CHICKS WITH DICKS

To determine the sex of a newly hatched chick you need to squeeze its tiny yellow body until it shits. Then you need to inspect its asshole. A smooth sphincter indicates that it’s a hen. But a bumpy bum means it’s a cock, which means it’s fucked. Male chicks cannot lay eggs, are unsuitable as meat, and are useless to the commercial poultry industry. Billions are killed every year, usually by gassing or crushing them to death. A Dutch artist is trying to raise awareness about baby chick genocide by chucking a bunch through a shredder…

VICE: So Katinka, what exactly are your plans?
Tinkebell: I bought 60 male chicks from a factory where 300,000 eggs are hatched each week. Half of these chicks are born male and so 150,000 chicks are taken straight to the gas chamber every week. I am going to a crafts market called Sale#3 where I’ll sell my male chicks for 15 euros a piece. On Sunday, when the market closes, I’ll throw all the unsold chicks through a shredder. 

Erm… Why would you do that?
I want to raise awareness about the fact that so many chicks are killed every year.

Isn’t that a bit of a harsh?
Sure it is. I’ll probably cry when I do it, but at least I’ll have given them a chance to be saved. If I hadn’t bought them from the factory, they would’ve been dead already.

Well I guess that sort of makes sense. Good luck!

We went back to talk to Katinka after the market closed…

So, Katinka, how did it go?
Well, I didn’t sell that many chicks. Only 9 actually. So when the market was about to shut, I went round with a bullhorn announcing to all the people that they had one last chance to save the 51 remaining males, and that I was going to shredder them if they didn’t buy them. They responded furiously and the vibe was really menacing. Then somebody from the crowd stole my shredder.

Then what happened?
One of the market organisers bought all the chicks because she didn’t want to be associated with the slaughter. Later that evening the police arrested me. It was crazy. They had a search warrant and came looking for me with two vans. I was interrogated and held for 5 hours.

What were you charged with?
I think I was charged with attempting to break animal welfare laws. If they go through with the prosecution, it will make for a very interesting case because chicks are killed this way every day.

And what happened to the chicks?
The cops told me that the woman who bought them off me handed them over to the police who then took them to a pet asylum, where they said they could not take in that many birds. So now the chicks will probably be returned to the factory where I bought them, where they’ll be killed anyway.

Katinka’s artist name is TINKEBELL by the way…