Eating Chickens

SOMETIMES you need a week off work, and this website, which is indeed work but not a "blog", took a week off. We are back just in time to respond to the election results. But that is for another day. For today, our thoughts turn to chickens. A good friend of mine at the senior center, with whom I sing in the gospel group, refuses to eat chicken. She told me that when whe was young, killing, preparing, and eating chickens was too much a part of her life, that she tired of the process, and that, at a rather early age, she abandoned the practice of consuming chicken, but did not become a vegetarian. She eats meat, if it isn't chicken. When chicken is served at the senior center, she gives hers to me, generously, if pragmatically. I have known other people who shared her approach. Youthful over exposure to chicken processing often leads to early abandonment of dietary chicken, even among farm folks. As for me, when I'm driving in my car, and I see a truck loaded with small cages packed and stuffed with live chickens, I become saddened, I feel for the animals, and I feel a bit guilty about eating chicken, as if I could stop or even influence the corporate processing of chickens with my restraint. And now new research very strongly indicates, to the point of proof, that not only are chickens animals who feel pain and fear, but that they are in fact highly intelligent creatures, who think and feel a great deal more than we arrogant humans had ever imagined. A lady has written several books about chickens, and was recently interviewed on National Public Radio. I forget her name and the book title, but she laid it out succinctly and convincingly. Chickens have a complex language, with which they freely communicate with each other. They have names for each other. They have names for every human being with whom they come in contact. This was discovered by very closely listening to and deciphering the various sounds chickens make, a combination of clucking sounds familair to almost everybody. These clucking noises are not gratuitous. They have meaning. As the late not so great Rush limbaugh (remember him?) inarticulately said: "words mean things". None of this is fabricated. The sounds were recorded, over and over again, sounds made by thousands of different chickens from various locations, and were carefully analyzed by competant scholars in linguistics as well as animal agriculture. The research can be replicated, the results confirmed. I could easily enumerate other aspects of chicken behavior which support this conclusion. Chickens feel love and hate, they develop cultures within their communities, and so forth. So now, as one might suspect, I am confronted with the choice of whether to continue eating chicken. I tend to be a vegetarian at home, and only eat meat "when in Rome" at the senior center or someone else's home. That, of course, is merely an excuse. Then, quite naturally my thoughts turn to other animals, including fish. Fish, quite obviously, do not enjoy being hooked on a fishing line. Their inevitable struggle on the hook clearly conveys terror and pain. A lady who works in the kitchen at the senior center and who with her husband and family owns and operates a small cattle ranch recently informed that that when a calf is taken away from its mother, the other invariably walks up and down the fence line, looking for her vanished baby. Hell, even my outdoor cats don't appear to do anything resembling that. We humans have always, or at least in modern times, given thought, to some degree or other, to the moral implications of how we treat other animals. Perhaps we should give much more. Well, and then, today we are having brisket at the senior center. I flat out love brisket. I wonder what I will do. I'm almost afraid to find out.