| Special Section: Lantern
Essay Competition Winners |
June/July
2006
Broilers
By Lisa Kemmerer
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“
They’re free with a purchase!” My sister beamed down at
the fluffy yellow chicks scampering along the bottom of a smelly box.
Her unselfconscious smile made the lines across her hazelnut skin disappear.
“You’re supporting the hen industry,” I repeated with less
conviction.
“I know,” my sister said with a shift to sadness. Her wavy brown
hair stuck up in odd places, unruly and unnoticed. “But if we take these
two we can protect them. We can’t change the industry, we can’t save
them all, but we can offer these two little ones a full and happy life!”
It was a familiar argument. It had been the same with each of the 20 indoor cats,
seven dogs, three horses, 12 chickens, seven ducks, and two geese that were settled
on our muddy plot of wooded land.
I glanced up to discover my sister holding two squirming, peeping chicks. I opened
my mouth to speak, but remained silent. It was a done deal. Once she had them
in hand, she had them in heart, and commonsense resistance shifted toward unkind.
She was my sister, my closest kin, my oldest friend—I knew her. While I
was daydreaming, she had selected the weakest links, two little problem birds
for us to labor and worry over until their inevitable, premature deaths. But
the lost labor didn’t bother me so much as the whole hen-thing.
“They all look healthy,” she explained, “so I just grabbed
what I could reach. How ‘bout these two?”
Perhaps they would live long and happy lives after all. We carried our two newest
residents to the cash register, where our supplies waited. “Two broilers,” the
man behind the checkout counter noted.
“
Chickens,” I muttered.
“‘Sorry?”
“Chickens,” I enunciated, searching the man’s face for understanding.
But I was pretty sure I could see bits of cow sinew and turkey flesh caught between
his coffee-stained teeth. “They’re no more broilers than I’m
a womb.” I looked from the tiny, round, black eyes to his large, almond-shaped,
hazel eyes. His still-friendly gaze offered no understanding. I smiled, embarrassed
to be different from his other customers—embarrassed to be different from
what he was able to understand. I comforted myself: I could at least distinguish
a chicken from dinner!
As my sister drove homeward I examined the tiny birds; they looked up at me with
bright and wondering eyes. I also wondered. Where had they come from? Where was
their mother? What of a mother who never saw her chicks, a mother born to endlessly
lay eggs she never incubated? Was she already “spent,” unable to
lay like a younger hen, and so sent off to slaughter, thrown about then finally
thrown out—electrocuted motionless before her throat was slit by the hurried
hands of her killer? Perhaps she had passed on through the gleaming opulence
of Golden Arches, under the gaze of a cheerful clown, through human teeth to
stomach, intestines, to finally be evacuated into still water?
And what had become of these little chicks’ brothers? How many roosters
does one need to market a fat hen or undeveloped genetic material for a sunny-side
up breakfast? I thought of my own unfertilized eggs, passed out each month, unmarketed,
uneaten. Their brothers were dead, smothered in a great heap, eliminated in a
garbage pile of little chicks that were superfluous to the industry. It doesn’t
take many roosters, but it takes a lot of death and misery to provide chicken
McNuggets and that sunny-side-up morning.
“Lois and Shirley?” I offered.
“Okay.”
We arrived home to the usual over-eager squeaks and yaps of dogs and a host of
expectant feline eyes gazing from smudged windows in a tired mobile home. It
didn’t look like much, but it served as home for many, and it was a well-planned
home in at least one critical aspect—no breeding. Residents, including
human animals—especially humans—were the last link in their own personal
genetics.
I placed the little ones in a large cage in the chicken coop to protect them
from other curious residents. Their mother could not be there to look after them,
so I added a bit of hay for mother’s fluff, a light for mother’s
warmth, water enough to drink but not drown, and baby food aplenty. Then I stood
back to admire the rushing little yellow balls of softness. Exquisite.
Lois and Shirley sprang upward splendidly and explored the yard with exuberance.
Rough feather-shafts thrust through baby-fluff, and half-formed wings propelled
two young hens through gangly adolescence. Lois and Shirley dusted in the sun
at the base of the barn, gobbled up spiders and moths in the corral, and roosted
side by side in the hen house. They traveled in tandem, heads bobbing with each
purposeful step, and they shared grubs under poppies and sunflowers in the rich
earth of the garden.
“Broilers.” The word still irked me. How could anyone witness so
many pairs of eager eyes set strategically on each side of busy beaks, with little
yellow legs that had so many places to go, and see only a roasted carcass? In
disgust, I imagined the cashier’s deadly diet delivering a coronary surprise,
one that took him out of the marketplace altogether.
Lois and Shirley quickly reached full flower and were beautiful as summer daisies.
Adult hen feathers gleamed white, and their frilly pink crowns were as perfect
as tutus formed by the hand of Degas. But like an artist’s images, these
beings were of human design, created to suit human tastes—literally. No
sooner did they reach adulthood than their bodies began to grow like mushrooms
in the rain; their lung capacity did not accommodate their body size. Joyous
forays dwindled, then stopped altogether.
Before the warming sun shifted southward, Lois’ chest heaved and rattled
with each laborious breath. The once rushing young bird lingered near the coop,
pecking ants and spiders that wandered within reach of her smooth yellow beak.
Shirley stayed with her ailing sister.
“She has a rattle in her lung,” my sister reported one hot afternoon,
always prepared to speak what I was least likely to verbalize, and least inclined
to want to hear. “The vet can never help our hens. What should we do?”
I pondered Lois, large for a hen but no taller than my rubber boot. I had no
answer. Evolution does not create “broilers,” they are born of capitalism
and indifference to life. What was Lois to the industry that bred her bulky body
but profit; what are chickens to most people but greasy, dismembered body parts
or a thin slice of flesh between bread? The solution lies in what we choose for
lunch.
“Let her alone,” I offered, feeling helpless and cowardly. Lois moved
and breathed with effort. It was clear the young hen was suffering, but I could
not bring myself to let her go.
Gleaming Lois lay cold and still in the early morning fog, and for the first
time, Shirley stepped out of the hen house alone. “She’s all by herself,” my
sister noted, as if on cue. Standing next to my sister, watching Lois move into
a new day, I wondered which one of us would remain alone at the end of our time
together.
It wasn’t but a few months before Shirley’s lungs began to sound
like hiking boots on loose gravel. “She’s rattling,” my sister
dutifully reported. Lines of worry played on the edges of her eyes like those
of animated characters. I could see years of tender care overlaid with inevitable
loss, and anxiety fostered by an indifferent world.
I scanned the hen’s graceful feathers, ruffled Degas crown, searching dark
eyes. Shirley turned her head sideways and upward, returning my gaze. She was
not inclined to want to move her bulky body, nor to strain her inadequate cardiovascular
system. She was bred for consumption, not to have a life, and she had come to
understand that sitting still was what she did best.
“Let her alone,” I recommended with a familiar twinge of guilt. When
the first rays of light came into the coop, Shirley’s beautiful yet imperfect
body lay lifeless. I felt beaten. Hens can live upwards of 15 years, but the
full and happy lives we planned for two busy spring chicks ended before the first
frost. Had we made the right decisions? In spite of our hopes, were these hens
condemned to live and die as “broilers”?
I knelt beside Shirley’s lifeless body. Lois and Shirley were “broilers,” yet
when I looked into their eyes, they had looked back at me. I touched Shirley’s
intricate feathers. They had died young, but Lois and Shirley had escaped the
terrible life of “broilers.” They rushed through the fury of youth
on strong legs, dined on random insects in green and growing grass, shared dust
baths alongside the hen house, and rested in dazzling sunlight as their health
failed. They lived their own lives. They had no price tag. And they were friends.
Lisa Kemmerer has a Master’s Degree in Theology from Harvard Divinity
and
a Ph.D. in Philosophy from University of Glasgow, Scotland. She has produced
two documentaries on Buddhism, and has a book out titled, In Search of Consistency:
Ethics and Animals.
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