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Liberating Chickens is Finger-Lickin' Depressing

I’m against animal cruelty, yes, but then I also work too hard to eat tofu. And this is why the whole vegan argument is marooned in some unachievable Aquarian utopia. Meat is a pleasure and some pleasures are not worth questioning. Until I did this.

I love animals but that doesn’t stop them from being delicious. Basically, if someone offers me a $12 pot n’ parma, and I don’t have to be involved in making the parma, I will eat seven of those bastards because they’re tasty and I enjoy the ritual. And yes, if I stopped to think about why my parma is the size a swan and costs only $12 I’d… well, I don’t want to think about that. The fact is that if I sat around thinking about all the ways I’m contributing to universal degradation and misery I’d never get out of bed. I’m against animal cruelty, yes, but then I also work too hard to eat tofu. And this is why the whole vegan argument is marooned in some unachievable Aquarian utopia. Meat is a pleasure and some pleasures are not worth questioning.

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I have a friend named Felicity who rescues animals from factory farms. I gave her the above opinion and she missed the point and said I should come see a chicken farm. She said it’s where they produce meat chickens for Coles and Woolworths and it would be a good experience. I reminded her I was ignoring the issue and she told me I should hold beliefs with some fucking conviction like a man, and that kind of got my goat. After all, I buy the Seafood Sensation from Subway in full knowledge that I’m eating pulped fish heads, so why not add some informed weight to my chicken consumption. So eventually I said “yeah alright” and wound up in an SUV with Felicity, Tim and Daniel, all of whom are members of Animal Liberation Victoria. They tell me ALV was originally formed in 1978 to shut down battery egg farms but they’ve since branched out to all areas of animal exploitation. I point out battery farms are still all the rage and everyone sighs. “Yeah it’s slow,” says Felicity. “People have grown up with these products and that makes them reluctant to change what they buy”. I ask if she can really imagine a future in which everyone is vegan. “I don’t know”, she says. “Everyone is pretty selfish but once they really got what’s going on, and really got it—not just saw one little photo—they would be. Most people just don’t know.”

I’ll flag it now. This is an article where I expected the worst and got it. You make what you want out of it. We fumble with Google maps, pull over, jump out and Daniel, who is driving, roars away. Tim leads through a ditch and into some blackberries and then through a field with lights at the top of a hill. No one says anything. Near the top are three enormous sheds, excavated into the slope. The sheds are about 300 metres long and surrounded by a moat of smashed terracotta pipes that make a lot of noise if anyone gets close. We skirt around the smashed moat, ignore the doors (they’re padlocked) and duck beneath the awning. You know the smell of ammonia? It’s the smell of old alleyway piss and here, under the awning it punches me in the throat. The other guys are way ahead of me so I pull my jumper over my face and follow with my eyes streaming. When I catch up Tim is cutting a section of wire mesh off the wall. Felicity is putting on a white bio-hazard suit and she tells me to do the same. She explains that farmers blame ALV members for contaminating chicken facilities with outside bacteria so her and Tim suit up. I put on my suit, plastic shoes, latex gloves and painters mask and follow them through the hole.

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The shed is lit up like day. The air is hot and I’m surrounded by a billion terrified chickens doing a sort of mosh-pit crush against the wall. Tim and Felicity get to work. Their job isn’t to rescue all the birds so instead they focus on the sick ones, which aren’t hard to find. I look around and see a lot of them missing feathers and covered in shit. On the ground lie the ones that didn’t make it. Tim finds one hanging upside down with a leg stuck in the feed line and although it’s leg is snapped in half the chicken is still alive. Felicity explains that the shed is windowless and illuminated so that the chickens think it’s day 24/7 and eat more, thus turning them into regular adult chickens, while they’re actually obese infants. I take this in as supposedly negative information but don’t care. Compared to the syrupy death air, constant light is a walk in the park.

It’s very empowering to stand in a shed of doomed animals. I find that if I move up and down the isles I quickly part the crowds like Moses. If I squat down though, they come to me like Jesus. Most people have never had anything to do with a chicken and I can tell you they’re very curious. They come up to me and peck at my bio-hazard suit and for the sake of an intense life experience I make myself look in their eyes and imagine their deaths. It’s a weird feeling.

We put the sick birds into pillowcases, four of them in total and then we climb back out. The air outside is sweet and I’m very much alive but depressed. Whether or not you’re moved by cruelty, you’re probably at least moved my hygiene and there was nothing hygienic about that shed. We trail back down the hill and hide in the blackberries until Daniel arrives and then we get back into our warm SUV and the chickens fall asleep.

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This is probably where you’re expecting a transcendental experience. I don’t have one of those. I don’t decide I’m wrong and they’re right. I just sit there breathing air and looking at the chicken with the broken leg in the pillow case on my lap and realise I’m no longer hungry. This is not a conscious decision, it’s an emotional reaction that would be the same if apples were marinated in shit and mustard gas. Yes, chicken is a tasty food but that wasn’t good at all. At that point in the car, it’s not even understandable. It’s just bizarre farming got to this point.

On the way home Tim seems strangely elated. He tells me that although they only do one rescue a month, the experience fades the trivialities in his own life. I ask him what will happen to the chooks and he explains they’ll be adopted. “Finding homes for chickens is easy. It’s harder when we rescue pigs. Not many people want a pig in their garden.” I point out that four chickens will have it pretty good now but that’s only a drop in the ocean. “Yeah”, says Felicity. “But for the individuals it’s everything.”

The chicken in my lap dies. I don’t feel sad, just sort of uncomfortable. This is one animal dying on my lap, from one shed, on one farm. Out there is a planet full of pigs and chickens and cows emerging from the black and clinging to life in sheds and feedlots and cages. It’s a shame they experience themselves as individuals. It’s a shame their consciousness is a by-product. There’s so much shame that I don’t want to think about it. Yes, let’s not think about it.

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Follow Julian on Twitter: @MorgansJulian

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