hitler had evolved to illuminate my awareness of humanity’s relentless
institutionalized assault upon nonhuman animals (Jones, F5).

In a letter to the editor, an indignant writer justifies using animals to

express human Holocaust suffering, but not the reverse: “Yes, the Nazis
treated us like animals, maybe worse than animals,” she writes. “But it’s
just an expression we use” (Jacobs 2003). It is acceptable, in other words,
to appropriate the treatment of nonhuman animals to characterize one’s
own mistreatment, but not the other way around. Advocates of this
position believe that they can legitimately use the experience of nonhuman
animals to characterize their own experience, even when the animals’
experience has not been duly acknowledged or imaginatively conceived of
to any degree, and perhaps has been dismissed without further inquiry. If
so, it may be asked why anyone would compromise the case for the
incomparability of one’s own suffering by comparing it to the suffering of
animals, given that nonhuman animals and their suffering are regarded as
vastly inferior.

But it is precisely the distinction between “treatment” and “experience”

that fuels resentment. To be “treated like animals” is an insult because the
experience of animals is assumed to be vastly inferior to that of any human
being, most of all one’s particular group. The worth of animals has
traditionally been regarded as instrumental worth only. “Animals were put
on earth for humans to use” is the standard formula, with “responsibly” or
“humanely” tacked on as an afterthought. Presuming an immeasurable gulf
between humans and animals allows one to appropriate animal abuse as a
metaphor for one’s own mistreatment while simultaneously dismissing the
metaphor, and hence the “animals,” as “just an expression.” In this figure
of speech the term “animal” has no concrete or independent meaning even
as “animal.” It is simply a code word for “humans badly treated by other
humans,” though not necessarily in a sense that is troubling to the
speaker, who may be as likely to dismiss the suffering of nonhuman
animals with another formula, “They’re only animals.”

Invisible Mass Suffering

18
None of us knows, omnisciently, who suffers more in conditions of horror,
human or nonhuman individuals. It may be that beyond a certain point, we
cannot fully apprehend the reality of anyone else’s suffering. In her book
The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry says that “A person whose pain it is, knows
it effortlessly, the person whose pain it is not, cannot know it even with
effort.” While Scarry’s point is about human pain and the inability of other
people to fathom it, what she says could apply to nonhuman animal pain
and suffering as well: “It is easy to remain wholly unaware of its existence;
even with effort, one may remain in doubt about its existence or may retain
the astonishing freedom of denying its existence; and finally, if with the
best effort of sustained attention one successfully apprehends it, the
aversiveness of the ‘it’ one apprehends will only be a shadowy fraction of
the actual ‘it’” (Scarry 1985, 4; quoted in Adams 1996, 183).

The problem of apprehending the pain of others is increased when the

others are in a situation of mass suffering. The individual is submerged in a
sea of suffering from the standpoint of onlookers. This is the opposite of
the personal experience of being inside one’s private hell while engulfed by
the hell of others. No wonder people who have suffered as whole
populations are desperate to be seen. No wonder they resent having their
suffering compared to the suffering of another group. What is felt to be
even worse than being “twinned” with another group is to be
indistinguishable to all forms of consciousness outside one’s own
consciousness, which will be obliterated in one’s own death.1

A fundamental difficulty in drawing attention to the plight of factory-

farmed animals is, similarly, that every situation in which they appear is a
mass situation, one that appears to be, as in reality it is, a limitless
expanse of animal suffering and horror (Davis 2004). Every factory-farm
scene replicates this expanse, mirroring its magnitude of unmanageability.
Except for the “veal” calf, whose solitary confinement stall and large sad
eyes draw attention to him or herself as a desolate individual, all that most
people see in looking at animal factories are endless rows of battery-caged
hens, wall-to-wall turkeys, thousands of chickens or pigs. What they hear is
deathly silence or indistinguishable "noise.” They see a brownish sea of
bodies without conflict, plot, or endpoint.

To the public eye, the sheer number and expanse of animals surrounded by
metal, wires, dung, dander, and dust renders all of them invisible and
impersonal. There are no “individuals” and no drama on which to focus,
only a scene of abstract suffering. Their horrifying pain is not even
minimally grasped by most viewers, who are socialized not to perceive
animals, especially “food” animals, as individuals with feelings. These
dispassionate onlookers have no concept of animals as sentient beings, let
alone as individuals with projects of their own of which they have been
stripped, such as their own family life and the comfort it brings, which was
their birthright in nature.2

Notwithstanding, it is reasonable to assume that animals imprisoned within

confinement systems suffer even more, in certain respects, than do humans
who are similarly confined. This occurs in a similar way that a mentally
impaired person might experience dimensions of suffering in being rough-
handled, imprisoned, and shouted at that elude a person capable of
conceptualizing the experience. Indeed, one who is capable of

19
conceptualizing one’s own suffering may be unable to grasp what it feels
like to suffer without being able to conceptualize it, of being in a condition
that could add to, rather than reduce, the suffering. It is in this quite
different sense from what is usually meant, when we are told that it is
“meaningless” to compare the suffering of a chicken with that of a human
being, that the claim resonates. The biologist, Marian Stamp Dawkins, says
that other animal species “may suffer in states that no human has ever
dreamed of or experienced” (Dawkins 1985, 29). Matthew Scully writes in
Dominion of the pain and suffering of animals in human confinement
systems:

For all we know, their pain may sometimes seem more immediate, blunt,
arbitrary, and inescapable than ours. Walk through an animal shelter or
slaughterhouse and you wonder if animal suffering might not at times be
all the more terrifying and all-encompassing without benefit of the words
and concepts that for us, after all, confer not only meaning but consolation.
Whatever’s going on inside their heads, it doesn’t seem “mere” to them.
(2002, 7)

The 9/11 Controversy

For many Americans, the worst, most unjust suffering to befall anyone
happened on September 11, 2001. Mark Slouka, in his essay “A Year
Later,” in Harper’s Magazine, puzzled over “how it was possible for a man’s
faith to sail over Auschwitz, say, only to founder on the World Trade
Center” (Slouka 2002, 37). How was it that so many intelligent people he
knew, who had lived though the 20th century and knew something about
history, actually insisted “that everything is different now,” as a result of
9/11, as though, Slouka marveled, “only our sorrow would weigh in the
record”? People who said they’d never be the same again never said that
while watching on television or reading in the newspaper about other
people’s and other nations’ calamities. In saying that the world as a result
of the 9/11 attack was “different now,” they didn’t mean that “before the
9/11 attack I was blind, but now I see the suffering that is going on and
that has been going on all around me, to which I might be a contributor,
God forbid.” No, they meant that an incomparable and superior outrage
had occurred. It happened to Americans. It happened to them: “Rwanda?
Bosnia? Couldn’t help but feel sorry for those folks, but let’s face it:
Rwanda did not have a covenant with God. And Jesus was not a Sarajevan,”
Slouka spoofed (39).

Following the 9/11 attack, I published a letter (Davis 2001; 2002) that
raised such consternation in the mainstream media that it got me on the
Howard Stern show (April 10, 2002; August 27, 2004). Without seeking to
diminish the horror of 9/11, I wrote that the people who died in the attack
arguably did not suffer more terrible deaths than animals in
slaughterhouses suffer every day. Using chickens as an example, I
observed that in addition to the much larger number of innocent chickens
who were killed (more than 8.5 billion chickens in the United States in
2001), and the horrible deaths they endured in the slaughter plants that
day, and every day, one had to account for the misery of their lives leading
up to their horrible death, including the terror attack they had suffered
several hours or days before they were killed, euphemistically referred to
as “chicken catching.”

20
I compared all this to the relatively satisfying lives of the majority of human
victims of 9/11 prior to the attack and added that we humans have a
plethora of palliatives, ranging from proclaiming ourselves heroes and
plotting revenge against our malefactors to the consolation of family and
friends and the relief of painkilling drugs and alcoholic beverages.
Moreover, whereas human animals have the ability to make some sort of
sense of the tragedy, the chickens, in contrast, have no cognitive
insulation, no compensation, presumably no comprehension of the causes
of their suffering, and thus no psychological relief from their suffering. The
fact that intensively raised chickens are forced to live in systems that
reflect our dispositions, not theirs, and that these systems are inimical to
their basic nature (as revealed by their behavior, physical breakdown, and
other indicators), shows that they are suffering in ways that could equal
and even exceed anything that we have known. Industry sources note, for
example, that hens caged for egg production are so overwrought that they
exhibit the "emotionality” of “hysteria,” and that something as simple as
an electrical storm can produce “an outbreak of hysteria” in four-to-eight-
week-old “broiler” chickens confined by the thousands in buildings (Bell
and Weaver 2002, 89; Clark, et al. 2004, 2).

I wrote my rebuttal in response to comments made by philosopher Peter

Singer, who in a review of Joan Dunayer’s book, Animal Equality: Language
and Liberation (2001) challenged the contention that we should use
equally strong words for human and nonhuman suffering or death. He
wrote: “Reading this suggestion just a few days after the killing of several
thousand people at the World Trade Centre, I have to demure. It is not
speciesist to think that this event was a greater tragedy than the killing of
several million chickens, which no doubt also occurred on September 11, as
it occurs on every working day in the United States. There are reasons for
thinking that the deaths of beings with family ties as close as those
between the people killed at the World Trade Centre and their loved ones
are more tragic than the deaths of beings without those ties; and there is
more than could be said about the kind of loss that death is to beings who
have a high degree of self-awareness, and a vivid sense of their own
existence over time” (Singer 2002, 36).

There are reasons for contesting this statement of assumed superiority of

the human suffering caused by 9/11 over that of the chickens in
slaughterhouses, starting with the fact that it is not lofty “tragedy” that’s
at issue in Dunayer’s book Singer is challenging, but raw suffering. 3
Moreover, there is evidence that the highly social chicken, who is endowed
with a “complex nervous system designed to form a multitude of memories
and to make complex decisions” (Rogers 1995, 218), has self-awareness
and a sense of personal existence over time. And who are we to say what
bonds chickens living together in the chicken houses might or might not
have formed? The chickens at United Poultry Concerns (the sanctuary that I
run) form close personal attachments. Even chicken exploiters admit that
they do (Davis 1996, 35, 148). The avian cognition specialist, Lesley J.
Rogers, quoted above, says in her book, The Development of Brain and
Behaviour in the Chicken, that modern studies of birds, including chickens,
“throw the fallacies of previous assumptions about the inferiority of avian
cognition into sharp relief” (Rogers, 218).

Cognitive Distance from Nonhuman Animal Suffering

21
But even if it could be proven that chickens and other nonhuman animals
suffer less than humans condemned to similar situations, this would not
mean that nonhuman animals do not suffer profoundly, nor does it provide
justification for harming them. Scientists tell us, for example, that hens in
transport trucks have been shown “to experience a level of fear
comparable to that induced by exposure to a high-intensity electric shock”
(Mills and Nicol 1990, 212). What more do we need to know? Our cognitive
distance from nonhuman animal suffering constitutes neither an argument
nor evidence as to who suffers more under horrific circumstances, humans
or nonhumans. Even for animal advocates, words like “slaughter,” “cages,”
“debeaking,” “forced molting,” and “ammonia burn” can lose their edge,
causing us to forget that what have become routine matters in our minds –
like “the killing of several million chickens that occurs on every single
working day in the United States,” in Peter Singer’s reality-blunting phrase
– is a fresh experience for each bird who is forced to endure what these
words signify.

In any case, the cognitive distance can be reduced. Vicarious suffering is

possible with respect to the members of not just one’s own species but also
other animal species, to whom we are linked through evolution. As Marian
Stamp Dawkins says in her essay, “The Scientific Basis for Assessing
Suffering in Animals,” just as the lack of absolute certainty does not stop
us from making assumptions about feelings in other people, so “it is
possible to build up a reasonably convincing picture of what animals
experience if the right facts about them are accumulated” (Dawkins 1985,
28).

Animal Sacrifice and the Holocaust: Falsifying the Fate of Victims

In “Taking Life or ‘Taking On Life,’” Carol J. Adams and Marjorie Procter-

Smith cite the following anecdote from the 19th-century women’s
movement:

When Pundita Ramabia was in this country she saw a hen carried to market
with its [sic] head downward. This Christian method of treating a poor,
dumb creature caused the heathen woman to cry out, “Oh, how cruel to
carry a hen with its head down!” and she quickly received the reply, “Why,
the hen does not mind it”; and in her heathen innocence she inquired, “Did
you ask the hen?” (Adams and Procter-Smith 1993, 304)

Similar to the myths circulated by US slavery owners about their human

“property” during the nineteenth century, animal victimizers typically
insist that their victims don’t mind their plight, or that they don’t
experience it “as you or I would,” or that the victims are complicit in their
plight, even, on occasion, to the point of gratitude. The victims, in other
words, are not really “innocent.” Thus, for example, at his trial, Nazi leader
Adolf Eichmann pleaded, regarding his deportation of tens of thousands of
Jews to their deaths, that the Jews “desired” to emigrate, and that “he,
Eichmann, was there to help them” (Arendt, 48). This is not exceptional
psychology, as students of sexual assault – one form of rape – are well
aware. Indeed, victimizers are very often likely to represent themselves,
and to be upheld by their sympathizers, as the innocent parties in their
orchestrations of the suffering and death of others. In Eichmann in
Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt cites an Egyptian deputy foreign minister who

22
claimed, for instance, that Hitler was “innocent of the slaughter of the
Jews; he was a victim of the Zionists, who had ‘compelled him to perpetrate
crimes that would eventually enable them to achieve their aim – the
creation of the State of Israel’” (Arendt 1994, 20). If you want to hurt
someone and maintain a clean conscience about it, chances are you will
invoke arguments along one or more of these lines: the slave/animal
doesn’t feel, or doesn’t know or care, is complicit, or isn’t even there. In
the latter case the victim is configured as an illusion.

This is a commonplace of victimizer psychology: the transformation of the

sacrificial victim into a manifestation of something else in disguise, a being
or spirit imprisoned in the manifestation that wants to be “let out,” a
“vermin” or viral infection that requires a bloodletting ceremony of
purgation to protect the community, “race,” or nation. In such cases, not
only is the victim reconfigured to suit the victimizer’s agenda, but the
victimizer too is different from what he or she appears to be – a murderer,
say, as in the portrayal of Hitler is, “in reality,” the benignly-motivated
liberator of a spiritual wish within the Jewish people to be free (think also
of U.S. president George W. Bush as the alleged “liberator” of the Iraqi
people).

To this day, animals are ritually sacrificed by Hindus whose practice is

based on the idea that “the sacrifice of an animal is not really the killing of
an animal.” The animal to be sacrificed “is not considered an animal,” but
is, instead, “a symbol of those powers for which the sacrificial ritual
stands” (Lal 1986, 201). Nor are Hindus the only ones who transmute
animals rhetorically in this way. Consider the idea presented by Christian
theologian Andrew Linzey, who in trying to rescue nonhuman animals from
the traditional Christian opprobrium and moral indifference cites an
interpretation in which animal sacrifice “is best seen as the freeing of
animal life to be with God” (Linzey 1986, 130).

Indeed there is a tradition of thought in ancient Greek religion, in Judaic

mysticism, and in other sectors of human culture in which nonhumans are
said to benefit from being sacrificed by humans to the point of voluntarily
“stretching out their necks” to assist in being slaughtered (Porphyry 1965,
36-37; Schochet 1984, 236-244; Schwartz 2001, 124-127). Advertisers tell
us that pigs want to become Oscar Meyer wieners, and in the sacrificial
language of Western science, animals who are but “tools of research”
under one aspect stand forth as “engaged” in animal experimentation
(Paul-Murphy, et al. 2004, 9). As Schochet says about the doctrine of
metempsychosis (the belief that human souls can become trapped in
“lower” life forms as punishment for their misdeeds), this doctrine, rather
than promoting vegetarianism, “militated in favor of the consumption of
flesh, for one thereby did the animal a favor” in releasing the human soul
within to pursue its higher destiny (Schochet 244).

Challenges such as the “Holocaust on Your Plate” exhibit, and Charles

Patterson’s book, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the
Holocaust (2002), help to restore a more likely version of the animals’ point
of view. They stimulate people to confront how animals must feel being
torn from their mothers at birth, mutilated, dumped in filthy dark buildings,
treated like trash and brutally murdered. They force us to recognize that
these animals, powerless to defend themselves, are condemned to the

23
same excremental universe, the same abyss of abasement, loneliness, pain,
and terror of imprisonment as were the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and
others characterized as “life unworthy of life” under the Nazis. They flout
the taboos and expose the rationalizations. They puncture the solipsism in
which we surround ourselves, in order to rescue billions of unacknowledged
animal victims from anonymity and the ignominy and injustice of being
consigned to the fate of a false and inferior existence in our minds.

The Absent Referent

The holocausts - burnt offerings – of the ancient Hebrews consisted of

countless nonhuman animals, as did the religious animal sacrifices
conducted throughout the ancient world by the Greeks, Hindus, Muslims,
Native Americans, and other cultures (Regan 1986; Davis 2001, 33-43). Yet
we are not supposed to regard those animals or their counterparts in
today’s world, where the consumption of animals for food rises to ever-
greater levels. We are not supposed to contemplate the experience of
animals in being turned into “burnt offerings,” meat, metaphors, and other
forms that obliterate their lives, personalities, feelings, and identities that
we choose to confer.

The “Holocaust on Your Plate” exhibit restores what feminist writer, Carol
Adams, refers to in The Sexual Politics of Meat as the “absent referent”
(Adams 1990; 2000, 40-48). An absent referent is an individual or group
whose fate is “transmuted into a metaphor for someone else’s existence or
fate” without being acknowledged in its own right. According to Adams,
“Metaphorically, the absent referent can be anything whose original
meaning is undercut as it is absorbed into a different hierarchy of
meaning.” The rape of women, for example, can be applied metaphorically
to the “rape” of the earth in such a way as to obliterate women. As Adams
explains:

The absent referent is both there and not there. It is there through
inference, but its meaningfulness reflects only upon what it refers to
because the originating, literal, experience that contributes the meaning is
not there. We fail to accord this absent referent its own existence. (1990,
42)

In the role of absent referents, nonhuman animals become metaphors for

describing human experience at the same time that “the originating
oppression of animals that generates the power of the metaphor” is
unacknowledged (Adams, 43), as when people say, “We’re treated like
animals.” The meaning of the animals’ fate, for the animals themselves, for
each individual him and her, is absorbed into a human-centered hierarchy
in which the animals do not count, or even exist, apart from how humans
use, or have used, them. Our use becomes their ontology – “this is what
they are” – and their teleology – “this is what they were made for.”

This process of “obscuring the face of the other,” as Maxwell Schnurer

describes in his essay, “At the Gates of Hell,” is “vital to the reduction of
living beings to objects upon whom atrocities can be heaped” (2004; 109,
117). And it is not species-specific. As Schnurer explains the process of
obscuring the face of the other to achieve self-exoneration:

24
In the case of the Holocaust, it was necessary to sustain a complex
infrastructure that enabled each participant to disguise his or her
responsibility. In the case of animals, as Adams notes, it is essential that
the acts of killing, enslaving, and torturing animals be well hidden from
sight, so that the consumer only ever sees the finished “product.” For both
systems of oppression, it is critical that the process be as
compartmentalized as possible. The reason to obscure the face of suffering
is as obvious as it is hidden – the vision of terrible actions can elicit
sympathy and compassion, and often call for remedy. (117)

Who “Owns” the Holocaust?

The word holocaust is not species-specific, and therefore Jews have no

ownership rights over it. From whatever source the word “Holocaust,” as it
is now employed, came from, Jews have taken it over from the Greek word,
holokauston, which in ancient times denoted their own and others’ cultural
practice of sacrificing animals, to designate the Nazi extermination of the
European Jews.4 Conceivably, those animals could complain that their
experience of being forcibly turned into burnt offerings (and to please or
sate a god they would not necessarily have acknowledged as their god) has
been unjustly appropriated by their victimizers, who are robbing them of
their original experience of suffering. Through PETA’s “Holocaust on Your
Plate” exhibit, the animals reclaim their experience, past, present, and
future. Taking the animals’ view it may be said of them, as Bruno
Bettelheim said of the millions of Jews and others who were systematically
slaughtered by the Nazis, that “while these millions were slaughtered for
an idea, they did not die for one” (Bettelheim 1980, 93).

In Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust, Boria
Sax observes that the very word Holocaust “pertains to animal sacrifice.”
Holocaust means “burning of the whole” (Sax 2000, 156). Sax explains that
among the people of the ancient Mediterranean, the slaughter of animals
was generally “a festive occasion with the inedible parts, bones, and gall
bladder together with a little meat left on the altar for a deity, while the
rest was consumed by human beings.”

In Hebrew sacrifice, a Holocaust was the entire animal “given to Yahweh to

be consumed by fire. The prototype was the sacrifice of the shepherd Abel
to Yahweh from his flock.” Use of the word holocaust for the Nazi murders,
according to Sax, is “based on an identification between the Jewish people
and the sacrificed animal. The imagery parallels the way Christ is
traditionally represented as the sacrificial lamb. In a strange way the term
Holocaust equates the Nazis, as those who perform the sacrifice, with
priests of ancient Israel” (Sax, 156).

Sax says that the term holocaust was “first popularized in the 1960s by
American Jews” (156). There was a felt need in the late 1950s, according to
James E. Young in Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, to distinguish
between the particular Jewish experience under Hitler and the general
experience of being a prisoner or killed in World War Two. Even so, the
term holocaust, in being invoked to capture the essence of a unique
catastrophe, was borrowed from ancient sacrificial usage and Jewish
history in order “to grasp the unfamiliar in familiar terms” (Young 1988,
87).

25
Nor did the term holocaust arise strictly in reference to ancient history.
“Holocaust” came to demarcate the experience of European Jews under the
Nazis at a time when the term holocaust was used to characterize
everything from World War I (“that holocaust swept over the world”) to the
“holocaust of housework” (crashing glassware), as shown by numerous
examples taken from the Palestine Post from 1938 to 1947 (Petrie, 2-3).
According to Jon Petrie’s investigation of the etymology of the word, in the
early 1960s, the most common referent of “holocaust” was nuclear war and
destruction. For example, the cover of the November 4, 1961 magazine The
Nation announces: “SHELTERS WHEN THE HOLOCAUST COMES.”

Petrie thinks that American Jewish writers “probably abandoned such

words as ‘disaster,’ ‘catastrophe,’ and ‘massacre’ in favor of ‘holocaust’ in
the 1960s” because “holocaust” with its evocation of the then dreaded
nuclear annihilation effectively conveyed something of the horror of the
Jewish experience during World War Two (Petrie 2004, 4).

Nobel Prizewinning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who grew up in a Polish

village where his father was a Hasidic rabbi, has one of his fictional
characters, Herman Gombiner, say in the story, “The Letter Writer,” that
towards the animals, all humans are Nazis, and for the animals, every day
is Treblinka. (Treblinka was a Nazi death camp in Poland that began
operating in 1942.) Herman, who lost his entire family to the Nazis, is
thinking about a mouse he befriended whose death he believes he caused,
and his sadness leads to a larger thought:

In his thoughts, Herman spoke a eulogy to the mouse who had shared a
portion of her life with him and who, because of him, had left this earth.
“What do they know – all those scholars, all those philosophers, all the
leaders of the world – about such as you? They have convinced themselves
that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of
creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food,
pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are
Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka. And yet man demands
compassion from heaven” (1935, 271).

Rather than trivializing “Nazi” and “Treblinka,” this usage conceptualizes

these terms and the events to which they refer, making them stand for a
certain type of atrocity – an extremity of inhumanity, victimization, and
misery – of which there may be more than one manifestation, if not in every
respect, yet in significant respects. In Enemies: A Love Story, the
protagonist, Herman, visits a zoo. He compares the zoo to a concentration
camp:

The air here was full of longing – for deserts, hills, valleys, dens, families.
Like the Jews, the animals had been dragged here from all parts of the
world, condemned to isolation and boredom. Some of them cried out their
woes; others remained mute (Singer quoted in Rosenberger 2004).

Even animal rights author Roberta Kalechofsky declares, despite her

opposition to Holocaust comparisons, that “Most suffering today, whether
of animals or humans, suffering beyond calculation, whether it is
physiological or the ripping apart of a mother and offspring, is in the hands

26
of other humans. Pain is a curse, and gratuitous pain inflicted by humans
on other humans or on animals is evil” (Kalechofsky 2003, 6-7).

An Atrocity Can Be Both Unique and General

Paradoxically, then, it is possible to make relevant and enlightening

comparisons, while agreeing with the approach taken by the philosopher,
Brian Luke, towards animal abuse. Luke writes: “My opposition to the
institutionalized exploitation of animals is not based on a comparison
between human and animal treatment, but on a consideration of the abuse
of the animals in and of itself” (Luke 1996, 81).

Paradoxically, while the words “Nazi,” “Treblinka,” and “Holocaust”

represent unique historical phenomena, they can also transcend these
phenomena to function more broadly. And a broader approach to the
Holocaust would appear to hold more promise for a more enlightened and
compassionate future, surely, than attempting to privatize the event to the
extent that its only permissible reference is self-reference. A broader
approach also provides a more just apprehension of past and present
atrocities, while connecting the Nazis and the Holocaust to the larger
ethical challenges confronting humanity.

In A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492

to the Present, Native American scholar Ward Churchill writes that the
experience of the Jews under the Nazis “is unique only in the sense that all
such phenomena exhibit unique characteristics. Genocide, as the nazis
practiced it, was never something suffered exclusively by the Jews, nor
were the nazis singularly guilty of its practice” (Churchill, 1997, 35-36).
Furthermore, Churchill argues in his Forward to Terrorists or Freedom
Fighters: Reflections on the Liberation of Animals: “Given that the key to
the ‘genocidal mentality’ resides, as virtually all commentators agree, in
the perpetrators’ conscious ‘dehumanization of the Other’ they have set
themselves to exterminating, it follows that removal of the self-assigned
license enjoyed by humans to do as they will to/with nonhumans can only
serve to better the lot of humans targeted for dehumanization/
subjugation/ eradication” (Churchill 2004, 2-3).

Matt Prescott, who directs the “Holocaust on Your Plate” exhibit, argues
that “Comparisons to the Holocaust are undeniable and inescapable not
only because we humans share with all other animals our ability to feel
pain, fear and loneliness, but because the government-sanctioned
oppression of billions of beings, and the systems we use to abuse and kill
them, eerily parallel the concentration camps.” He explains:

The methods of the Holocaust exist today in the form of factory farming
where billions of innocent, feeling beings are taken from their families,
trucked hundreds of miles through all weather extremes, confined in
cramped, filthy conditions, and herded to their deaths. During the
Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children died from
heat exhaustion, dehydration, starvation or from freezing to the sides of
cattle cars. Those who arrived at the concentration camps alive were forced
into cramped bunkers where they lived on top of other dead victims,
covered in their own feces and urine. They were forced to work until their
bodies couldn’t work anymore, and were then herded to their deaths in

27
assembly-line fashion. Ten billion animals a year in the U.S. suffer through
these same horrors every single day. We must ask ourselves: sixty years
later, have we learned nothing? Why are we still transporting animals
through all weather extremes, forcing them to endure extreme heat and
cold? Why are we still confining them in conditions so dirty, the only way to
keep them alive is through the extreme overuse of antibiotics? Why are we
still ripping children away from mothers and leading them by the necks and
legs to the kill floor?

Moreover, Prescott points out that the United States Holocaust Museum
states in its guidelines for teaching about the Holocaust that “The
Holocaust provides a context for exploring the dangers of remaining silent,
apathetic, and indifferent in the face of others’ oppression” (2004).

One of the many questions that emerge from the current debate about the
use of the Holocaust to illuminate humankind’s relationship to billions of
nonhuman animals is the extent to which the outrage of having one’s own
suffering compared to that of others centers primarily on issues of identity
and uniqueness or on issues of superiority and privilege. The ownership of
superior and unique suffering has many claimants, but as Isaac Bashevis
Singer observed speaking of chickens, there is no evidence that people are
more important than chickens (Shenker 1991, 11).

There is no evidence, either, that human suffering, or Jewish suffering, is

separate from all other suffering, or that it needs to be kept separate and
superior in order to maintain its identity. But where, it may be asked, is the
evidence that we humans have had enough of inflicting massive
preventable suffering on one another and on the individuals of other
species, given that we know suffering so well, and claim to abhor it? In
Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, Charles
Patterson concludes that “the sooner we put an end to our cruel and
violent way of life, the better it will be for all of us – perpetrators,
bystanders, and victims” (Patterson 2002, 232). Who but the Nazi within us
disagrees? If we are going to exterminate someone, let it be the fascist
within.

† Karen Davis, PhD. is the founder and President of United Poultry

Concerns (www.upc-online.org), a nonprofit organization that promotes
the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. She is the
author of Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the
Modern Poultry Industry; A Home for Henny; More Than a Meal: The
Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality; and Instead of Chicken,
Instead of Turkey: A Poultryless “Poultry” Potpourri (a cookbook). Karen
is currently writing a book titled The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale:
A Case for Comparing Atrocities

1At the same time, a human or nonhuman animal’s suffering may be so

extreme, so unnatural and unbearable, that the longing arises never to be
“seen” again. Take the poem “The Snow Leopard in the MetroToronto Zoo”
by Jason Gray:

He pads on grassy banks behind a fence

28
 with measured paces slow and tense.

Beyond his cage his thoughts are sharp and white;

he lives a compelled anchorite.

A solid ghost gone blind with all the green,

he waits and waits to be unseen. (Gray 2003, 56)

2 In fact, however, when the public is exposed to some of the more

“dramatic” scenes taking place behind the scenes that are still largely
hidden from view – e.g., force-feeding of ducks and geese to produce foie
gras, artificial insemination and masturbation of “breeder” turkeys on
which the commercial turkey industry is based, treatment of newborn
chicks at the hatchery, candid-camera looks at what really goes on inside a
slaughterhouse – there is a much greater sense of the individuality of each
animal and, one hopes, greater empathy. Undercover video investigations
are starting to make this happen – to foreground individual animals in their
struggle against their abusers in the midst of the mass-suffering in which
each animal is submerged in factory-farm settings.

3 Peter Singer’s position regarding the superiority of most human adult

suffering and death over the suffering and death of most, if not all,
nonhuman beings may be inferred, for example, in his discussion of
damming a river that will adversely affect the nonhuman animals in the
area: “Neither drowning nor starvation is an easy way to die, and the
suffering involved in these deaths should . . . be given no less weight than
we would give to an equivalent amount of suffering experienced by human
beings. . . . But the argument presented above does not require us to
regard the death of a nonhuman animal as morally equivalent to the death
of a human being, since humans are capable of foresight and forward
planning in ways that nonhuman animals are not. This is surely relevant to
the seriousness of death, which, in the case of a human being capable of
planning for the future, will thwart these plans, and which thus causes a
loss that is different in kind from the loss that death causes to beings
incapable even of understanding that they exist over time and have a
future. It is also entirely legitimate to take into account the greater sense
of loss that humans feel when people close to them die; whether nonhuman
animals will feel a sense of loss at the death of another animal will depend
on the social habits of the species, but in most cases it is unlikely to be as
prolonged, and perhaps not as deep, as the grief that humans feel” (Singer
2000, 96).

4 Many Jews don’t like to use the word holocaust anymore because it has
been used to apply to too many things not unique to the Jewish experience;
so some scholars are opting for other words like Shoah, Churban, the
Event, and the Tremendum to try to recapture some sense of singularity.
See, e.g., James E. Young (1988, 85-89). See also Nathan Snaza (2004, 12).

29
 An Unnatural Order: Discovering the Roots of our
Domination of Nature and Each Other

By Jim Mason

Some think human society seems to be steadily going insane. They note
the ridiculous hatreds that keep us nearly constantly at war with each
other. They see we are fouling our global nest, wiping out much of the
planet's life and making life more and more miserable for ourselves. I
don't think we are going insane; I think we have just not learned to look
deeply enough into the causes of our current social and environmental
problems. I believe with a growing number of others that these
problems began several millennia ago when our ancestors took up
farming and broke the primal bonds with the living world and put human
beings above all other life. Because of this, we have no sense of kinship
with other life on this planet, hence no good sense of belonging here.
Our tradition is one of arrogance toward the living world around us; it is
a thing beneath us - to be either used up or kept at bay. We are, as
intellectuals say, alienated from nature.

Although most religions today describe a three-tiered hierarchy: God,

people, and everything else ... primal people lived not merely close to,
but in and with nature. Food and materials came not by working with
the soil, not by controlling the lives and growth of plants and animals,
but by incredibly detailed knowledge about them. They lived with daily
reminders of their connections with the living beings around them and
with constant awareness of how their taking from their world might
affect their lives in it. All of this evolved into a set of beliefs and
eventually into tribal religions, which have taken on many forms and
variations. What they all have in common, though, is a deep emotional
attachment to, and respect for, the living world that made changing or
controlling it unthinkable.

Alienated as we are from the natural world, our modern minds are too
maimed to fully grasp how thoroughly this human mind was fed by its
environment - particularly by the moving, living beings in it. The
emerging cultural human mind literally took its shape and substance, its
basic images and ideas, from the plants and animals around it. It came
to know which plants out of hundreds made the best foods, medicines
and materials. It came to know the life cycles and day-to-day habits of
dozens of kinds of animals intimately enough to be able to predict when
and where a hunt might be most successful. It came to know how all of
the above might be affected by wind, rain, seasons, and the other
elements and forces in nature. From such living, the people knew the
land, their foraging territory, probably better than any modern ecologist
could. They had, after all, generations of wisdom and experience in
living in it, and most of all, a feeling for it that no books nor journals can
ever convey.

30
Animals intrigued human beings with their size, speed, strength,
habits and other features. They were believed to have powers humans
did not. For primal humans - especially those with the flowering mind,
consciousness and culture of modern Homo sapiens about 45,000 years
ago - the animals in their foraging lands were the most impressive, the
most fascinating living beings in the world. Measured in terms of the
amount of human wonder they caused, animals were the most
wonderful things out there in the world. The primal relationship with
the powers of the living world was more of a partnership in which
human beings had interactions and a strong sense of interdependence
with them.

Other things in nature impressed us, too, like dark forests, violent
storms, rivers swollen by flood waters. Yet animals impressed us in
ways that the rest of nature could not. Why animals? Why do animals
figure so centrally to the process of mind formation? Why isn't the
child moved by stuffed plants and figures of trees and rocks? Animals,
like us, move freely; and they are more obviously like people than are
trees, rivers and other things in nature. Animals have eyes, ears, hair,
and other organs like us; and they sleep, eat, defecate, copulate, give
birth, play, fight, die and carry on many of the same activities of life
that we do. Somewhat similar to us yet somewhat different, animals
forced comparisons, categories, and conclusions. Animals made us
think. Animals drove and shaped human intelligence. They are
fascinating to watch. Of all the things in nature, then, animals stand
out most in ways needed by the developing brain/mind. Animals are
active, noisy, colorful characters - all of which makes them most
informative. In contrast, the rest of nature is background - relatively
amorphous, still, inscrutable, and not much help to the budding
brain/mind, whether that of the species or the individual.

As movers of the mind, thought and feeling, animals are very strong
stuff to human beings. No wonder our ancestors believed they had
souls and powers.

After centuries of manipulative animal husbandry, however, men

gained conscious control over animals and their life processes. In
reducing them to physical submission, people reduced animals
physically as well. Castrated, yoked, harnessed, hobbled, penned, and
shackled, domestic animals were thoroughly subdued. They had none
of that wild, mysterious power that their ancestors had when they
were stalked by hunter-foragers. Domestic animals were
disempowered - made docile - by confinement, selective breeding, and
familiarity with humans. They gradually came to be seen more with
contempt than awe.

In reducing domestic animals, farmers reduced animals in general, and

with them the living world that animals had symbolized. Farming, in
general, helped reduce the animal/natural powers because crop-
conscious farmers saw more and more natural elements as threats. But

31
 it was animal husbandry in particular that nudged people from seeing
animals as powers to seeing them as commodities and tools. It was
husbandry that drastically upset the ancient human-animal
relationship, changing it from partnership to master-and-slave, from
being kin with animal-nature to being lord over animal-nature.

This reduction of animals - the soul and the essence of the living world
to the primal mind - reduced all of nature, creating, in the
agriculturalist's mind, a view of the world where people were over and
distinctly apart from nature. Animal reduction was key to the radically
different worldview that came with the transition from foraging to
farming, for more than any other agricultural development, it broke up
the old ideas of kinship and continuity with the living world. This, more
than any other factor, accelerated and accentuated human alienation
from nature. It originated in the East's first agricultural center, it
founds its legs there, and then it spread to the other centers of
civilization. Husbandry was, I think, the more influential side of
farming that led, ultimately, to the agrarian worldview that we still
hold today. As that worldview began to emerge thousands of years
ago, wrote University of California historian Roderick Nash, "for the
first time humans saw themselves as distinct from the rest of nature."

Do creatures have the same rights that we do?

By Joy Williams
(C) 1997 Harpers Magazine. Permission to distribute everywhere.

St. Francis once converted a wolf to reason. The wolf of Gubbio promised to
stop terrorizing an Italian town; he made pledges and assurances and
pacts, and he kept his part of the bargains. But St. Francis only performed
this miracle once, and as miracles go, it didn't seem to capture the public's
fancy. Humans don't want to enter into a pact with animals. They don't
want animals to reason. It would be an unnerving experience. It would
bring about all manner of awkwardness and guilt. It would make our
treatment of them seem, well, unreasonable. The fact that animals are
voiceless is a relief to us, it frees us from feeling much empathy or sorrow.
If animals did have voices, if they could speak with the tongues of angels-at
the very least with the tongues of angels-it is unlikely that they could save
themselves from mankind. Their mysterious otherness has not saved them,
nor have their beautiful songs and coats and skins and shells, nor have
their, strengths, their skills, their swiftness, the beauty of their flights. We
discover the remarkable intelligence of the whale, the wolf, the elephant -
it does not save them, nor does our awareness of the complexity of their
lives. It matters not, it seems, whether they nurse their young or brood

32
patiently on eggs. If they eat meat, we decry their viciousness; if they eat
grasses and seeds, we dismiss them as weak. We know that they care for
their young and teach them, that they play and grieve, that they have
memories and a sense of the future for which they sometimes plan. We
know about their habits, their migrations, that they have a sense of home,
of finding, seeking, returning to home. We know that when they face death,
they fear it. We know all these things and it has not saved them from us.

Anything that is animal, that is not us, can be slaughtered as a pest or

sucked dry as a memento or reduced to a trophy or eaten, eaten, eaten. For
reasons of need - preference or availability. Or it's culture, it's a way to
feed the poor, it's different, it's plentiful, it's not plentiful, which makes it
more intriguing, it arouses the palate, it amuses the palate, it makes your
dick bigger, it's healthy, it's somebody's way of life, it's somebody's
livelihood, it's somebody's business.

Agriculture has become agribusiness, after all. So the creatures that have
been under our "stewardship" the longest, that have been codified by habit
for our use, that have always suffered a special place in our regard - the
farm animals - have never been as cruelly kept or confined or slaughtered
in all of history. Aldo Leopold, in his naturalist classic A Sand Country
Almanac, argues that wild animals and domestic animals have different
moral statuses - domestic animals are not free and therefore are unworthy
of our regard. Catholic moral textbooks instruct that we have no duties of
justice or charity toward animals; our only duties concerning them are the
proper use we make of them. But large-scale corporate agribusinesses,
enjoying fat federal tax breaks, don't need to have their interests defended
by effete ethical rationalizations. Factory farmers are all Cartesians.
Animals are no more than machine - milk machines, piglet machines, egg
machines - production units converting themselves into profit. They are
explicitly excluded from any protection offered by the federal Animal
Welfare Act, an act that is casually and lightly enforced, if at all, by the
Department of Agriculture: "Normal agricultural operation" precludes
"humane" treatment, and anti-cruelty laws do not apply to that which is
raised for food.

The factory farm today is a crowded, stinking bedlam, filled with suffering
animals that are quite literally insane, sprayed with pesticides and fattened
on a diet of growth stimulants, antibiotics, and drugs. Two hundred and
fifty thousand laying hens are confined within a single building. (The high
mortality rate caused by overcrowding is economically acceptable; nothing
is more worthless than an individual chicken.) Pigs are raised in bare
concrete cages in windowless, metal buildings or tightly restrained in foul
pens and gestation boxes. Cows are kept pregnant to produce an abnormal
amount of milk, which is further artificially increased with hormone
injections. The by-products of the dairy industry, calves, are chained in
crates twenty-two inches wide and no longer than their bodies, and raised
on a diet of drug-laced liquid feed for a few months until they're
slaughtered for the "delicacy" veal. (Yet some people say, Well apparently
they're raised in the darkness, in crates or something, but the taste is
creamy, sort of refined, a very nice taste ...) People will stop eating veal
only if they think they will get a killer disease if they don't. In England, the
beef industry had a setback when a link was found between bovine
spongiform encephalopathy, a fatal disease of cattle, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease, a fatal neurological virus in humans. The cows became ill because

33
they were fed the rendered remains of sick sheep. Of course, in this county
we are assured that our cows aren't being fed sick sheep and that no BSE-
infected cattle have been found here. We do have many "downer" animals,
though, about 100,000 of them year, that collapse from stress or
something, heaven knows, and end up dead prior to the slaughtering
process. They are rendered and ground up and become pet food and animal
feed. Cattle do eat cattle here. They are fed the ground offal of those that
have succumbed to unknown causes, and this has been the practice for
many years. If BSE were ever confirmed in this country, which is not at all
unlikely, people would stop eating meat for a while for the same reasons
the English did. Not because they'd had a sudden telepathic vision of the
horrors of the abattoir or because they'd all been subjected to a reading of
James Agee's remarkable fable about a Christlike steer, "A Mother's Tale, "
but because they thought that eating steak would make their brains go
funny. Once assured by the government that there was no need for alarm
they would be back in the spotless supermarkets, making their selections
among the sliced, cubed, and shrink-rapped remains, which have borne no
resemblance to rising things in our minds for some time now. They are
merely some things, in a different department from the toilet-bowl
cleanser. The Supermarket has never been a place where one thinks -
Animal.

Now genetic manipulation is becoming a commonplace as well. One of the

problems in poultry production is that bacteria-laden feces fly all over the
carcasses in the slaughtering process. It's just always been a problem.
Awaiting government approval is a proposed product called Rectite, a sort
of superglue that seals the rectal cavities of poultry so all that salmonella
contamination can be avoided. But Rectite already sounds a little old-
fashioned. Genetic engineers might want to create a turkey, say, that had
no vent at all, possibly no feet, and even a smaller head to save space. This
would likely be hailed as quite an advantage over the traditionally
constructed bird. Researchers probably dream about this nightly (when
they're not dreaming about genetically identical sheep). Researchers are, in
fact, creating entire new orders of creatures specifically designed,
transgenic, xenograph-ready. Around the world in labs with names such as
Genpharm International Inc., Genzyme Corporation, and Pharmaceutical
Proteins, biotechnocrats are inserting human genes in live-stock to form,
animals that can produce human proteins and hormones: drugstores on the
hoof. Pigs, long attractive to the farmer, not because of any Babe- or Miss
Piggy-like charm but because they have short pregnancies and big litters,
have become a favorite of researchers who are altering them to make the
perfect organ donors. Doctors, awaiting the eventual blessing of the FDA,
are eagerly anticipating placing genetically altered pig livers in just about
everybody. (The drunks will probably get them to start.) Humans are
requiring and demanding fresh new organs all the time (employing animals
in this way seems so much more sophisticated than merely eating them),
and the ethics of raising or breeding animals for body parts to replace our
own failing ones seem to give people pause only when combined with
warnings of dangers to human health. A person might not want that little
monkey's heart, not because he wanted the monkey to keep it but because
he'd worry that he might contract the Ebola virus and that his skin would
get pulpy, he'd vomit black blood, and his eyeballs would burst.

We distance ourselves more and more from animals as we use them in

increasingly bizarre ways. Animals are being subsumed in a weird

34
unnaturalness. Indeed, technology, which is forever pressing to remove
animals from nature, to muddy and morph the remaining integrity of the
animal kingdom, has rendered the word "natural" obsolete. A side benefit
of the new and developing technologies is that soon we won't have to feel
guilty about the suffering and denigration of the animals because we will
have made them up. (That's not an animal, it's a donor...) Any sentience
they possess will have been invented by man or eliminated altogether. An
animal will have no more real "life" than a lightbulb.

In the laboratory, animals have already been reclassified. They are tools,
they're part of the scientific apparatus, they undergo transformations, they
are metamorphosed into data. Rats and mice are already excluded from the
very definition of "animal" by the Department of Agriculture. The offspring
of these un-animals are then genetically reinvented. There are countless
variations of mutant "knock-out mice, creatures whose genetic code has
been grotesquely altered, who lack particular genes crucial to learning or
to instinctual behavior and self-destruct in novel ways, or who develop
terrible diseases or deformities. As for the cats and dogs and rabbits and
primates other than man in the laboratory, although not deemed un-
animals, they are transformed semantically into "research animals." These
animals, like "food" animals, qualify for very little protection under the
Animal Welfare Act. At present this act does not prohibit any experiment or
procedure that might be performed on animals in labs, and makes clear
that the government cannot interfere with the conduct or design of any
experiment. Blinding has long been a popular procedure in the lab, as are
any and all deprivology studies. Of endless interest is the study of an
animal's reaction to unrelieved, inescapable pain. The procedures, of
course , are never cruelty but science - they may result in data that might
be of some use to us sometime. So dogs are decerebrated or mutilated or
poisoned or burned to provide grist for a learned thesis; other dogs are
tormented into states of trauma, into states of "learned helplessness," into
"psychological death," to see if their observed decline can give any insights
into human depression. Some experiments merely satisfy scientific
"curiosity." (Wow, this stuff took that puppy's skin right down to the bone. I
wonder if it will take the rust off the lawn furniture with no mess.) Other
experiments serve to confirm prior conclusions-to verify previously known
LD (lethal dose) levels, for example. LD tests, said by industry to determine
the toxicity of floor waxes and detergents, end when half the animals in a
test group die. Animals never leave laboratories. They keep undergoing
more and more corrosive tests until they expire, or until their bodies,
unable to provide even the most utterly senseless data, are "humanely
destroyed."

But dogs and cats and rabbits are as nothing to the researcher when
compared with what can be extrapolated from the most desirable lab
animal of them all-the chimpanzee. The chimpanzee, humankind's closest
relative, has been infected and maimed and killed for over fifty years now,
for us, for the possible advantage to us, because they're so much like us;
they possess 98 percent of the same DNA, the same genetic material, as
humans. That missing 2 percent allows them to be vivisected on our behalf.
If it weren't for that lucky- for-us 2, they wouldn't be able to be used as
experimental surrogates because they'd be just like us, and medical
advancement would come to a standstill. Or at best it would, in the words
of a doctor writing in The New Physician, slow to a "snail's pace."

35
So in our country's finest universities (as well as in some of our just so so
ones), researchers, not to be likened to snails, are still making
chimpanzees "hot" with deadly diseases and screwing bolts into their
heads. They're still removing infants from their mothers and
"containerizing" them in solitary so that their psychological and emotional
suffering and decline can be observed. They're still performing cataract
surgery on healthy chimps, then giving them different rehabilitative
treatments, then killing them and dissecting their brains to see which
treatment produced the best result within the visual cortex. And they're
still trying to give chimps AIDS. Scientists have been frustrated because
chimps just won't get this disease, though their own simian immune
systems can be destroyed in the lab. Over 100 chimps have been dosed
with the human AIDS virus, but none have developed human AIDS. In 1995,
researchers from the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Emory
University in Atlanta were able to announce that one chimp, infected with
the virus ten years earlier, had come down with AIDS, or, rather, had come
down with the opportunistic diseases associated with AIDS. Managing to
give one chimp the symptom of AIDS was certainly not science's finest
hour.

In any case, what is all this "research" for? Artificially induced diseases in
animals practically never result in a cure that can be applicable to humans.
Even scientists have begun to recognize the ambiguity of their work to the
extent that it is common now, after the announcement of any discovery
wrung from animal research, for the researchers to caution publicly against
using the findings, to draw conclusions about human disease or behavior.
Still, researchers work hard at public relations. Parents' terrors of the
mysterious sudden infant death syndrome were manipulated shamelessly
with the cure dependent upon animal research mantra- until the precipitous
recent drop in infant deaths was attributed to the simple act of putting
babies to bed on their backs instead of their stomachs. (Prevention maybe
worth a pound of cure, but it's not something the drug companies are
interested in.) Misleading monkey experiments delayed an effective polio
vaccine for decades. (As for insight into the cancer problem, 46 percent of
substances deemed carcinogenic in mice are found not to be carcinogenic
in rats.) Successes in human kidney transplants, blood transfusions, and
heart-bypass surgery all resulted only when doctors ignored the baleful
results of experiments on dogs and used human material. Animal tests, in
fact, do not predict side effects in humans up to 52 percent of the time.
Guinea pigs die when injected with penicillin. Thalidomide was found safe
for rodents; so was Opren, an arthritis drug that caused fatal liver toxicity
in a number of human patients before it was taken off the market. Animals
are sacrificed in laboratories to show the safety of products too; they are
not all employed to test the dangerous side effects. The tobacco industry
was able to deny a link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer for
decades because many thousands of dogs, monkeys, rabbits, and rats,
fitted with masks and placed in "smoking chambers", immobilzed in
stereotaxic chairs with tubes blowing smoke down their windpipes, could
not be encouraged to develop carcinomas.

The horror! The horror! if I may be so bold as to quote Conrad. Yet most
people believe they like animals, are kind to them, and, by accepting any
new "uses that can be found for them, have sensible attitudes regarding
them. Normal people are fond of animals and disapprove of wanton cruelty,
but keep their priorities in order. That is, they seem to want to be kinder to

36
animals even as they continue to use them and eat them and expect them
to relocate themselves when it's time to build a vacation home. But they
certainly don't want to run the risk of being denigrated as animal people by
regarding animals too highly or caring too much.

When a dog was found bound and hanged with electrical cord and set on
fire in Miami in April 1996, people contributed money to a reward fund for
the apprehension of his killer. A few people contributing a little money
would have been normal, but hundreds of people contributed a
considerable amount of money, which made them peculiar, which made
them animal people. The Miami Herald was puzzled: "[The collected money]
exceeds the $11,000 offered by law enforcement agencies for the capture
of a serial killer who beats and burns homeless women in Miami."

When a seventeen-year-old with cancer wanted to go to Alaska and kill a

Kodiak bear, and was sent to do just that thanks to the generosity of the
Make-A-Wish Foundation, it set off what the papers referred to as an
"animal-rights furor." The extent of that furor caused others to be more
"objective" about the situation, saying things like, Hey, it'll make the poor
kid happy, and it's something he can do with his dad.

When boys on a high school team in Texas battered a cat with their
baseball bats, put it in a bag, and ran over it with their pickup truck, killing
it, because it had taken to hanging around and soiling the pitcher's mound,
the animal people were outraged and demanded that the players be kicked
off the team. Such intense disapproval "bewildered" the youths and caused
a backlash. We all did things to cats when we were young. This is just
ridiculous . Some people think a cat is more important than a boy. Although
such arguments are not up to the debating dazzle, say, of Dostoevsky's
Grand Inquisitor, a humanist argument in any form defends normal thinking
against the misanthropic nuts -- the animal people or, worst of all, the
animal rights people who seek to question it.

"A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy," the statement made by People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) some years ago, has been used with
considerable success to discredit the animal-rights movement (though a rat
does seem to be a boy when it suits science's purposes). PETA's actual
remark was, "When it comes to having a nervous system and the ability to
feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." Even
addressing the statement as intended has resulted in a not so edifying
debate about suffering. Do animals suffer or don't they? And if they do
(they certainly seem to), does that ability, rather than the ability to speak
or reason, give them the rights of life, liberty, and freedom from torture?
"Rights" has become practically the only ethical language we speak in this
country, and to the animal-rights activist, it means equal consideration of
interests. But to normal people, rights for animals is ridiculous, and much
merriment is had by placing the, concept in the most ludicrous light
possible. What kind of rights exactly? The right to vote? The right to a good
education? The right of a doggy not to be nutted at the vet's? Not only are
the animal-rights people considered annoying because of their boycotts
and protests and extremely politically incorrect use of Holocaust and
slavery references regarding the status of animals; they're considered anti-
human, even monstrous, in their misguidedness. (Hitler, was a vegetarian,
you know, and he adored his German shepherds.) An animal-rights activist

37
is perceived to be the kind of person who would sneak into a school
cafeteria and whisper to the innocent, impressionable children there, You
know that sandwich Mommy packed for you? Well, I know you love your
mommy very much, but you know that substance in your sandwich once
had a mommy and a life too, and it wanted to live that life just as much as
you want to live yours. The animal-rights people are widely thought to be -
well, crazy.

There are thousands of animal-advocacy organizations in the United States,

with millions of members. Feral cats, wild horses, greyhounds, fowls, bats,
as well as the more dramatic gorillas, pandas, and dolphins, all have their
devoted protectors, and various methods are used to win public sympathy
for them. But many advocates - working for the humane treatment of
animals would prefer not to argue the rights issue at all. To argue that an
animal has the right not to have its arms cut off in an experiment is far
different than arguing that a pig, should be treated more kindly before
being converted into a Heavenly Ham. It is one thing to show up as a carrot
at the country fair, toting a placard that reads "Eat Your Veggies, Not Your
Friends, and quite another to find a convincing language with an irrefutable
philosophical base for the concept of animal dignity. It's easier to have a
yard sale to benefit your local wildlife rehabilitation center than to wade
into real rights talk and tempt flake status. An animal-welfare advocate can
feel quietly victorious convincing someone to adopt a pet from the pound
rather than buy one from a pet store, but a rights person is always
plunging into the eschatological dark. ("You actually believe that animals
have souls?" "Yes, I do. I do believe that. Their natures are their souls.")

Welfare groups have been laboring on behalf of the animals for some time-
the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the
American Anti- Vivisection Society are both over a hundred years old but
the rights movement took off only in 1973, when The New York Review of
Books published an unsolicited re- view of a book about animals, men, and
morals. The reviewer was the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, who
quickly expanded his article into the rights bible, Animal Liberation.

PETA, founded by Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco in 1980, is the group
that perhaps best personifies the rights movement, because it broke
tactical ground in 1981 with a daring legal action that attempted to
prosecute a researcher for animal cruelty. Pacheco volunteered as an
assistant to a Dr. Edward Taub at the Institute of Behavioral Research in
Silver Spring, Maryland, with the intention of secretly documenting
conditions in an "ordinary" lab. Taub had been surgically crippling primates
to monitor the rehabilitation of impaired limbs for many years, apparently
suspending his efforts only long enough to write proposals for federal
grants that would, and did, allow him to continue his labors. Pacheco and
PETA got a precedent-setting search warrant from a circuit judge, and
police raided the filthy lab and confiscated seventeen monkeys, as well as
Taub's files and a monkey's severed hand that the less than charismatic
researcher kept n his desk as a paperweight. Although the rights of the
mutilated primates could not be argued, as those rights had never been
established, Taub was found guilty by a jury of cruelty to animals. The
conviction was overturned on appeal when the court ruled that state
statutes did not apply to research conducted under a federal program.

38
Taub, supported by the animal-experimentation industry, seemed to have
unlimited funds for defense at his disposal. Still, PETA's persistence and
style brought publicity and respect for animal advocates.

Today, pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness, the National Association

for Biomedical Research, and the American Medical Association (all of which
have only our best interests at heart) revile as extremists such groups as
PETA, Last Chance for Animals, Friends of Animals, and the Animal
Liberation Front. These rights groups can argue rights with all solemnity
but prefer vivid direct action. After a letter-writing campaign and a tourist
boycott led by the Fund for Animals made an impression on the governor of
Alaska, the group was assisted by Friends of Animals, which aired, on
national television, an undercover video of Alaskan officials tirelessly
exterminating wolves. The ALF breaks into labs, damages equipment, and
frees animals, all to great notoriety and accusations of terrorism, but its
raids often provide irrefutable proof of researchers' barbarism. The ALF
stole files from the University of Pennsylvania's head injury lab that
showed baboons in vises getting their heads mashed while researchers
chortled. The National Institutes of Health had called the Pennsylvania lab
"one of the best in the world," but the federal government cut off funding
after the improperly acquired film was made public. (What does the Animal
Rights Direct Action Coalition do to relax? They drive up to McDonald's in a
pickup truck with a dead cow in the back and a sign reading, "Here's Your
Lunch.")

Moderates in the movement - the ones who have struggled quietly for
reform - are tolerated by society as long as they can be, considered
harmless dogooders. Activists, of course, put this toleration at risk. But
even moderate groups are taking responsibility for a more meaningful ethic
regarding the animals. The Humane Society of the United States, founded
in 1954, has five million members and is considered a reasonable group
working in a mannerly way within the system, lobbying governments and
promoting ballot initiatives on behalf of the animals. Still, although the
HSUS studiously avoids using rights language, its position that animals
should not be treated more cruelly than humans is a view quite
revolutionary in its implications. It is, in fact, a rights position, an animal
rights extremist position.

Amid controversies and organizational politicking, the animal people never

stop thinking about animals. And they never stop thinking about the ways
they can make the rest of us think about animals, for we've grown awfully
comfortable with animals' erasure from our lives. (If we don't erase them,
we absorb them) The animal people are vegetarians. They'd better be if
they don't want to be accused of being hypocritical. (Of course, by not
being hypocritical, they can be accused of being self-righteous.) But people
don't admire them overmuch for living lightly on the planet, and their
"Meat Is Murder" chirping seems to be an irritant right up there with a leaf
blower or a jet ski. Their wishful hope that by their example animals will be
saved and the slaughterhouses will fall silent is dismissed as absurd,
because on an average day in America, 130,000 cattle, 7,000 calves,
360,000 pigs, and 24 million chickens are killed, and you can't just shut
down a show like that overnight. Besides, the argument goes, a vegetarian,
unless he is a zealot, practically a Jain, is culpable in the death of animals
from the moment he wakes up in the morning. Modern slaughterhouses
find a use for everything but the squeal, the cluck, and the moo, as the ag

39
spokesmen like to say. As well as being turned into the more obvious sofas,
shoes, wallets, and "tough chic" jackets and skirts, animals are
transmogrified into anti-aging creams and glue and paint and antifreeze.
Gelatin- benign gelatin, formerly known as hooves-constitutes Jello, of
course, and is also in ice cream and the increasing number of "fat free"
products we consume. Animals are turned into all manner of drugs, mood
enhancers, and mood stabilizers. Premarin, an estrogen drug for
menopausal women, comes from the urine of pregnant mares. This is a
whole new industry that results in the births of approximately 75,000
unwanted foals each year. Off to the slaughterhouse the little ones go, to
be turned into ... something else. Animals are everywhere in our lives; we
just can't look into their eyes. We'd prefer not to think about their eyes at
all, actually.

Vegetarians do their best, but they seem to lack influence. A recent article
in The New York Times Magazine marveled over a meeting between
environmentalists and ranchers that took place at a steakhouse in Orofino,
Idaho, a restaurant described as "a shrine to red meat and raw timber." As
the two groups "sparred and joked over steak," they realized they had a
great deal in common. They both wanted wolves, grizzlies, and open
spaces. They forged a new and potentially powerful bond as they literally
chewed the fat. A vegetarian could never come to such an understanding
with the Big Dogs. Never! (Particularly if he tried to break the ice with
George Bernard Shaw's witticism that "meat eating is cannibalism with the
heroic dish omitted." The ranchers and environmentalists together would
throw him out on his ass into the parking lot.)

The animal people have never been embraced by the increasingly corporate
environmental community. Mainstream enviro groups, with their
compromises and retreats, have lost the moral background on the American
scene in less than thirty years. They've become ecowimps. Even the far
from ecowimpy Earth First! has never entangled itself in the briar patch
that is animal rights. To this group, farm animals are the problem. Shoot
Cows Not Bears, Earth First! exhorts in its Dada way. As for the
environmental philosophers, the Deep Ecologists, they have never fully
acknowledged the reality of the animals, preferring to deal in the
abstractions of biodiversity and species instead. Although they call for a
less human-centered ethic, our ugly and troubled relationship with the
nonhuman animal is a problem they do not care to address.

Only the animal people struggle to address this problem, and there is no
limit to the horrible things they can worry about or the disappointments
they must endure. Public awareness and revulsion at or treatment of
animals is often raised only to fade or be circumvented. Two successes for
the movement involved the fur and cosmetics industries. The wearing of fur
was discredited for a time through the tactic of howling insult. "Corpse
Coat!" activists would scream at any opportunity, or they would solicitously
ask of some fur wearer, "How did you get the blood off that?" Then they'd
go out and paint "Shame" and "Death" all over furriers windows. Most
cosmetics companies eliminated animal testing after the word got out to
the kids (Mommy, is it true that they blinded hundreds of white bunnies to
make this petty soap?) and consumers were organized to boycott. But the
fur industry is still around, hoping for government subsidies to boost
export sales and counting on a new wave of designers - there's always a
new wave - who believe the trend gurus' predictions of a "fur renaissance

40
fueled by a growing interest in luxury investments" and are churning out
the beaver capes, the burgundy pony-skin jackets, and the acid-green sable
bam jackets. And some of the big names in the beauty industry - Helene
Curtis, Cheeseborough, and Pond's - continue to test on animals. Overall,
the use of animals in research could very well be increasing - who knows?
Corporate monoliths such as Procter & Gamble and Bausch & Lomb never
stopped animal testing; the Department of Defense could still be cutting
the vocal cords of beagles and testing nerve gas on them. The DOD doesn't
have to release any figures at all, and research facilities in general enjoy
institutionalized secrecy and seldom have to provide real numbers to the
public.

No, there's little cause for real happiness among the animal people and
scant opportunity for self-congratulation. Commercial whaling has never
really been outlawed, trade in exotic species is brisk, trophy hunting is
back. Whenever a victory is claimed for the animals, it doesn't stay a
victory for long: it's either not definitive or it's superseded by something
worse. Cases continue to be won only to be lost on appeal, and the cases
that remain won involve animal cruelty or welfare, never the rights of an
animal to an equal consideration of interests, for an animal has no standing
in a court of law. Injuries to a person's "aesthetic interests" can be
judicially recognized (I am offended by seeing spotted owls mounted on the
hoods of logging trucks), but an animal's interest in continuing to exist
cannot.

The animal people need their day in court on the rights issue, and groups
such as the Animal Legal Defense Fund are seeking to find, try, and win the
perfect case - the case that will take animals out of the realm of property
and grant them legal status of their own. The plaintiff will undoubtedly be a
chimp. The chimpanzees' ability to be trained in sign language, and their
further ability to use that language to express their fears and needs, could
provide the scientific basis for the argument that they deserve the same
freedom from enslavement that humans now enjoy. Peter Singer's latest
philosophical effort is the Great Ape Project, a rhetorical demand for the
extension of the "community of equals" to include all the great apes:
human beings and "our disquieting doubles" - chimpanzees, gorillas, and
orangutans. The rights of life and freedom from torture and imprisonment
would be granted to these animals, and then, possibly, would trickle down
to those that are less our disquieting doubles.

Sometimes a number of the animal people gather together, as they did last
year for a "World Congress" at the cavernous USAir Arena in Landover,
Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. The arena can hold 18,000 people
and it was far from full. There were no lovely animals there, of course.
Animals can never be called upon to do a star turn on the movement's
behalf that would be using the animals. So only people were there, and
only about 3,000 of them. The arena itself, so vast and impersonal, so
disconcertingly inert, seemed to emphasize the gargantuan task the little
group had taken on, and the gaunt specter of hopeless helplessness
appeared more than once. Unspeakably wretched images were projected on
immense screens: gruesome videos of steel leg-hold traps going off and
nailing a remarkable array of creatures, videos of moribund lab animals and
terrified stockyard animals, videos of berserk zoo and circus animals being
shot. The animal people sat silently watching, watching simian horror,
avian and equine horror, hunting and puppy-mill and pound horror -

41
witnessing things a normal person would never want to know about. There
were three days of speeches. The speakers were impassioned but calm,
well-spoken, well-dressed, well-prepared; they politely restricted
themselves to the time allotted. Nobody screamed, "We've got to stop
dressing up as carrots!" or, "Whose idea was it to petition the town of
Fishkill to change its name. It made us took like morons!" The importance
of unity was stressed, the importance of being perceived as a single-
interest political group that could effect change. Between speeches, people
would wander out to the encircling satellite area and line up for the
beyond-veggie, no-dairy vegan food that the arena's concessionaires were
serving up with a certain amount of puzzlement. The Franks A Lot stand
was sensibly shuttered. On the fourth day there was a March for Animals,
from the Ellipse up Constitution Avenue to the Capitol. It was a nice march,
orderly. Bystanders seemed a little baffled by it. Perhaps because there
were no animals.

After the march, the animal people went home-to continue to work, work,
work for the animals so that they might be saved from our barbarism. Has
any primarily middle-class group in this country ever had such an extremist
agenda, based utterly on non-self- fulfillment and non-self-interest? The
animal people are calling for a moral attitude toward a great and
mysterious and mute nation, which can't, by our stem reckoning, act
morally back. Their quest is quixotic; their reasoning, assailable; their
intentions, almost inarticulable. The implementation of their vision would
seem madness. But the future world is not this one. Our treatment of
animals and our attitude toward them is crucial not only to any pretensions
we have to ethical behavior but to humankind's intellectual and moral
evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn't it?

Compassion
I believe that all humans are born with an inherent compassion, for both
animals and other people, which is usually partly removed through
conditioning by human culture.

Compassion and Violence

Most humans have difficulty with performing violence on other humans or

creatures; most people are quite gentle.

For most humans to be able to perform violence on another living being,

they must objectify that being to become a thing; they must separate
themselves from the being and place themselves above him or her to be
able to treat the being as an object.

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Animals are seen as living things, not as living beings. Things can be
destroyed and manipulated and eaten, but beings are respected.
Companion animals are respected and treated as equals, and referred to as
he or she; chickens are referred to as "it".

This is very similar to racism. In racism, people different from oneself could
be referred to using epithets of hatred that hide the fact of the people's
humanity; i.e. "white trash" or "nigger."

In the same way, animals are not referred to as pig or cow; they are
referred to as pork or beef. When an animal's flesh is named the same as
an animal, such as turkey or chicken, people resort to making jokes about
the animal to resolve their uncomfortableness about eating the animal, as
is evident around most Thanksgiving day dinner tables.

It is not at all a surprise that animals are treated without concern for their
pain when used in animal research, when one considers how they are
treated when killed and eaten for food.

Sometimes, people say they don't hate other races, but simply insist that
the other race is different in some way. This difference places one race
above the other, allowing people to exploit and use them. For example,
blacks in South Africa are commonly thought of as stupid and as thieves, so
that there is no hesitation by the whites to exploit them as domestic
servants, and to do other injustices.

Circle of Compassion

Everyone has a "circle of compassion." One cares deeply about everyone

within this circle. Some people limit their circle just to their immediate
family; some include the family animals. The animals living with a family
tend to be called "pets" to separate them from other types of human-
controlled animals, for which there is less compassion.

Some people do not have any compassion, but some people manage to care
about almost everyone, even the insects they might breathe in or step on.

Everything outside of the circle is not emotionally important to the

individual. Someone might care about their own pets and the pets in the
shelter, but would not care about the animals used in research. Someone
might care about the animals killed for meat, and be vegetarian, but not
care about the cows killed in the process of milk production. Someone
might care about everything but the soil animals crushed as one walks
across the grass or killed as pests in organic agriculture.

There are reasons for these definitions of the circles; they vary from person
to person. One is cognitive dissonance; another is ignorance of what can
actually feel pain; another is basic selfishness. A main reason is pure
despair; you may feel you cannot possibly worry about every living animal
and avoid harming them. Avoiding harm to life as much as possible is worth
it, because you will know you've done your best.

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The best example of this: trapping spiders and carrying them outside to be
set free, instead of killing them.

I looked at the Chicken endlessly, and I wondered. What lay behind the veil
of animal secrecy?
- William Grimes, My Fine Feathered Friend

In this essay, I discuss the social life of chickens and the mental states that
I believe they have and need in order to participate in the social
relationships that I have observed in them. What follows is a personalized,
candid discussion of what I know, what I think I know, and what I am
unsure of but have observed relevant to the minds of chickens in their
relationships with each other and with other species and with me.

Chickens evolved in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains and the

tropical forests of Southeast Asia where they have lived and raised their
families for thousands of years. Most people I talk to had no idea that
chickens are natives of a rugged, forested habitat filled with vibrant
tropical colors and sounds. Similarly surprising to many is the fact that
chickens are endowed with memory and emotions, and that they have a
keenly developed consciousness of one another and of their surroundings.

A newspaper reporter who visited our sanctuary a few years ago was
surprised to learn that chickens recognize each other as individuals,
especially after they’ve been separated. A friend and I had recently rescued
a hen and a rooster in a patch of woods alongside a road in rural Virginia on
the Eastern Shore. The first night we managed to get the hen out of the
tree, but the rooster got away. The following night after hours of playing
hide and seek with him in the rain, we succeeded in netting the rooster,
and the two were reunited at our sanctuary. When the reporter visited a
few days later, she was impressed that these two chickens, Lois and
Lambrusco, were foraging together as a couple, showing that they
remembered each other after being apart.

Chickens form memories that influence their social behavior from the time
they are embryos, and they update their memories over the course of their
lives. I’ve observed their memories in action at our sanctuary. For instance,
if I have to remove a hen from the flock for two or three weeks in order to
treat an infection, when I put her outside again, she moves easily back into
the flock, which accepts her as if she had never been away. There may be a
little showdown, a tiff instigated by another hen, but the challenge is
quickly resolved. Best of all, I’ve watched many a returning hen be greeted

44
by her own flock members led by the rooster walking over and gathering
around her conversably, as if they were saying to her, “Where have you
been?” and “How are you?” and “We’re glad you’re back.”

My Experience with Mother Hens and Their Families

What of the hens whom we observe each day at home, with what care and
assiduity they govern and guard their chicks? Some let down their wings
for the chicks to come under; others arch their backs for them to climb
upon; there is no part of their bodies with which they do not wish to
cherish their chicks if they can, nor do they do this without a joy and
alacrity which they seem to exhibit by the sound of their voices. - Plutarch

The purpose of our sanctuary on the Virginia Eastern Shore is to provide a

home for chickens who already exist, rather than adding to the population
and thus diminishing our capacity to adopt more birds. For this reason we
do not allow our hens to hatch their eggs in the spring and early summer as
they would otherwise do, given their association with the roosters in our
yard. All of our birds have been adopted from situations of abandonment or
abuse, or else they were no longer wanted or able to be cared for by their
previous owners. Our two-acre sanctuary is a fenced open yard that shades
into tangled wooded areas filled with trees, bushes, vines, undergrowth
and the soil chickens love to scratch in all year round. It also includes
several smaller fenced enclosures with chicken-wire roofs, each with its
own predator-proof house, for chickens who are inclined to fly over fences
during chick-hatching season, and thus be vulnerable to the raccoons,
foxes, owls, possums and other predators inhabiting the woods and fields
around us.

I learned the hard way about the vulnerability of chickens to predators.

Once, a hen named Eva, who had jumped the fence and been missing for
several weeks, reappeared in early June with a brood of eight fluffy chicks.
This gave me a chance to observe directly some of the maternal behavior I
had read so much about. We had adopted Eva into our sanctuary along with
several other hens and a rooster confiscated during a cockfighting raid in
Alabama. Watching Eva travel around the yard, outside the sanctuary fence
with her tiny brood close behind her, was like watching a family of wild
birds whose dark and golden feathers blended perfectly with the woods and
foliage they melted in and out of during the day. Periodically, at the edge
of the woods, Eva would squat down with her feathers puffed out, and her
peeping chicks would all run under her wings for comfort and warmth. A
few minutes later, the family was on the move again.

Throughout history, hens have been praised for their ability to defend their
young from an attacker. I watched Eva do exactly this one day when a large
dog wandered in front of the magnolia tree where she and her chicks were
foraging. With her wings outspread and curved menacingly toward the dog,
she rushed at him over and over, cackling loudly, all the while continuing to
push her chicks behind herself with her wings. The dog stood stock still
before the excited mother hen, and soon ambled away, but Eva maintained
her aggressive posture of self-defense, her sharp, repetitive cackle and
attentive lookout for several minutes after he was gone.

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Eva’s behavior toward the dog differed radically from her behavior toward
me, demonstrating her ability to distinguish between a likely predator and
someone she perceived as presenting no dire threat to her and her chicks.
She already knew me from the sanctuary yard, and though I had never
handled her apart from lifting her out of the crate she’d arrived in from
Alabama several months earlier, when I started discreetly stalking her and
her family, to get the closest possible view of them, the most she did when
she saw me coming was dissolve with her brood into the woods or
disappear under the magnolia tree. While she didn’t see me as particularly
dangerous, she nevertheless maintained a wary distance that, over time,
diminished to where she increasingly brought her brood right up to the
sanctuary fence, approaching the front steps of our house, and ever closer
to me - but not too close just yet. When she and her chicks were out and
about, and I called to her, “Hey, Eva,” she’d quickly look up at me, poised
and alert for several seconds, before resuming her occupation.

One morning, I looked outside expecting to see the little group in the dewy
grass, but they were not there. Knowing that mother raccoons prowled
nightly looking for food for their own youngsters in the summer, I sadly
surmised they were the likely reason that I never saw my dear Eva and her
chicks again.

Inside the sanctuary, I broke the no chick-hatching rule just once. Upon
returning from a trip of several days, I discovered that Daffodil, a soft white
hen with a sweet face and quiet manner, was nestled deep in the corner of
her house in a nest she’d pulled together from the straw bedding on the dirt
floor. Seeing there were only two eggs under her, and fearing they might
contain embryos mature enough to have well-developed nervous systems by
then, I left her alone. A few weeks later on a warm day in June, I was
scattering fresh straw in the house next to hers, when all of a sudden I
heard the tiniest peeps. Thinking a sparrow was caught inside, I ran to
guide the bird out. But those peeps were not from a sparrow; they arose
from Daffodil’s corner. Adjusting my eyes, I peered down into the dark place
where Daffodil was, and there I beheld the source of the tiny voice - a little
yellow face with dark bright eyes was peeking out of her feathers.

I kneeled down and stared into the face of the chick who looked intently
back at me, before it hid itself, then peeked out again. I looked closely into
Daffodil’s face as well, knowing from experience that making direct eye
contact with chickens is crucial to forming a trusting, friendly relationship
with them. If chickens see people only from the standpoint of boots and
shoes, and people don’t look them in the eye and talk to them, no bond of
friendship will be formed between human and bird.

I’ve seen this difference expressed between hens we’ve adopted into our
sanctuary from an egg production facility, for example, and chickens
brought to us as young birds or as someone’s former pet. Former egg-
industry hens tend to look back at me, not with that sharp, bright, direct
focus of a fully confident chicken, but with a watchful opacity that no doubt
in part reflects their having spent their entire previous lives in cages or on
crowded floors in dark, polluted buildings that permanently affected their
eyes before coming to our sanctuary. Psychologically, it’s as if they’ve
pulled down a little curtain between themselves and human beings that

46
does not prevent friendship but infuses their recovery with a settled strain
of fear. I’ll say more about these hens presently.

From the very first, a large red rooster named Francis regularly visited
Daffodil and her chick in their nesting place, and Daffodil acted happy and
content to have him there. Frequently, I found him quietly sitting with her
and the little chick, who scrambled around both of them, in and out of their
feathers. Though roosters will mate with more than one hen in the flock, a
rooster and a hen will also form bonds so strong that they will refuse to
mate with anyone else. Could it be that Francis was the father of this chick
and that he and Daffodil knew it? He certainly was uniquely and intimately
involved with the pair, and it wasn’t as though he was the head of the
flock, the one who oversaw all of the hens and the other roosters and was
thus fulfilling his duty in that role. Rather, Francis seemed simply to be a
member of this particular family. For the rest of the summer, Daffodil and
her chick formed a kind of enchanted circle with an inviolable space all
around themselves, as they roamed together in the yard, undisturbed by
the other chickens. Not once did I see Francis or any of the other roosters
try to mate with Daffodil during the time she was raising her frisky chick -
the little one I named Daisy who grew up to be Sir Daisy, a large, handsome
rooster with white and golden-brown feathers.

My Relationship with the Hens in Our Sanctuary

The industry must convey the message that hens are distinct from
companion species to defuse the misperceptions. - Simon Shane, Editor,
Egg Industry

The poultry industry represents chickens bred for food as mentally

vacuous, eviscerated organisms. Hens bred for commercial egg production
are said to be suited to a caged environment, with no need for personal
space or normal foraging and social activity. They are characterized as
aggressive cannibals who, notwithstanding their otherwise mindless
passivity and affinity for cages, cannot live together in a cage without first
having a portion of their sensitive beaks burned off - otherwise, it is said,
they will tear each other up. Similarly, the instinct to tend and fuss over
her eggs and be a mother has been rooted out of these hens (so it is
claimed), and the idea of one’s having a social relationship with such hens
is dismissed as silly sentimentalism. I confess I have yet to meet a single
example of these so-called cannibalistic cage-loving birds.

Over the years, we have adopted hundreds of “egg-type” hens into our
sanctuary straight from the cage environment, which is all they ever knew
until they were rescued and placed gently on the ground where they felt
the earth next to their bodies for the first time in their lives. To watch a
little group of nearly featherless hens with naked necks and mutilated
beaks respond to this experience is deeply moving. Because their bones
have never been properly exercised and their toenails are long and spindly
for never having scratched vigorously in the ground, some hens take a few
days or longer learning to walk normally and fly up to a perch and settle on
it securely, but their desire to do these things is evident from the time they
arrive.

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Chickens released from a long siege in a cage and placed on the ground
almost invariably start making the tentative, increasingly vigorous gestures
of taking a dustbath. They paddle and fling the dirt with their claws, rake in
particles of earth with their beaks, fluff up their feathers, roll on their
sides, pause from time to time with their eyes closed, and stretch out their
legs in obvious relish at being able to bask luxuriously and satisfy their
urge to clean themselves and to be clean.

Carefully lifting a battered hen, who has never known anything before but
brutal handling, out of a transport carrier and placing her on the ground to
begin taking her first real dustbath (as opposed to the “vacuum” dustbaths
hens try to perform in a cage) is a gesture from which a trusting
relationship between human and bird grows. If hens were flowers, it would
be like watching a flower unfold, or in the case of a little flock of hens set
carefully on the ground together, a little field of flowers transforming
themselves from withered stalks into blossoms. For chickens, dustbathing
is not only a cleansing activity; it is also a social gathering. Typically, one
hen begins the process and is quickly joined by other hens and maybe one
or two roosters. Soon the birds are buried so deep in their dustbowls that
only the moving tail of a rooster or an outspread wing can be seen a few
feet away. Eventually, one by one, the little flock emerges from their ritual
entrancement all refreshed. Each bird stands up, vigorously shakes the dirt
particles out of his or her feathers, creating a fierce little dust storm before
running off to the next engaging activity.

Early on as I began forming our sanctuary and organization in the 1980s, I

drove one day from Maryland to New York to pick up seven former battery-
caged hens. Instead of crating them in the car, I allowed them to sit
together in the back seat on towels, so they wouldn’t be cramped yet again
in a dark enclosure, unable to see out the windows or to see me. Also, I
wanted to watch them through my rearview mirror and talk to them.

Once their flutter of anxiety and fear had subsided, the hens sat quietly in
the car, occasionally standing up to stretch a leg or a wing, all the while
peering out from under their pale and pendulous combs (the bright red
crest on top of chickens’ heads grows abnormally long, flaccid and
yellowish-white in the cage environment) as I drove and spoke to them of
the life awaiting. Then an astonishing thing happened. The most naked and
pitiful looking hen began making her way slowly from the back seat, across
the passenger seat separator, toward me. She crawled onto my knee and
settled herself in my lap for the remainder of the trip.

The question has been asked whether chickens can form intentions. Do
they have “intentionality”? Do they consciously formulate purposes and
carry them out? In the rearview mirror I watched Bonnie, that ravaged little
hen, make a difficult yet beeline trip from the backseat of the car into my
lap. Reliving the scene in my mind, I see her journey as her intention to
reach me. Once she obtained her objective, she rested without further
incident.

Intentionality in chickens is shown in many ways. An example is a hen’s

desire not only to lay an egg, but to lay her egg in a particular place with a
particular group of hens, or in a secluded spot she has chosen - and she has
definitely chosen it. I’ve watched hens delay laying their egg until they got

48
where they wanted to be. Conscious or not at the outset, once the intention
has been formed, the hen is consciously and emotionally committed to
accomplishing it. No other interpretation of her behavior makes sense by
comparison. Sarah, for example, a white leghorn hen from a battery-cage
egg-laying operation who came to our sanctuary with osteoporosis and a
broken leg, was determined, as she grew stronger, to climb the front stairs
of our house, one laborious step at a time, just so that she could lay her
egg behind the toilet in the bathroom next to the second floor landing. This
was a hen, remember, who had never known anything before in her life but
a crowded metal cage among thousands of cages in a windowless building.
I was Sarah’s friendly facilitator. I cheered her on, and the interest I
showed in her and her wishes and successes was a critical part of her
recovery, both physical and mental.

These days in the morning when I unhook the door of the little house in
which eight hens and Sir Valery Valentine the rooster spend the night,
brown Josephine runs alongside me and dashes ahead down to the Big
House where she waits in a state of eager anticipation while I unlatch the
door to let the birds who are eagerly assembled on the other side of that
door out into the yard. Out they rush, and in goes Josephine, straight to the
favorite spot shaped by herself and her friends into a comfy nest atop three
stacked bales of straw that, envisioned in her mind’s eye, she was
determined to get to. Why else, unless she remembered the place and her
experience in it with anticipatory pleasure, would she be determined day
after day to repeat the episode?

In her mind’s eye as well is my own role in her morning ritual. I hold the
Keys to the little straw Kingdom Josephine is eager to reenter, and she
accompanies me trustingly and expectantly as we make our way toward it.
Likewise, our hen Charity knew that I held the keys to the cellar where she
laid her eggs for years in a pile of books in a cabinet beside a table I
worked at. Unlike Josephine, Charity wanted to lay her egg in a private
place, free of the fussing of hens gathered together and sharing their nest,
often accompanied by a rooster boisterously crowing the egg-laying news
amid the cacophony of cackles. Charity didn’t mind my presence in the
cellar. She seemed to like me sitting there, each of us intent on our silent
endeavor. If the cellar door was closed, blocking her way to the basement
when she was ready to lay her egg, she would pace back and forth in front
of the window on the opposite side of the house where I sat at my desk
facing the window. If I didn’t respond quickly enough, she’d start pecking
at the window with an increasing bang to get me to move. By the time I ran
up the steps and opened the cellar door, she’d already be standing there,
having raced around the house as soon as she saw me get up. Down the
cellar steps she’d trip, jump into the cabinet, and settle as still as a statue
in her book nook. After she had laid her egg and spent a little time with it,
she let me know she was ready to go back outside, running up the steps to
the landing where she waited until I opened the door, and out she went.

Do events like these suggest that the chickens regard me as a chicken like
themselves? I don’t really think so, other than perhaps when they are
motherless chicks and I am their sole provider and protector, similar to the
way children raised by wolves imprint on and behave like wolves. I see the
ability of chickens to bond with me and be endearingly companionable as
an extension of their ability to adapt their native instincts to habitats and
human-created environments that stimulate their natural ability to perceive

49
analogies and fit what they find where they happen to be to the fulfillment
of their own needs and desires.

The inherently social nature of chickens enables them to socialize

successfully with a variety of other species and to form bonds of
interspecies affection. Having adopted into our sanctuary many
incapacitated young chickens from the “broiler” chicken (meat) industry, I
know how quickly they learn to recognize me and my voice and their own
names. They twitter and chirp when I talk to them, and they turn their
heads to watch me moving about or away from them. Living in the house
until they are well enough to go outside if they ever can, they quickly learn
the cues I provide that signify their comfort and care and establish their
personal identity.

This is not to suggest that chickens are unlimitedly malleable. Mother hens
and their embryos have a genetic repertoire of communications that are
too subtle for humans to decipher entirely, let alone imitate. Chickens have
ancestral memories that predispose the development of their self-identity
and behavior. Even chickens incubated in mechanical hatcheries and
deprived of parental influence - virtually all of the birds at our sanctuary -
behave like chickens in essential ways. For instance, they all follow the sun
around the yard. They all sunbathe, dropping to the ground and lying on
their sides with one wing outspread, then turning over and spreading out
the other wing while raising their neck feathers to allow the warm sunlight
and vitamin D to penetrate their skin. Similar to dustbathing, sunbathing is
a social as well as a healthful activity for chickens, where you see one bird
drop to the ground where the sun is shining, followed by another and then
another, and if you don’t know what they are doing, you will think they had
died the way they lie still with their eyes closed, flopped like mops under
the sun.

I’m aware when I am in the yard with them that the chickens are constantly
sending, receiving and responding to many signals that elude me. They also
exhibit a clear sense of distinction between themselves, as chickens, and
the three ducks, two turkeys and peacock Frankencense who share their
sanctuary space. And they definitely know the difference between
themselves and their predators, such as foxes and hawks, whose proximity
raises a sustained alarm through the entire flock. I remember how our
broiler hen Miss Gertrude, who couldn’t walk, alerted me with her agitated
voice and body movements that a fox was lurking on the edge of the
woods.

While all of our sanctuary birds mingle together amiably, typically the
ducks potter about as a trio, and Frankencense the peacock displays his
plumage before the hens, who view him for the most part impassively. The
closest interspecies relationship I’ve observed among our birds is between
the chickens and the turkeys.

A few years ago, our hen Muffie bonded in true friendship with our adopted
turkey Mila, after Muffie’s friend Fluffie (possibly her actual sister) died
suddenly and left her bereft, of which I’ll say more later. Right from the
start, Muffie and Mila shared a quiet affection, foraging together and
sometimes preening each other very delicately. One of their favorite rituals
was in the evenings when I changed their water and ran the hose in their

50
bowls. Together, Muffie and Mila would follow the tiny rivulets along the
ground, drinking as they went, Muffie darting and drinking like a brisk
brown fairy, Mila dreamily swaying and sipping, piping her intermittent
flute notes.

Notwithstanding, I don’t think Muffie ever thought of herself as a “turkey”

in her relationship with Mila, and I doubt very much that chickens bonded
with humans experience themselves as “human,” particularly when other
chickens are nearby - out of sight maybe, but not out of earshot. (Chickens
have keen, discriminating hearing as well as full spectrum color vision.
Chick embryos have been shown to distinguish the crow of a rooster from
other sounds from inside their shells.)

Chickens in my experience have a core identity and sense of themselves as

chickens. An example is a chick I named Fred, sole survivor of a classroom
hatching project in which embryos were mechanically incubated. Fred was
so large, loud and demanding from the moment he set foot in our kitchen, I
assumed he’d grow up to be a rooster. He raced up and down the hallway,
hopped up on my shoulder, leapt to the top of my head, ran across my
back, down my arm and onto the floor when I was at the computer, and was
generally what you’d call “pushy,” but adorably so. I remember one day
putting Fred outdoors in an enclosure with a few adult hens on the ground,
and he flew straight up the tree to a branch, peeping loudly, apparently
wanting no part of them.

“Fred” grew into a lustrously beautiful black hen whom I renamed

Freddaflower. Often we’d sit on the sofa together at night while I watched
television or read. Even by herself, Freddaflower liked to perch on the arm
of the sofa in front of the TV when it was on, suggesting she liked to be
there because it was our special place. She ran up and down the stairs to
the second floor as she pleased, and often I would find her in the
guestroom standing prettily in front of the full-length mirror preening her
feathers and observing herself. She appeared to be fully aware that it was
she herself she was looking at in the mirror. I’d say to her, “Look,
Freddaflower - that’s you! Look how pretty you are!” And she seemed
already to know that.

Freddaflower loved for me to hold her and pet her. She demanded to be
picked up. She would close her eyes and purr while I stroked her feathers
and kissed her face. From time to time, I placed her outside in the chicken
yard, and sometimes she ventured out on her own, but she always came
back. Eventually I noticed she was returning to me less and less, and for
shorter periods. One night she elected to remain in the chicken house with
the flock. From then on until she died of ovarian cancer in my arms two
years later, Freddaflower expressed her ambivalence of wanting to be with
me but also wanting to be with the other hens, to socialize and nest with
them and participate in their world and the reliving of ancestral
experiences that she carried within herself.

My Relationship with the Roosters in Our Sanctuary

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A less happy ambivalence appeared in a soft-colored gray and white rooster
I named Ruby when he was brought to our sanctuary as a young bird by a
girl who swore he was a hen. Following me about the house on his brisk
little legs, even sleeping beside me on my pillow at night, Ruby grew up to
be a rooster. In spite of our close relationship during his first months of
life, once he became sexually mature, Ruby’s attitude toward me changed.
In the yard with the other chickens, he showed no disposition to fight. He
didn’t attack other birds or provoke antagonisms. He fit in with the existing
flock of hens and roosters, but toward me and other people he became
compulsively aggressive. As soon as I (or anyone) appeared in the yard,
Ruby ran from wherever he was and physically attacked us. Having to work
in the yard under his vigilant eye, I took to carrying a bottomless birdcage
and placing it over him while I worked. When finished I would lift it off him
and walk backward toward the gate with the birdcage in front of me as a
shield.

What I saw taking place in Ruby was a conflict he couldn’t control, and from
which he suffered emotionally, between an autonomous genetic impulse on
the one hand, and his personal desire on the other to be friendly with me.
He got to where when he saw me coming with the birdcage, he would walk
right up and let me place it over him as if grateful for my protection against
a behavior he didn’t want to carry out. Even more tellingly, he developed a
syndrome of coughs and sneezes whenever I approached, symptomatic, I
believed, of his inner turmoil. He didn’t have a respiratory infection, and
despite his antagonism toward me, I never felt that he hated me but rather
that he suffered from his dilemma, including his inability to manage it.

My personal experience with our sanctuary roosters confirms the literature

I’ve read about wild and feral chickens documenting that the majority of
roosters do not physically and compulsively attack one another. Chickens
maintain a social order in which every member of the flock has a place and
finds a place. During the day our roosters and hens break up into small,
fluctuating groups that are somewhat, but by no means, rigidly territorial.
Antagonisms between roosters are resolved with bloodless showdowns and
face-offs. The most notable exception is when a new rooster is introduced
into an existing flock, which may provoke a temporary flare up, but even
then, there is no predicting.

Last year I placed newcomer Benjamin in a yard already occupied by two

other roosters, Rhubarb and Oliver and their twenty or so hens, and he fit in
right away. Ruby won immediate acceptance when I put him outside in the
chickenyard after living in the house with me for almost six months. In
dealing with Ruby I found an unexpected ally in our large red rooster Pola,
who was so attentive to me, all I had to do was call him, and he bolted over
from his hens and let me pick him up and hold him. I have a greeting card
photograph of Pola and me “crowing” together, my one hand clasped over
his swelled-out chest, my other hand holding his claw, in a duet I captioned
“With Heart and Voice.”

Playfully, I got into the habit of yelling “Pola, Help!” whenever Ruby acted
like he was ready to come after me, which worked as well as the birdcage.
Hearing my call, Pola would perk up, race over to where Ruby was about to
charge, and run him off with such cheerful alacrity it was as if he knew this
was our little game together. I’d always say, “Thank you, Pola, thank you!”

52
and he acted very pleased with his performance and the praise I lavished on
him for “saving” me. He stuck out his chest, stretched up his neck, flapped
his wings vigorously, and crowed triumphantly a few times.

Roosters crow to announce their accomplishments. Even after losing a

skirmish, a rooster will often crow as if to compensate for his loss or deny
its importance or call it a draw. Last summer as I sat reading outside with
the chickens, I was diverted by our two head roosters, Rhubarb and Sir
Valery Valentine, crowing back and forth at each other in their respective
yards just a few feet apart. It looked like Sir Valery was intentionally
crossing a little too far into Rhubarb’s territory, and Rhubarb kept dashing
at him to reinforce the boundary. There was not a hint of hostility between
them; rather the contest, I decided as I watched them go at it, was being
carried out as a kind of spirited mock ritual, in which each rooster rushed at
the other, only to halt abruptly on his own side of the invisible buffer zone
they apparently had agreed upon. At that point, each rooster paced up and
down on his own side, steadily eyeing the other bird and crowing at him
across the divide. After ten minutes or so, they each backed off and were
soon engrossed in other activities.

Roosters are so energetic and solicitous toward their hens, so intensely

focused on every aspect of their social life together that one of the saddest
things to see is a rooster in a state of decline due to age, illness or both. An
aging or ailing rooster who can no longer hold his own in the flock suffers
severely. He droops, and I have even heard a rooster cry over his loss of
place and prestige within his flock. This is what happened to our rooster
Jules - “Gentleman Jules,” as my husband fondly named him - who came to
our sanctuary in the following way.

One day I received a phone call from the resident of an apartment building
outside Washington, DC, saying that a rooster was loose in the complex and
was being chased by children who were throwing stones at him. After two
weeks of trying, she managed to lure the rooster into the laundry room and
called me to come get him. Expecting to find a cowering and emaciated
creature needing to be carefully lifted out of a corner, I discovered instead
a bright-eyed perky, chatty little fellow with glossy black feathers like
Freddaflower. I drove him to our sanctuary and set him outside with the
flock, which at the time included our large white broiler rooster Henry, and
our feisty bantam rooster, Bantu, who loved nothing better than sitting in
the breeze under the trees with his two favorite large brown hens, Nadia
and Nadine.

Jules was a sweet-natured rooster, warm and affectionate to the core. He

was a natural leader, and the hens loved him. Our dusky brown hen Petal,
whom we’d adopted from another sanctuary, was especially devoted to
Jules. Petal had curled gnarly toes, which didn’t stop her from whisking
away from anyone she didn’t want to come near her; otherwise she sat still
watching everything, especially Jules. Petal never made a sound; she didn’t
cluck like most hens - except when Jules left her side a little too long. Then
all of a sudden, the silent and immobile hen with the watchful eye let out a
raucous SQUAWK, SQUAWK, SQUAWK, that didn’t stop until Jules had lifted
his head up from whatever he was doing, and muttering to himself, ran
over to comfort his friend.

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Two years after coming to live with us, Jules developed a respiratory
infection that with treatment seemed to go away, but left him weak and
vulnerable. He returned to the chickenyard only to find himself supplanted
by Glippie, with whom he had used to be cordial, but was now dueling, and
he didn’t have the heart or strength for it. His exuberance ebbed out of him
and he became sad; there is no other word for the total condition of
mournfulness he showed. His voice, which had always been cheerful,
changed to moaning tones of woe. He banished himself to the outer edges
of the chickenyard where he paced up and down, bawling so loudly I could
hear him crying from inside the house. I brought him in with me and sought
to comfort my beloved bird, who showed by his whole demeanor that knew
he was dying and was hurt through and through by what he had become.
Jules developed an abdominal tumor. One morning our veterinarian placed
him gently on the floor of his office after a final and futile overnight stay.
Jules looked up at me from the floor and let out a low groan of “ooooohh” so
broken that it pierced me through. I am pierced by it now, remembering the
sorrow expressed by this dear sweet creature, “Gentleman Jules,” who had
loved his life and his hens and was leaving it all behind.

My Experience of Empathy and Affection in Chickens

I perceive in your literature the proposal that chickens be treated as pets. I

have been involved with many thousands of chickens and turkeys and I
don’t think they are good pets, although it is evident that almost any
vertebrate may be trained to come for food. - Thomas Jukes in a letter to
the author, 1992

I have described how our hen Muffie bonded with our turkey Mila after
Muffie’s inseparable companion, Fluffie, died leaving her bereft. Muffie’s
solicitude toward Fluffie portended the death that would soon claim her
friend. Like Jules, Fluffie developed an infection that treatment had seemed
to heal, but she never fully recovered. One day, I looked out the kitchen
window and saw Muffie straddled on top of Fluffie with her wings extended
over her. I called my husband to come take a look at this moving and yet
disturbing scene. We saw it repeated several times over the next few days.

On a late afternoon, I went outside to put Muffie and Fluffie in for the night
but found them already in their house in the straw. Fluffie stood drooping
with her head and tail curved toward the ground and Muffie stood
motionless beside her. I rushed Fluffie to the veterinarian and brought her
home with medicine, but she died that same night in the small bedroom
where she and Muffie had liked to perch on top of the bookcase in front of
the big window overlooking the yard.

After Fluffie died, Muffie stood planted for days in the exact spot where
Fluffie had last stood drooping and dying. Now, Muffie drooped in her
place. She no longer scampered into the woods or came bursting into the
kitchen to jump up on the sink and peck holes in the sponge floating on top
of the dishwater. She was not interested in me or the other chickens. Two
weeks of this dejection and I said, “We must get Muffie a new sister.” That
is how Petal, who had loved Jules, came to live in our sanctuary. The minute
Petal appeared, Muffie lost her torpor and became a bustling “police miss,”
picking on Petal and patrolling everything Petal did until finally the two
hens became amiable, but they were never pals.

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Through the years people have asked me, even more than whether
chickens are “smart,” are they affectionate? - toward people, they
particularly want to know. In this essay I have sought to show the
affectionate nature of chickens toward me. Because I don’t just feed them
but I also talk to them and look them in the eye and express my feelings for
them, the birds at our sanctuary gather around me and stand there
serenely preening themselves or sit quietly on the ground next to my chair
while I read and chat with them.

Chickens represented by the poultry industry as incapable of friendship

with humans have rested in my lap with their eyes closed as peacefully as
sleeping babies, and as I have noted, they quickly learn their names. A little
white hen from the egg industry named Karla became so friendly, all I had
to do was call out “Karla!” and she would break through the other hens and
head straight toward me, knowing she’d be scooped off the ground and
kissed on her sweet face and over her closed eyes. And I can still see Vicky,
our large white hen from a “broiler breeder” operation, whose right eye
had been knocked out, peeking around the corner of her house each time I
shouted, “Vicky, what are you doing in there?” And there was Henry,
likewise from a broiler breeder operation, who came to our sanctuary dirty
and angry after falling out of a truck on the way to a slaughter plant.
Lavished with my attention, Henry, who at first couldn’t bear to be
touched, became as pliant and lovable as a big shaggy dog. I couldn’t resist
wrestling him to the ground with bearish hugs, and his joy at being placed
in a garden where he could eat all the tomatoes he wanted was expressed
in groans of ecstasy. He was like, “Are all these riches of food and affection
really for me?”

One of my most poignant memories is of a large black, beautiful hen I

named Mavis. Mavis had been dropped off at a shelter by a man who’d
exhibited her at agricultural fairs. She must have spent her whole life
immobilized on the floor of a cage with a keeper who treated her like an
object. During her first two weeks at our sanctuary, Mavis could not even
stand up without crumbling to the ground, and she was deeply shy and
inexpressive. In the chickenyard she sat alone by the fence and poked
around a little by herself without showing or attracting interest. I saw no
sign that she was ever going to recover from the emotional and sensory
deprivation of her previous life.

During this time, we had three adult broiler hens - Bella Mae, Alice, and
Florence. They were the opposite of Mavis. All I had to do was crouch down
in the yard, and here comes one of my Three Graces, as I called them, Bella
Mae for example, bumping up against me with her ample breast for an
embrace. Immediately, Alice and Florence would hastily plod over on their
heavy feet to participate in the embracement ceremony. Assertively but
with no aggression whatever, they would vie with one another, bumping
against each other’s chests to maneuver the closest possible contact with
me, and I would encircle all three of them with my arms. One day as we
were doing this, I looked up and saw Mavis just a few feet away, staring at
us. The next time, the same thing happened. There was Mavis with her
melancholy eyes watching me hugging the three white hens. And then it
struck me - Mavis wants to be hugged. I withdrew from the hens, walked

55
over and knelt beside Mavis and pulled her gently toward me. It didn’t take
much. She rested against me in a completeness of comfort that seemed to
include her gratitude that her shy desire had been understood.

In my first years of keeping chickens there were no predators, until a fox

found us, and we built our fences - but only after eleven chickens
disappeared rapidly under our nose. The fox would sneak up in broad
daylight, raising a clamor among the birds. Running out of the house I’d
see no stalker, just sometimes a soul-stabbing bunch of feathers on the
ground in the midst of panic. When our bantam rooster Josie was taken, his
companion Alexandra ran shrieking through the kitchen, jumped up on a
table and could not stop shrieking and was never the same afterward. The
fox killed Pola, our big red rooster who had so gallantly responded to my
calls begging him to “save” me from Ruby. I am sure he was attacked while
trying to protect his hens the day he disappeared, while I sat obliviously at
the computer. It was too much. I sat on the kitchen floor crying and
screaming. At the time, I was caring for Sonja, a big white warm-natured,
bouncy hen I was treating for wounds she’d received before I rescued her.
As I sat on the floor exploding with grief and guilt, Sonja walked over to
where I sat weeping. She nestled her face next to mine and began purring
with the ineffable soft purr that is also a trill in chickens. She comforted me
even as her gesture deepened the heartache I was feeling in that moment
about the painful mystery of Pola and the mystery of all chickens. Did Sonja
know why I was crying? I doubt it, but maybe she did. Did she know that I
was terribly sad and distressed? There is no question in my mind about
that. She responded to my grief with an expression of empathy that I have
carried emotionally in my life ever since.

It is experiences such as this and others I have described in this essay that
have made me a passionate advocate for chickens. I do not seek to
sentimentalize chickens but to characterize them as best I can within the
purview of my own observations and relationships with them. In the 1980s I
wrote an essay about an abandoned crippled broiler hen named Viva who,
more than any other single cause, led me to found United Poultry Concerns
in 1990. It is hard for me to evoke in words how expressive she was in spite
of her handicap and despite the miserable life she had had before I lifted
her out of her misery and brought her home with me.

My experience with chickens for more than twenty years has shown me that
chickens are conscious and emotional beings with adaptable sociability and
a range of intentions and personalities. If there is one trait above all that
leaps to my mind in thinking about chickens when they are enjoying their
lives and pursuing their own interests, it is cheerfulness. Chickens are
cheerful birds, quite vocally so, and when they are dispirited and
oppressed, their entire being expresses this state of affairs as well. The
fact that chickens become lethargic in continuously barren environments,
instead of proving that they are stupid or impassive by nature, shows how
sensitive these birds are to their surroundings, deprivations and prospects.
Likewise, when chickens are happy, their sense of wellbeing resonates
unmistakably.

Karen Davis, PhD is the president and founder of United Poultry Concerns,
a nonprofit organization dedicated to the compassionate and respectful

56
treatment of domestic fowl. She’s the editor of UPC’s quarterly magazine
Poultry Press and the author of several books including Prisoned Chickens,
Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry (1996;
Revised Edition 2009), More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth,
Ritual and Reality, and The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale: A Case for
Comparing Atrocities. Karen maintains a sanctuary for chickens, turkeys
and ducks on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

By Karen Davis, PhD, President & Founder of United Poultry Concerns

“A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.” – Samuel Butler

Buried in the trees behind the fence at the back of our yard, there was a
chicken house which opened onto the cow pasture on the other side. It
belonged to our landlady. When we first rented the place, I used to pass by
it regularly on my way to the pond at the bottom of the pasture slope. A
ramshackle structure made of wood with a door latch tied shut with a
string, the chicken house sat low on the pasture side under the sky,
surrounded by broken pieces of old farm equipment scattered and piled
every which way. Approached from the overgrown garden path, it rested
among flickering shadows of yellow and green leaves, with shafts of
sunlight and small breezes filtering through. When we first moved in it was
empty, and I, a lifelong suburbanite, gave scarce thought to what manner
of life it had housed before our
coming. Peering through the dusky screen at the garden end, I could see a
compacted dirt floor with a large metal cylinder in the middle, and over at
the far end, a low shelf crammed to the roof with junk. Stray wisps of white
feathers lay about, some lifted up by the breeze.

One July day on my way to the pond I stopped short. Through the leaves, I
thought I saw white forms moving around on the other side of the screen.
Listening, I thought I heard voices. A moment later I was staring through
the screen. White, young-looking chickens covered the ground. Several,
when they saw me, came over and sank down in front of me. Back then I
knew almost nothing about chickens, but I could see that their legs weren’t
right. They tended to be thick and swollen with the toes curling inward and
outward in odd sorts of ways. Many could barely make their way to the
metal feeder which stood at a considerable distance, under the
circumstances, from the water trough rigged up along one wall. A few
fumbling steps and they would sink down on their broad, heavy breasts,
their eyes peering at me.

[“Fleshly bodies of broiler chickens grow heavy so quickly that

development of their bones and joints can’t keep up. . . . Many of these

57
animals crouch or hobble about in pain on flawed feet and legs.” – Jim
Mason & Peter Singer, Animal Factories]

From then on I used to visit the chickens almost every day, wondering
dimly as to their ultimate fate. One morning in late August I went out to see
them as usual. Only, this time the place was deserted. Then I saw her.
[“When you choose a career in the poultry industry you may not see a
chicken or an egg or a turkey – except at
mealtime.” – Careers in the Poultry Industry: A Job is Ready When You Are].

She was stumbling around over by the feed cylinder on the far side where
the low shelf piled with junk made everything dark. A shaft of sunlight had
caught her, but by the time I was able to get inside she had scrunched
herself deep in the far corner underneath the shelf against the wall. She
shrank as I reached in to gather her up and lift her out of there. I held her
in my lap stroking her feathers and looked at her. She was small and looked
as if she had never been in the sun. Her feathers and legs and beak were
brownstained with dirt and feces and dust. Her eyes were as lusterless as
the rest of her, and her feet and legs were deformed. I let her go and she
hobbled back to the corner where she must have spent the summer, coming
out only to eat and drink. She had managed to escape being trampled to
death, unlike the chicken I had found some weeks earlier stretched out and
pounded into the dirt.

I made her a bed by the stove, close to our kitchen table. We named her
Viva. Neurotically adapted to corners by now, Viva would hide her head in
whatever closest corner she could find inside the house, or if outside she
would often stick her head under a bush or pile of cut grass and just stay
that way. Despite this, she liked to be outdoors. To see her sitting among
the bright leaves scattered over the grass in the autumn sunshine, you
would not have guessed what her legs and feet were like. Yet she liked to
move around. When we first had her she used to cover a surprisingly wide
territory in spite of her hardship, for though crippled, she was quick, and I
would sometimes catch her hobbling vigorously to some point or other
straight across the yard with her little wings fluttering.

She used her wings for balance in order to get about. To steady herself,
and to keep from falling, she would spread them out so that the feather
ends touched the ground, and standing thus, she would totter from side to
side in a painstaking adjustment before going ahead. Much of her energy
was spent upon this procedure every other step or so.

At first I hoped that exercise would help strengthen her legs, but as her
body grew bigger they got worse. Often I would find her sitting with them
spread out on either side of her, and sometimes they would even get
caught in her wings, causing her terrible confusion and distress. One day I
noticed that certain parts of her legs and feet were a greenish-blue, and
wondered if she had some disease. I’d been thinking lately that even if she
were not in actual physical pain, which I wasn’t sure of, she was still in
some kind of acute misery, for she acted as though she was. She hid her
face in corners more and more as the weeks went by, and ordinary efforts
like
eating and turning around were increasingly done with a commotion which
left her exhausted.

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One of the most touching things about Viva was her voice. She would
always talk to me with her frail “peep peep” which never got any louder
and seemed to come from somewhere in the center of her body which
pulsed her tail at precisely the same time. Also, rarely, she gave a little
trill. Often after one of her ordeals, I would sit talking to her, stroking her
beautiful back and her feet that were so soft between the toes and on the
bottoms, and she would carry on the dialogue with me, her tail feathers
twitching in a kind of unison with each of her utterances.

I decided to have her looked at, so I made an appointment and on a

Saturday morning took her in a bed of straw in a cardboard box to the
veterinarian’s office an hour away.

The veterinarian asked briskly, was this some sort of pet, what was it? No, I
said, not exactly – Viva was our companion, she had been abandoned and
she lived with us in our house. The veterinarian looked at me. She said,
“Most people would not care what happened to a chicken.”

She spread out Viva’s wings and showed me that the undersides were black
and blue like the blotches in her legs and feet. She said that because of her
struggle with her condition, Viva’s body was full of wounds, inside as well
as out. I asked, what is her condition? And she said Viva suffered from a
congenital leg defect, called splay foot, an inborn weakness in her joints
typical of birds bred for the modern food industry. [“Dramatic changes
have taken place within the industry. Instead of ‘scratching for their food,’
today’s pampered chickens are the products of advanced science and
technology.” – Careers in the Poultry Industry: A Job is Ready When You
Are]. She said Viva should be euthanized and that she would use an
inhalant, which is more gentle than the usual leg injection. She had to look
in on another animal just now which would give me time to spend a last few
minutes alone with my friend.

I pulled up a chair next to the box on the table with

Viva in it. Just then a young veterinary aid rushed in,
“Where is it? Can I see it? I’ve never seen a
chicken,” she said making for the table. She left. I
thought my heart would burst. Viva was very
peaceful, and when I spoke to her she piped back in
the way that she had, her little tail pulsing its perky
beats, from somewhere inside.

The veterinarian took Viva away. Later, as I was

leaving, she said that Viva would not die fast enough
so she had to use a leg injection after all. She thanked me for caring about
a chicken. I placed Viva in the car on the front seat beside me. The box in
which she had travelled alive she was carried home dead in. My husband
and I dug a hole in the corner of the yard and laid her inside. We covered
her up with the dirt. I made a note on the inside cover of my dictionary: On
Saturday, November 28, 1985, soft Viva died.

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Chickens Raised for Meat

Chickens are cheerful, vibrant, sociable birds who evolved in the forests of
India and Southeast Asia. Chickens mass-produced for food never feel the
sun or soft grass or see the sky overhead. They never know the comfort of
a mother hen’s wing or the pleasure of parenting their young. Every day in
North America and throughout the world,
hundreds of millions of chickens are forced to live in filth and fear and are
brutally slaughtered. As a result of genetic manipulation for overgrown
muscle tissue of the breast and thighs, chickens suffer miserably from
painful lameness. They suffer from gastrointestinal disorders, blood
diseases, and chronic respiratory infections. The parents of these birds are
kept in darkness on semi-starvation diets designed to reduce the mating
infirmities that result from breeding chickens to grow too large too fast.

During their six weeks of life, “broiler” chickens – soft young chickens just
like Viva – live in semi-
darkness on manure-drenched wood shavings, unchanged through several
flocks of 30,000 to 50,000 or more birds in a single shed. The ammonia
causes chickens to develop a blinding eye disease called
ammonia burn. So painful is this disease that afflicted birds rub their
hurting eyes with their wings and let out cries of pain.

“Broiler” chickens are crowded by the thousands in long dark sheds

contaminated with Salmonella,
Listeria and Campylobacter bacteria and Avian
Influenza viruses. Poultry products are the main source of food poisoning in
the home and a leading cause of arthritis in consumers.

Catching, Transport, and Slaughter

At six to twelve weeks old, chickens are violently cornered and grabbed by
catching crews and carried upside down by their
legs – struggling, flapping, and crying – to the transport truck.

At the slaughterhouse, the chickens are torn from the cages and hung
upside down on a conveyer belt. As they move toward the killing knife, they
are dragged through an electrical current that paralyzes their muscles but
Does Not Stun Them. Chickens are intentionally kept alive through the
slaughter process so their hearts will continue to beat and pump out blood.

“The chickens hang there and look at you while they are bleeding. They try
to hide their head from you by sticking it under the wing of the chicken
next to them on the slaughter line. You can tell by them looking at you,
they’re scared to death.” – Virgil Butler, former Tyson chicken
slaughterhouse worker in Grannis, Arkansas.

Millions of chickens are alive, conscious and breathing not only as their
throats are being cut but afterwards, when they are plunged into scalding
water to remove their feathers. In the scalder, “the chickens scream, kick,
and their eyeballs pop out of their heads,” said Virgil Butler. The industry

60
calls these birds “redskins” – birds who were scalded while they were still
alive.

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