May
2001
Chickens
and Chimpanzees: the Odd Couple of the Animal Rights Movement
By Karen Davis
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Let me begin by saying that I abhor the privileging
of any mammal or bird in the fight for animal rights. It is mainly for
this reason that the Great Ape Project has always left me ambivalent
and a little infuriated with its demand for an “extension of the
community of equals to include all great apes” (Paola Cavalieri
and Peter Singer, The Great Ape Project, 1993). Please don’t get
me wrong. I want great apes to have legal rights, absolutely without
question. Only, why should chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans get
first dibs at justice? I already know the answer—I’ve heard
it a thousand times. Because they’re “more like us.”
Because they share 98 percent of our genes. Because they will open the
door for other species to squeak, sneak, or peak through, at least.
That you have to start somewhere, I will agree, so the “squeak
& sneak” argument appeals to me most. Still…
For all the attention they’ve received, the great apes are patronized
shamelessly by their leading advocates who illogically and unjustly
compare them with the least competent members of human society: infants
and the mentally disabled. They argue anthropomorphically that the great
apes have shown mental behaviors most similar to human mental behaviors,
while failing to stress that such demonstrations depend upon anatomical
and physiological resemblances—such as fingers and vocal mechanisms—that
facilitate scientific “interpretation” far more easily than
do, say, fins, wings, bird claws, and non-ape-like mechanisms of vocalization.
It is based on humanocentric criteria that the great apes are thus paraded
as deserving a shot at being granted a place sort of beside and sort
of below us on a little bit of land set aside for semipersons. As avian
specialist Dr. Lesley Rogers says concerning the Great Ape Project in
her book Minds of Their Own (Westview Press, 1998), “By shifting
the boundary to allow apes into the same group as humans, we are still
saying that ‘some animals are more equal than others.’”
Indeed, why should other creatures have to “prove” their “entitlement”
to “personhood”? And what further torments must they endure
at our hands, and for how much longer, that we may or may not extract
from them this “proof”?
In an article I wrote called “Expanding the Great Ape Project”
(Between the Species, 1996), I took issue with this elitism and pleaded
for its expansion: “Equality Beyond Primatology.” I argued
especially for the inclusion of birds, both by way of illustration and
for their own sakes. In general, I complained that even to be a nonhuman
“person” on the highest level within the Great Ape universe
of thought was to be a poor contender according to its standards of
value: the vaunted chimpanzees rank with “intellectually disabled
human beings” in Singer’s words. Where does this put the majority
of the animal kingdom? What about birds? More specifically, what about
chickens?
Adult nonhuman animals, from gorillas to guinea fowl, negotiate complex
environments every day and perform a multiplicity of cognitive acts,
including practical decision-making. Adult animals embody such a repertoire
of experiences accompanying their growth that it is nonsense to equate
it with the experiential repertoire of human babies and the cognitively
disabled. Fair pleading demands that we stop “defending” other
animals from ourselves by calling them “dumb.” 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.
The issue was crystallized a number of years ago by Carl Sagan in his
book The Dragons of Eden (1977). To make the case that at least some
“beasts” employ reason—which should earn them points
toward having some “rights”—Sagan contrasts chimpanzees
and a chicken in an anecdote taken from the annals of early animal ethology.
A researcher reported watching two chimpanzees luring a chicken with
food while hiding a piece of wire. Like Charlie Brown to the football,
the chicken reportedly kept returning, only to be tricked again. This
revealed, in Sagan’s view, that “chickens have a very low
capacity for avoidance learning,” whereas the chimpanzees showed
“a fine combination of behavior sometimes thought to be uniquely
human: cooperation, planning a future course of action, deception and
cruelty.” To wit, chimpanzees may be considered as candidates for
rights, but chickens may not.
Despite the push to give special status to apes, thus perhaps opening
the door for all other animals, nothing materially has changed—for
any animals for that matter. They’re all still rotting for cuisine
or science, or whatever. Yet, there is a change on the horizon for chickens.
Although just a nanoshift, I am happy about it.
Getting “Ready” for Chickens
Who was it that said, “I’m so low down I declare I’m
looking up at down?” If we were to imagine, say, a dung heap, picture
the chimp perched on top and the chickens scrounging around at the bottom
of the pile. That’s rather how it was when I decided to start an
advocacy group for chickens in the late 1980s, and was told by some
that if I was going to “do” farm animals, I had better do
pigs instead, because people weren’t “ready” for chickens.
So now I’m sitting here poring over all the media coverage that
McDonald’s received on announcing that in setting minimal animal
welfare standards for its global suppliers of food products, the company
would “do” chickens first—hens used for commercial egg
laying, no less. And I’m thinking, now isn’t this interesting,
amazing really. At the start of the new century—a new millennium
even—the chicken whom I was told people weren’t ready for,
has been pulled up out of the deepest oblivion into the spotlight along
with the chimpanzee. What a difference a decade can make.
I feel cheap saying this. I myself am not looking up at down except
vicariously, and I am not happy about the plight and fate of chickens.
I am not an optimist of the intellect; only of the will. Still, word
is getting out about the widespread abuse of these birds. I know for
a fact that there are thousands of people in this country who care deeply
about chickens; and I know that it is possible to get people who never
thought about them before to care very much. I have seen this happen
because I am at the forefront of making it happen. For example, I persuaded
a journalist who had never heard of “forced molting”—the
egg industry’s practice of depriving hens of food for 10 to 14
days, causing them to lose their feathers, in order to manipulate the
production of eggs—to do a cover story about this for The Washington
Post (4/30/00). Another Post writer did a feature story about my work
as the founder and director of United Poultry Concerns, (“For the
Birds,” 10/14/99), which was awarded a distinguished Ark Trust
Genesis Award in 2000 for spotlighting animal issues.
When I talk about change with regard to chickens, I am not just talking
about media attention, but about attitude. Nobody ever says to me anymore
that people “aren’t ready” for chickens. Attention is
finally being paid to the largest number of abused warm-blooded vertebrates
on the planet, both in the animal advocacy community and in the public
domain, in the U.S. as well as in the UK. The enormous popularity of
last year’s hit movie Chicken Run, which featured emotive clay-mation
chickens conspiring to escape an egg farm, gives reason for hope. But
there’s more.
Consider the following. Recent polls show that Americans are willing
to pay more for eggs that come from hens treated less inhumanely. Last
year a bill was introduced in California that would have banned the
forced molting of hens. This year, two bills were introduced in Illinois
and in Washington State that would ban the practice as well. Washington
State was also considering a bill that would prohibit keeping hens in
tiny cages as well as debeaking them as a way of controlling their distorted
behavior behind bars. Although these bills were killed by agricultural
committees, such proposed legislation indicates great public concern.
While the U.S. lags far behind Europe, which not only bans forced molting
but has decreed that hens must be out of cages entirely by 2012, the
American egg industry—under increasing pressure—has merely
set 2012 as the year when each hen is supposed to get 67 square inches
of cage space instead of the standard 48.
Abusing chickens for fun is also becoming less acceptable. In 1998 voters
in Missouri and Arizona banned cockfighting; Oklahoma is set to go next.
In the past year, two abusers of chickens were convicted of cruelty
to animals: a Denver disc jockey who had a hen dropped from a balcony
in order to record her suffering on the air; and an egg farmer who left
thousands of hens to starve to death in their cages rather than comply
with Washington State’s environmental laws.
To see chickens beginning to be vindicated after the long reign of oblivion
and denigration they’ve suffered since the mid-20th century, when
these earth-firstiest, earth-thirstiest of birds disappeared from the
American landscape, is enough to make me weep. Which is exactly what
I did a few years ago in an airport, not from any blinding epiphany
that an aircraft is a form of avian evolution, but because I was engrossed
in a book called The Development of Brain and Behaviour in the Chicken
(1995) by avian specialist Lesley Rogers. The emotion that shook me
at the airport derived from Rogers’ saying such things as, “it
is now clear that birds have cognitive capacities equivalent to those
of mammals, even primates” and “With increased knowledge of
the behaviour and cognitive abilities of the chicken has come the realization
that the chicken is not an inferior species to be treated merely as
a food source.” These were the words of a scientist. I wished then,
as I do now, that I could inscribe these words into the minds of every
existing human being and every generation to come. It was this driving
impulse that led me to start United Poultry Concerns after meeting a
chicken named Viva. It is no exaggeration to say that Viva changed my
life. From the moment I pulled her out of a muddy shack in Maryland
and saw her face, I knew that I had a story to tell that would never
let go of me. I have lived to see the day when the chicken as well as
the chimpanzee is starting to receive some attention, and for this I
am semi-elated though far from satisfied.
Karen Davis, Ph.D. is President and Director of United Poultry
Concerns, a non-profit organization which promotes the compassionate
and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. She is the author of Prisoned
Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry.
Her new book, More Than A Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual,
and Reality will be published by Lantern Books later this year. For
information, call (757) 678-7875 or visit www.upc-online.org.
