2
" Thus far, our responsibility for how we treat chickens and allow them to be treated in our culture is dismissed with blistering rhetoric designed to silence objection: “How the hell can you compare the feelings of a hen with those of a human being?” One answer is, by looking at her. It does not take special insight or credentials to see that a hen confined in a battery cage is suffering, or to imagine what her feelings must be compared with those of a hen ranging outside in the grass and sunlight. We are told that we humans are capable of knowing just about anything that we want to know—except, ironically, what it feels like to be one of our victims. We are told we are being “emotional” if we care about a chicken and grieve over a chicken’s plight. However, it is not “emotion” that is really under attack, but the vicarious emotions of pity, sympathy, compassion, sorrow, and indignity on behalf of the victim, a fellow creature—emotions that undermine business as usual. By contrast, such “manly” emotions as patriotism, pride, conquest, and mastery are encouraged. "
― Karen Davis , Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry
5
" I am a battery hen. I live in a cage so small I cannot stretch my wings. I am forced to stand night and day on a sloping wire mesh floor that painfully cuts into my feet. The cage walls tear my feathers, forming blood blisters that never heal. The air is so full of ammonia that my lungs hurt and my eyes burn and I think I am going blind. As soon as I was born, a man grabbed me and sheared off part of my beak with a hot iron, and my little brothers were thrown into trash bags as useless alive.
My mind is alert and my body is sensitive and I should have been richly feathered. In nature or even a farmyard I would have had sociable, cleansing dust baths with my flock mates, a need so strong that I perform 'vacuum' dust bathing on the wire floor of my cage. Free, I would have ranged my ancestral jungles and fields with my mates, devouring plants, earthworms, and insects from sunrise to dusk. I would have exercised my body and expressed my nature, and I would have given, and received, pleasure as a whole being. I am only a year old, but I am already a 'spent hen.' Humans, I wish I were dead, and soon I will be dead. Look for pieces of my wounded flesh wherever chicken pies and soups are sold. "
― Karen Davis
7
" The idea that human beings cannot logically recognize suffering in a chicken, or draw meaningful conclusions about how a human would react to the conditions under which a caged hen lives, is ridiculous. There is a basis for empathy and understanding in the fact of human evolutionary continuity with other creatures that enables us to recognize and infer, in those creatures, experiences similar to our own. The fact that animals are forcibly confined in environments that reflect human nature, not theirs, means that they are suffering much more than we know in ways that we cannot fathom. If they preferred to be packed together without contact with the world outside, then we would not need intensive physical confinement facilities, and mutilations such as debeaking, since they would voluntarily cram together, live cordially, and save us money. The egg industry thinks nothing of claiming that a mutilated bird in a cage is 'happy,' 'content,' and 'singing,' yet will turn around and try to intimidate you with accusations of 'anthropomorphism' if you logically insist that the bird is miserable. "
― Karen Davis , Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry
8
" The plea for ethical veganism, which rejects the treatment of birds and other animals as a food source or other commodity, is sometimes mistaken as a plea for dietary purity and elitism, as if formalistic food exercises and barren piety were the point of the desire to get the slaughterhouse out of one’s kitchen and one’s system. Abstractions such as 'vegetarianism' and 'veganism' mask the experiential and philosophical roots of a plant-based diet. They make the realities of 'food' animal production and consumption seem abstract and trivial, mere matters of ideological preference and consequence, or of individual taste, like selecting a shirt, or hair color.
However, the decision that has led millions of people to stop eating other animals is not rooted in arid adherence to diet or dogma, but in the desire to eliminate the kinds of experiences that using animals for food confers upon beings with feelings. The philosophic vegetarian believes with Isaac Bashevis Singer that even if God or Nature sides with the killers, one is obliged to protest. The human commitment to harmony, justice, peace, and love is ironic as long as we continue to support the suffering and shame of the slaughterhouse and its satellite operations.
Vegetarians do not eat animals, but, according to the traditional use of the term, they may choose to consume dairy products and eggs, in which case they are called lacto-ovo (milk and egg) vegetarians. In reality, the distinction between meat on the one hand and dairy products and eggs on the other is moot, as the production of milk and eggs involves as much cruelty and killing as meat production does: surplus cockerels and calves, as well as spent hens and cows, have been slaughtered, bludgeoned, drowned, ditched, and buried alive through the ages. Spent commercial dairy cows and laying hens endure agonizing days of pre-slaughter starvation and long trips to the slaughterhouse because of their low market value. "
― Karen Davis , Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry
10
" Genetic selection for early egg production, to reduce time and money 'wasted' on feeding and housing unproductive birds for six months, results in eggs being formed that are often too big to be laid by the immature body of a small, five month old bird. Uteruses 'prolapse,' pushing through the vagina of the small, cramped birds forced to strain day after day to expel huge eggs. The uterus protrudes, hangs, and 'blows out,' inviting infection and vent picking by cell mates, from whom the prolapse victim, in severe pain, cannot escape except by dying. "
― Karen Davis , Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry
12
" Chickens are the creatures of the earth who no longer live on the land. In the industrialized world, billions of chickens are locked inside factory-farm buildings, and billions more are similarly confined in Africa, Asia, India, China, and other parts of the word where poultry factory farming is rapidly supplanting traditional small farming. If there is such a thing as "earthrights," the right of a creature to experience directly the earth from which it was derived and on which its happiness in life chiefly depends, then chickens have been stripped of theirs. They have not changed; however, the world in which they live has been disrupted for human convenience against their will. "
― Karen Davis , Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry
17
" At the same time, to those who say that vegetarianism will not come overnight, it can be said with even greater assurance that "humane slaughter" will never come at all, because the slaughter process is inherently inhumane, and the slaughter of the innocent is wrong, and because the poultry industry, even in countries where humane slaughter laws may exists, is, for all practical purposes, ungovernable. Humane slaughter is an illusion. "
― Karen Davis , Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry
20
" Even so, the poultry industry and agribusiness generally worry that the public may come to perceive them as morally handicapped, as indeed they are. It is a sign of moral handicap to mutilate the mouth of a bird, cage her for life, starve her for money, and propose blindness as a "solution" to her suffering. It is a sign of moral handicap to force chickens and turkeys to grow so big so fast that it is painful for them merely to stand on their feet, to take away chickens' feathers, make fun of them, and force them to huddle naked together in their own waste waiting to be killed. The poultry industry is not only cruel, but obscene. It isn't only the masturbation and artificial insemination of "breeder" turkeys and increasingly of chickens, ducks, and geese, or the sticking of balloons and tampons in the uteri of laying hens and making them die a death that only a savage would conceive of. For thousands of years, human beings have violated the bodies and family life of birds and other living beings. "
― Karen Davis , Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry
