opinion
I used to make fun of vegetarians. Then I visited a chicken farm.
Thousands of living, breathing sentient beings were crammed in this hot, cavernous building where the air was so dusty and thick with ammonia that you could hardly breathe. The poor birds never once saw a ray of sunlight. They scratched, squawked, ate and defecated for four months straight without a single square foot of space in which to move. At the end of the four months, the animals were thrown into cages by the handful, loaded onto a trailer truck and driven down the interstate at high speeds to a processing plant where they were slaughtered.
When I left the farm, I was shaken. I haven’t bought a chicken nugget since.
Animal cruelty on a massive scale
It’s not that I don’t like chicken. I do. It’s not that I consider it immoral to eat meat. I don’t. But it is immoral to torture animals even on a small scale. To practice animal cruelty on the massive scale that is being done in the United States is unconscionable.
Gone are the chickens of my childhood that roamed my grandmother’s and mother’s farms. That lived in a real chicken house safe from predators until the one bad day in their lives when my granny would catch them, quickly wring their necks and serve them for our Sunday dinner. Such “free range” chickens are still available for a premium price, and God bless the farmers who give us that option. But the chickens that nearly everybody is eating – on your chicken sandwich, pizza or in your bucket of extra crispy – are being quietly tortured while you play along.
How is it that Americans are choosing to ignore this great evil that is taking place under our noses? Could our willful ignorance really be nothing more than a selfish desire to get our nuggets for 99 cents a package rather than the $3 or $4 they might cost us if these animals were humanely raised?
And it’s not just the chickens. The massive feedlots where pigs and cattle are packed on concrete pads for their entire miserable lives and where veal calves are caged so tightly that they cannot even move bespeaks a darkness in our souls about which the ancient Hebrew prophets tried to warn us. The human heart is “desperately wicked,” they told us. Who can know it?
Face the irony
I love irony. It’s one of the few things that can break through our habituated thought patterns and allow us to see things differently. Sometimes for the first time.
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So here’s your chance.
We punish – and imprison – poor rural whites and urban people of color for cockfighting, an ancient practice in which the birds are well-fed, pampered and trained until that fateful day when they may die in the arena. The more successful birds are ultimately turned out to “stud,” where they spend the remainder of their days eating and breeding.
This human behavior we punish, but those who condemn eight billion birds per year to a cruel, murderous existence and certain death, we reward. That, my friends, is irony writ large.
And, no, I am not arguing that cock-fighting or dog-fighting should be decriminalized. I am arguing for a modicum of consistency. I am saying that we are better than this. That we wouldn’t buy a stolen car even if we could get it at a 75% discount, and we shouldn’t buy tortured animals just because they make it onto the dollar menu.
COVID-19 is changing the way we eat. Huge meat processing plants are being shut down because of the virus. Newsflash: Beans, corn, rice and vegetables are delicious! As a rule, they are healthier. And they cost less!
Maybe part of the new normal will be a kinder, gentler, more connected America, not just towards each other but towards the innocent animals God has placed under our dominion and care. And to whom we have a moral obligation to treat with a modicum of decency.
Buzz Thomas is a retired minister, constitutional lawyer and school superintendent. He is also a native Tennessean.
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