Her feathers are skeletal and dirty. The skin under them is visible and raw from rubbing against the wire. There is purple skin stretched thin over round cysts shutting the hen's eyes and causing incredible pain to her feet. The placement is not random. She has to balance her full weight on slanted wires twenty-four hours a day, causing her joints distress. The wire allows urine and feces to fall through and pile up beneath her, giving off enough ammonia to sting and infect her eyes. She is in a cage with nine other hens. Each has a space about the size of a piece of paper and must climb over the others to reach the food and water at the front of the cage. Some have their necks wrapped around the wire and others hang by wings also caught in the wire. Immobilized and unable to get to food or water, they die of starvation in the cage. The living stand alongside the dying, dead, and decomposing. The cages are stacked from the floor nearly to the ceiling in a warehouse and extend back until they disappear into the darkness. This is a battery-cage system where the chickens never see the light of day, their feet never touch earth, and they can never spread their wings.
I became vegan because I don't want to support captivity, torture, physical mutilation, and killing. I first picked up a pamphlet about veganism and animal rights at an Earth Day celebration in Washington, D.C., my home of sixteen years before moving to Alabama. I saw pictures of the hens I've described and was shocked. The chickens didn't look at all like the white, fluffy, feathered birds of my mind's eye.
I became vegetarian on my next birthday, as a gift to others and myself; but I had to learn more. I chose chickens as a topic for a school paper. I quickly realized that it was hard to find any information on chickens as animals because they have been declassified as animals and reclassified as objects; as “food.” I had to do searches, instead, for poultry. I read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, The Dreaded Comparison by Marjorie Spiegel, and Animal Liberation by Peter Singer, and many articles. I visited websites and was particularly impressed with Compassion Over Killing (www.cok.net) and Farm Sanctuary (www.farmsanctuary.org). The more I learned, the more the animals' suffering resonated with me. Somehow, I felt that eating suffering and calling it nourishment could only produce more suffering. I thought of my ancestry as a Black woman: the rapes, unwanted pregnancies, captivity, stolen babies, grieving mothers, horrific transports, and the physical, mental, and spiritual pain of chattel slavery. I'm convinced that animals of other species, many of whom are more protective of their young than humans, grieve when their babies are taken away. I thought of how much I missed my mother, brother, and sister when I was in foster care. I made the emotional connection that other beings must feel this pain, too, when they are separated from their mothers and other family members. When I saw the battery cages, I thought of the more than two million Americans who know cages firsthand in the prison-industrial complex. I thought of the economically oppressed workers at killing plants and wondered if people who kill and cut all day could still make love at night. I had to learn more, so I went to work for The Fund for Animals.
With access to, and influence from, The Fund for Animals and Compassion Over Killing, my eyes were opened with a reality check. I learned that baby chickens are hatched thousands at a time. At an egg-laying farm where they use the battery-cage system I described, the male chicks are thrown away—alive—into what looks like a thirty-gallon garbage can. Packed against each other's bodies, they eventually suffocate. The female baby chickens have their beaks seared off with a hot iron, without anesthetic. This sometimes cuts off part of their tongue and often burns their eyes and nostrils. This is done to keep them from pecking themselves or each other while confined so closely. Their front toes are amputated at the outer joint without anesthetic for the same reason. Once grown, the hens are routinely denied food for at least ten days, which induces molting and shocks their systems into laying eggs. The integrity of these sensitive beings is totally violated. They do not control their bodies, their reproduction, their social structure, or their food.
Pigs suffer, too. The piglet is held by his rear with his head dangling toward the concrete floor. The worker cuts off his tail without anesthetic. He then cuts into his scrotum and pulls out his testicles. The piglet wiggles and screams. The female piglet is chosen as a breeder. She, too, has her tail cut off. She then spends her life in a continuous cycle of insemination, pregnancy, birth, and nursing. While pregnant, she is restricted in what is called a gestation crate, a cage of metal piping the size of the pig, allowing her only to stand or lie down. She has no room to turn around and certainly no room to walk in any direction. Once she has given birth, she's transferred to a farrowing crate and confined to lying on the industrial grated flooring by metal bars or straps. Here, she nurses her babies. One advertiser of such contraptions boasts cast iron as their first flooring option. When the mother pig's birthing rate slows, she is packed into a crowded truck with other pigs and unloaded at a killing plant. There, she is hoisted into the air by a chain on her hind leg. While she is writhing around trying to break free, a worker cuts her throat. She is replaced by another pig who will reproduce more quickly.
Like pigs and chickens, cows also know captivity and have their reproductive systems hijacked by their captors. Cows and bulls do not choose their mates. They are bred instead to increase desired traits like heavier weights, higher volumes of milk, or to be polled (born without horns). Cows, like humans, carry their young for nine months. Most cows raised for their flesh give birth in the spring. They graze together through the summer and then the baby calves are stolen from their mothers in the fall. They are taken to a feedlot where they are crowded into pens on dirt outdoors or confined to solitary cages inside a facility. They are fed a mixture engineered to make them grow as quickly as possible. As a result, they reach slaughter weight within a year, even though they have not fully matured. Cows that are held captive for their milk suffer one pregnancy after another, allowing them to produce milk for ten months after each birth. If a cow produces a high volume of milk, her female calf may be chosen to replace older cows, who are killed when their production slows. The majority of calves born to cows who produce milk are killed within weeks of being born, and are sold as veal.
Cows and bulls also suffer mutilation in their youth and at the killing plants. Within weeks of being born, their horns are cut out of their heads to adapt them to confinement. Male calves who will not be used for breeding are held down while someone cuts their testicles from their bodies. Then to mark ownership, their sensitive skin is burned with a red-hot branding iron. All of this is done without anesthesia. For many, the physical brutality escalates to the unthinkable at the killing plant. By law, cows and bulls do not have to be dead prior to being butchered. They are, however, supposed to be struck unconscious, usually by a single bolt shot into the head. Unfortunately, unlike car parts on an assembly line, these “products” are living beings that move, often causing the shooter to miss his mark. They are dismembered while still alive and conscious.
They resist. At the stockyard, bewildered calves try to turn around and run away, only to be beaten and prodded in their face, anus, and anywhere in between. The pigs who don't get off the truck are dragged or thrown off. Those who resist being confined to small metal cages are hit in the head with pieces of wood, metal piping, electric prods, and anything else that the workers can get their hands on. Chickens fight for their lives as they are shackled in the killing plant before having their throats cut. These beings resist at every point of their captivity and torture. They surrender only to the force used against them.
We, too, should resist. We should resist the notion that cows “give” their milk and flesh because we know that, like their babies, they are taken. We should resist being fooled by images of happy cows, pigs, and chickens that smile at us from advertisements, because we know there is no happiness in captivity, torture, and death. As Black people, we can resist being insulted by historic comparisons to animals that are intended to hurt us and embrace our fellow beings with respect, awe, and wonder. We should resist arguments about the natural food chain because, for one, we've killed the part of it that would naturally eat us, and two, there's nothing natural about breeding for genetic modification, captivity, and systematic mutilation. We should resist in solidarity with souls who long for freedom they've never known.
It has never been easier to take a stand for the billions of individuals created and destroyed for human consumption—by going vegan. It's been fourteen years since I stopped consuming dead animals; five years since I gave up dairy and eggs. For the first two years, I was the lone vegetarian among my friends and family, trying to live off bean burritos. I must say this is not the way to go, and if I had to do it over, I'd do two things differently. First, I'd join a vegetarian society like the Black Vegetarians of Georgia or the Vegetarian Society of D.C. These and other vegetarian groups, which are all over the country, are a great place to meet other vegans, exchange recipes, sample home-cooked foods, and try out restaurants. Secondly, I'd learn five vegan recipes for foods I love. Keep in mind you have the whole world to choose from. Try Indian palak daal, African peanut stews, Thai coconut curries, Ethiopian lentils and split peas, and Chinese bean curd. When we broaden the horizons of our dietary choices, it's easy to find recipes that are authentically vegan and require no substitutions.
It is important to remember that our dietary choices can have negative or positive consequences. If we are what we eat, we can choose to be fear and terror or bright green sprigs of broccoli. We can choose to be orphans and prisoners or strong, leafy collards. We can choose to be pain and death or vibrant mangoes. Each time we sit down at the table, we can choose to consume violence and dine on terror or choose a vegan lifestyle that nourishes our bodies, gives us peace of mind and provides sustenance for our souls. I easily choose vegan. Peace begins on our plates.