By Don Hall

I’m sure you’ve watched one of those documentaries about chicken farms in America, right? The ones that show in no uncertain terms the horrors of millions of chickens, all basically on top of each other in huge warehouses? The docs that let you in on the fact that “free range” only really means that the chickens have access to the outdoors whether they use it or not?

There are those chickens who only see the individual chickens around them. They believe that the society of the warehouse should be organized to both protect and provide assistance to each chicken. If a specific chicken is born weaker than the rest, it is the goal of the Chicken Code to focus energy and time to assist that chicken thus each chicken in turn is taken care of.

There are also those chickens who see the entire floor of millions, maybe billions of chickens. In that view, all chickens are exactly the same and a selfish interest is required to survive.

The ethical dilemma is presented as thus for we myriad chickens.

For the first kind of chicken, like Jesus with the Prodigal Son, the chickens most in danger are the ones that receive the most attention. You know, #ChickenLivesMatter and all that. These chickens feel the pain of the least capable, the chickens overlooked. They see that many of these chickens die from being over fed until their hearts give out from the sheer weight of the body. 

The other chickens, while not as myopic as the first, become hopelessly farsighted in their approach to all the other chickens. These chickens see the forest rather than the trees and hence the individual chickens become abstract. Just raw numbers of clucking, scratching, eating and shitting fowls. If five percent of the chickens die from Necrotic enteritis due to wet feet, whatever. It’s only five percent, right?

The most insidious thing about these two camps of chickens is that, in the end, it doesn’t matter if you are a bleeding heart chicken, invested in poultry empathy or a conservative-minded chicken, looking past the living creatures to embrace the data.

Some 9.3 billion chickens were slaughtered last year in the United States — 28 per American — and here’s how they are typically killed: Workers shove the chickens’ legs into metal shackles, and the birds are then carried upside down to an electrified bath that stuns them before a circular saw cuts open their necks and they are dunked in scalding water.

So the amount of empathy or lack of it within each chicken doesn’t much matter. The chickens are fucking lunch and that’s all they are. The only reason the chickens get their $1,200.00 stimulus checks and food stamps is to feed so they then can feed the System.

All the chickens are being overfed to be slaughtered and become chicken nuggets.