Chickens and Eggs and the Stories We’re Sold
24 Jun
Esperanza with a statue of Buddha at Animal Acres
During the time that I was a vegetarian, I thought that no animals were killed for me to drink milk, eat cheese, and start my morning with poached eggs. I bought organic milk and cage-free or free range eggs, thinking that insured an easy and long life for the animals. Chickens lay eggs naturally as a byproduct of their menstrual cycle. So I picked up my container of eggs, feeling happy and confident that my choices were doing no harm. I didn’t realize that there was so much more to the story than what we are told. I didn’t realize that from the time we’re receiving farm toys as children until we’re adults, purchasing containers decorated in pastoral pictures, we’re being sold an image that is far from reality. What would happen if we replaced that story of Americana and told the truth? What if?
Streamers are swaying in a breeze coming through the window. Brightly colored balloons adorn a room where children are squealing and running through in cone-shaped hats. A table is straining with the load of packages dressed in pinks and yellows and baby blues. Eagerly the birthday girl rips into the paper. In handfuls, wads land on the floor, ignored. All focus is on the glimmer in her eyes, the way she holds her breath in anticipation, and the gift that is being unveiled, shred by shred. When the paper is removed, she sings out, “I got the Deluxe Egg Farm Play Set! Just like I wanted!”
Eagerly, she opens the box. She carefully removes a gray warehouse from inside, instead of a little red barn sitting in green grass. Like a dollhouse with plastic couches, fireplaces, and miniature bathtubs, this warehouse comes with small wire cages, stacked on top of each other, and formed in rows. There are about four chickens for every cage. With no room to spread a wing in their tightly-packed cages, the bodies of the little plastic chickens have purple bruises and contusions and lack feathers in spots. Because the birds have no room to move comfortably, the girl has the anxious little chickens peck at one another. A smile forms across her mom’s lips knowingly.
“Sweetheart, you need to trim the ends of the chickens’ beaks, so that they don’t hurt each other.”
The girl moves the chickens to the debeaker. She puts their beaks inside and pretends to cut through tissue, cartilage, and bone just like in real life. She then presses the beaks against shiny red paper made up to be a cauterizing blade.
“Does that hurt the chickens, Mommy?”
“Oh, it feels about like getting the end of your finger cut off,” she says nonchalantly.
Done with the job at hand, the girl looks inside the box for more.
“Where are the boys, Mommy?”
“Here they are, sweet pea,” her mother says, handing her daughter fuzzy lemon-colored male chicks that are packaged with a grinder.
“But Mommy,” protests the little girl, “I wanted a free-range chicken farm.”
“Sweetie, Mommy told you that the male chicks are killed regardless if the farm is organic or free range or your typical factory farm. It would cost too much money to keep feeding male chicks for nothing. They don’t give eggs, and they aren’t good for meat.”
With that, the girl moves the young male chicks to the grinder, moving it around until the little yellow chicks are the texture of mustard seed.
After she’s played with the set for a year, keeping the chickens in the cramped darkness, manipulating them to produce more eggs than they would naturally, and taxing their bodies until their bones are brittle and their livers are fatty, she requests the new slaughterhouse play set. She uses the chickens’ bodies for pot pies and soups, where their unsightly and unappetizing bruises are hidden from the public. Then for her next birthday, the girl asks her mom for new chicken replacements and starts over again anew.
This story, of course, is far-fetched fiction. We would never tell these horrors to our children or have them play act what today’s farming is really like. We wouldn’t let them know from where their food originated when we serve them their morning scrambled eggs. However, shouldn’t we ask ourselves if we truly feel so comfortable with the real-life situation of these chickens, why we keep perpetuating a lie, if even to ourselves?
