Chickens

 

42-Day Wonders
Tom Horton, Washingtonian Magazine, feature — September 2006
Like all the Rieley children, Megan, 16, helps raise and care for the chickens. "I really hate killing 'em, but you gotta do what you gotta do"... the profit in raising chickens now lies in volume. A new grower who doesn't raise half a million or more a year probably can't make it...

Disease Takes Wing
James Carroll, in Common Dreams from Boston Globe, commentary — February 2006
If birds are not a friend to the human species, where in all of nature is friendship to be found? Each day come more reports of the dispersal of diseased poultry and fowl, moving from east to west, Asia into Europe, and alarms begin to sound...

Bird Flu Coning Home to Roost
Michael Greger, Satya Magazine Interview — February 2006
When you have tens of thousands of chickens overcrowded in filthy football field size sheds, beak-to-beak in their own waste, one should not be surprised that these are veritable breeding grounds for emerging infectious diseases...

Whistleblower on the Kill Floor — The Satya Interview with Virgil Butler and Laura Alexander
Satya Magazine — February 2006

When I first started killing me, it really bothered me... The more I did it, the less it bothered me. I became desensitized. The killing room does something to your mind...

Blue Hens Beloved, Extinct, Illegal, Collectible
Robin Brown, The News Journal, feature — February 2006
"They're for curiosity sake," Gelb said. "If we don't keep them, who the heck would?"...

Avian Influenza: Action Alert
Karen Davis, United Poultry Concerns, essay — November 2005
If there is any doubt that the human species has violated the privilege of sharing the earth with the other creatures, the spread and handling of avian influenza dispels it. People ask, what can we do? The answer is, we can stop eating birds and their eggs and we can try to help as many birds as we can...

Eggs: Battery or Free Range?
The Independent, feature — October 2005
The cruelty of intensive chicken-farming is turning many consumers against battery eggs but, as Hester Lacey explains, 'free range' may not be the natural paradise you think it is...

Drugged Gamecocks Rehab at Chicken Sanctuary
Amir Efrati, The Wall Street Jounal, feature — July 2005
Felipe, an orange-feathered rooster from Pennsylvania, faced near-certain death when police busted his cockfighting match on a rural compound in 2001. Instead, he checked into the Eastern Shore Chicken Sanctuary...

Funeral For a Hen
pattrice le-muir jones, essays — June 2005
When Fanny arrived at the sanctuary, she was shockingly skinny and had very few of her lovely red feathers. She and her peers looked more like monsters than birds. Having spent years perched on wire in cramped cages, they could hardly walk...

The Battle Over Welfare vs. Rights
Karen Davis, United Poultry Concerns, essay — June 2005
Are we really representing a caged hen's wishes when we say that she would reject a touch of comfort short of total liberation? And who, under any circumstances, would reject a less inhumane death for themselves or for someone they loved?...

How Pigs Could be Launchpad for Bird Flu Pandemic
James Meilde, The Guardian, feature — June 2005
A virologist from Hong Kong warned pigs could provide a launchpad, even if birds carrying the virus, which is causing havoc in Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, failed to do so...

Group Targets 'Animal Care Certified' Label
James Drew, Toledo Blade, feature — February 2005
But last year, the national advertising division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus referred the Animal Care Certified logo on egg cartons to the Federal Trade Commission for possible law-enforcement action...

Cockfighting May Be On Its Last Legs
Elizabeth Nash, The Independent, feature — January 2005
Emboldened by their success and polls which show an overwhelming majority is opposed to cockfighting... those campaigners are now actively targeting these final redoubts of the sport. Cockfighting is fighting for its life...

The Life of One Battery Hen
Karen Davis, United Poultry Concerns — August 2004
The two-way communication between themselves and a mother hen — the continuous interaction which they are genetically endowed to expect, and which they need — has not occurred. The mother hen's heartbeat is missing, and she does not respond to the embryos' calls of distress or comfort them with her soft clucks...

Echoes of Abu Ghraib in Chicken Slaughterhouses
Peter Singer, Karen Dawn, New York Times, commentary — July 2004
When humans have unchecked power over those they see as inferior, they may abuse it. Slaughterhouse workers do not expect to be chastised for hurting animals. And the American soldiers at Abu Ghraib clearly did not expect punishment, or they would not have posed for photographs...

Humanity Can't Be Forgotten, Even When Slaughtering Poultry
Wayne Pacelle, HSUS, commentary — July 2004
The humane slaughter law [1958] exempted poultry. And that exemption stands to this day. More than 9 billion chickens and turkeys are slaughtered every year — 95 percent of all animals killed for food in the United States — and they are entirely at the mercy of major chicken processors...

Into the Frying Pan: Virginia's Egg Business Heats Up — But Is There a Difference Between Factory and Farm?
Laura LaFay, Style Weekly, feature — April 2004
But when you pull into the parking lot, there is not a chicken to be seen or a cluck to be heard. To the left of the lot stands the egg-processing plant. To the right, five long windowless “chicken houses." Except for the sound of an American flag snapping in the wind, all is silent...

Avian Influenza — Death Toll 50 Million and Rising!
Sasha, senior high school paper — February 2004
The current way in which poultry have been handled and slaughtered is completely unacceptable in terms of animal welfare, and has been largely ignored by international bodies responsible for handling this outbreak...

Tastes Like (Mutant) Chicken: The Great McDonald's Diet Test, and Why Ukranians Won't Touch Your Buffalo Wings
Mark Morford, SF Gate, commentary — January 2004
We consider ourselves omnipotent and untouchable and the world’s paragon of virile capitalist vitality, when in fact the world sees us as this giant flaccid flabby glutton who blindly believes everything the McDonald’s marketing slogans spits our way. I'm lovin' it!...

Chickens and Chimpanzees: The Odd Couple of the Animal Rights Movement
Karen Davis, Satya Magazine, essay — 2002
Just as human verbal language is one of the many languages of life, so our particular type of intelligence is one among many. If people feel threatened by the idea of equality beyond human primatology, that is our problem to solve...

Inside the Egg Factories
Laura Moretti, Animals Voice, feature
On a battery farm, the relentless caged cacophony is deafening. In the hatchery—hopelessly buried beneath the nonchalance of egg factory processing—is the fever-pitch peeping of desperately dying, newly born birds...

Killer in the Night
Maya Khankhoje, poem
i tried to align / the tip of my gun / with the tip of your nose / as it is done in the movies / and pull the damn trigger / which refused to budge / i had to kill you but could not...

 

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