PETA had a mothers' day poetry contest about chickens. They chose the ten best poems to publish at their site, so I thought I would post a few of the ones I like. The references to Mr. Novak in some of the poems are for the man who runs Yum Foods, the parent company of KFC.
Why chickens on mothers' day? One of the things the animal rights movement hates is that in order to create milk and meat, the people who profit from raising animals kill most of the male animals and have taken reproductive rights from the female animals they have enslaved. Little baby boy chicks are thrown into garbage bags and left to die, sometimes after being stomped on. Female chickens become horribly abused egg machines. Female cows are kept pregnant so that we can drink their milk, and their babies are ripped away at birth, the boys to be crated up for veal and the females to continue the cycle of agony and abuse. Cows that normally would live about twenty years are totally worn out by these successive pregnancies and often don't even survive past five, when their milk starts giving out. Then they are slaughtered for hamburger. These creatures love their young and grieve for them. Animal rights activists believe this is a horrible thing to be happening on the earth, to create foods that absolutely no human has any real need to eat.
These poems give us another perspective on being a chicken.
ALICEWALKER
Mothers’ Day
May 9, 2004
Dear Mr. Novak:
Suppose in a future life you come back as a chicken. You are small and fuzzy and scared.
You are soft. Beautiful. Yellow, with bright orange legs. Tiny feet. Innocent, deeply
curious eyes.
You are in a place that does not live up to you. It is dark and hot; there is no fresh air. It
stinks. As soon as you are born, part of your mouth, your tender beak, is burned off.
This indescribable pain is your introduction to life.
It will be a short life.
Each day “managed” by hands and machines you can barely glimpse and comprehend not
at all. You are in a cage with so many others! You feel your body, stuffed with food and
hormones, pressing against the bodies around you. It reminds you perhaps of the lifetime
ago when you were a human slave in a ship enduring the Middle Passage.
You feel heavy and hot, suffocating, because you are constantly drugged; your body forced
to grow so large and fast your bones cannot support it: they begin to break.
After an infinity of unbearable pain you are lifted out of the cage into which you
were born, and from which your mother was taken immediately after your birth, and
dumped, with thousands of others, into a vat of boiling water. Most of the others are dead,
but for some reason, you are not. You drown, choking, in the smelly, scalding water.
You have not had one moment in which to touch earth, to see the sky, to enjoy a worm;
you have had no chance to experience a mother’s love, to receive the rich comfort of
hearing a father’s cocky crow, or to feel the kind hand on your feathers of a caring human
being.
Your body, broken though it is, and smeared with the excrement that left it because you
were so afraid as you died, is plucked of its sickly covering of feathers, cut up, and sent to
the place where it will be covered with white flour and herbs, fried in hot fat, and presented
to human families who have no way of knowing they are eating – bringing into their own
bodies (and spirits) – the deep suffering, fear and misery of your largely unlived life.
I do not wish this for you. I do not wish it for myself. I do not wish it for the
thousands that eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC).
We do not know what Life has in mind for us, or how many lifetimes we are going to
have. Understanding this, it is wise, I believe, to avoid acts of cruelty and violence and to
put our trust and effort into consideration of all “others” with whom we share the planet; as
we extend, uphold and honor all acts of universal kindness.
With an embrace
for you
& deep hopes for health
and happiness
to your
family.
In peace,
Alice Walker |
