Number 10
(de Nederlandse versie van het verhaal van Number 10 is hier te lezen)
I don't know how they experienced their arrival at the sanctuary – that
moment when the van doors opened and the light of day filled their eyes
for the first time in their lives – but I know that, for one breathless
moment, when we first looked at the 100 souls safely tucked inside, we
didn't see the tangled mess of soiled feathers, the open sores, the
broken bones, the chopped off beaks, the mocked lives. All we saw – in
one breath of infinite relief and elation – was 100 souls who will go on
breathing. And, for one instant, the glow of their living presence
obscured everything else – the wreckage we'd made of their lives for our
amusement, the despair still engulfing the 50 billion left behind, the
darkness of a humanity that imposes untold misery for a taste.
For
one rich instant, we luxuriated in the sweetness of those 100 happy
endings. Then, we embraced anew the toil of rising, standing, bearing,
shouldering, suffering, nurturing 100 new beginnings.
The 100
birds who were now gazing at the open sky for the first time in their
lives, were industry trash, "spent" hens rescued from a "free-range" egg
facility where they had endured a lifetime of physical, social and
psychological deprivation, females whose depleted bodies were no longer
able to churn out eggs at the unnaturally high rate of production they
had been forced to sustain all of their young lives, and were being sent
to slaughter to be replaced with a new generation of victims whose
bodies would be used up in a fraction of their life span and then mass
killed, erased from existence, scrubbed from awareness, not a trace of
their earthly existence left over, not a feather, not a song, not a
child, not a dream.
Nothing in their captive lives had prepared
them for freedom. Born in incubators and raised by machines in isolation
from mothers, families or communities who could teach them the skills
and strengths that living requires, they had no social skills that would
gain them acceptance in a free bird community, no language that was
comprehensible to chickens outside their gulag and, after a lifetime of
systematic abuse, most had lost even the ability to nurture themselves.
Yet there they were. Asked to live and be free.
Everyone remained still and silent until Chris
climbed into the van and started gently lifting one by one into
Michele's cupped hands. Then, in one instant, the entire group went into
a blind panic. They ran to the back of the van screaming, swarming,
climbing on each other's backs, trying frantically to hide or escape,
huddling together for a shred of comfort, an extra millimeter of
protection, an extra millisecond of existence, still attached to the
mockery we'd made of their lives, still trying to save them, still
hoping (for what?).
As gently as we handled them, held them,
cradled them before putting them on the straw-covered ground, they still
cried out in fear for their pathetic only lives. That was the only
sound we heard them utter that day and for many days to come – the sound
of fear, pain, despair – the tragic record of a life of torment. And,
with each rebirth, with each new bird lifted from the bleakness of her
past onto a free future, we felt both the giddiness of life that was
released at last, finally free to become, and the weight, the call, the
tug, the stab in the heart of the lives left behind, still trembling in
fear, still stirring faintly with absurd, irrepressible hope.
When they first touched the straw-covered ground, most of them just
stood there, motionless for a minute or two, looking around, bewildered,
exhausted, rocking from foot to foot as though rehearsing a walk they
were about to take for the first time in their lives – the first
astonished steps into a life that was finally free to begin – stepping
in place for a few beats, then staggering to one of the corners of the
barn and joining one of the two huddles that were quickly forming there.
And that's where they stayed. For a long while, none of them ventured
out in the middle of the open barn. They remained hidden in their corner
huddles, still and silent except to stir or sound in fear.
It was painful to watch. They didn't seem to know the simplest, most natural of all things: how to be in their own bodies, how to inhabit their own lives. They were moved by a peculiar sort of alertness, an alertness I'd never seen before. They were keenly aware of everything around them, reacting to the slightest move, faintest rustle, softest sound – the drop of a leaf making the entire flock cower as if struck by a physical blow to the body. But, at the same time, they seemed strangely disconnected from everything including, or especially, their own battered selves, inhabiting their mournful, bedraggled, besmirched lives with a sort of eerie, forlorn detachment, a sort of sorrowful resignation, most of them making no attempt to preen their filth-encrusted feathers, mend their wounds, protect their frail bones, or replenish their starved and parched bodies. Each, dragging into this new life the devastated landscape of her past – the amputated beaks, the hunched backs, the slumping shoulders, the brittle bones, the featherless patches covered in bruises and abrasions, the defeated gaze, the uncertain gait.
You could see, in the mutilated face of each bird, the record of her struggle to escape the hot knife that seared off her beak in a cloud of acrid smoke: The beak was cut all the way to the root, or severed at an angle, or the jaw had splintered and protruded from under the shattered upper part, or there's was a lump at the end of the beak, a strange, botched attempt at self healing, or a tumor had developed in response to the trauma and obstructed the nostrils. You could see in what direction each bird had desperately yanked her head to escape the blade – down, or up, or sideways – you could see how violently she had writhed and how wide the scream had opened her beak as the knife cut through bone, cartilage and soft tissue – the beak is severed straight or at an angle, its tip is rounded or flat, or the lower jaw forks and splinters, or the upper part is missing altogether, or the tips are melted into a round opening, frozen into a permanent expression of bewilderment, a grotesque semblance of lips puckered in a kiss.
But
you could also see, with infinite gratitude and sadness, the inner
light of each bird's life, her golden beauty, her intense yearning to
live and become still glowing through the darkness.
That day, and
for weeks to come, many stayed huddled together, seeking a meager
measure of warmth and solace under the battered wings of another. They
refused to leave the barn, keeping themselves tucked in an
out-of-the-way corner and gazing at the great, big, happening world
outdoors from inside the shed. Others focused exclusively on the patch
of world immediately in front of them and air-pecked neurotically, for
hours on end, at invisible targets.
Some, tried to make
themselves invisible, squeezing themselves in the nearest, smallest
nook, even if the space was barely large enough to mask their faces. You
could see them trying to disappear inside these absurd bunkers, their
bodies and scraggly tails sticking out, but their faces hidden, their
eyes covered, protected from the unbearable, overwhelming, frightening
sights and sounds of life. They stood frozen in their meager, pathetic
hiding places, heart racing, body trembling, wishing for nothing but an
end to the terror, a sliver of comfort and peace.
A few bold
souls ventured out in the open middle of the barn, seemingly certain
that herein lied the thing they had yearned for all of their young lives
– whatever that thing was to a person condemned to a desolate
environment – mind nourishment? knowledge? a sense of possibility? Their
curiosity, their need to feed their starved minds, was stronger than
caution.
One intrepid young hen jumped into a grain bowl not because she wanted
to eat – nourishment could wait – but because she wanted to do something
she had been denied her entire life: take a dustbath. You could hear
her fluttering and scuttling inside the bowl, burrowing in the grain,
covering herself in it, throwing it in the air like confetti and, as the
beads scrubbed and cleansed her scab-encrusted skin, what was left of
her feathers fluffed like a ragged rose, her brittle wings and legs went
akimbo in ecstatic abandonment, her eyes rolled up dreamily, lids
weighed down with the sweet weight of delight. The first dustbath of her
life.
Next to her, at a nearby water bowl, three hens gathered
around and drank, unhurriedly, as though they had all the time in the
world – they did! – dipping their mutilated beaks in fresh water,
letting the cool mirth of each sip roll down the tongue, one glittering
drop always hanging at the tip, eyes closed, heads thrown back, chins
lifted to high heaven, beak parted as if in a silent song to the open
sky.
And then there was the young hen who hadn't moved from the spot where
she was first laid down. Who was still leaning against the perch ladder,
one wing draped over the lowest rung, the other hanging down to the
ground as though trying to hold herself up, keep her balance or regain
it.
When gently nudged, she staggered as far as the nearest
water bowl and parked herself there, went no further. She just stood
there, the angle of her folded comb pointing to a frightened, dazed eye.
Many of them froze this way when they first set foot on free ground,
unsure what to do, where to go, unsure what to do with the fact that
there WAS somewhere to go, a horizon that stretched farther than the
prison wall they'd seen all of their barren lives, a space that was
filled with something they had never experienced in their entire lives –
open sky, sunlight, birdsong, the scents of a living earth – and a
floor that cushioned the foot, rustled, murmured and yielded sweetly
under each step, a floor that did not punish every step like the wire
mesh floors they'd walked on all their lives – a floor covered in straw!
But this little hen never moved. She stood frozen in the same
spot for hours, unable or unwilling to eat or drink even though food and
water was only a few inches away.
While the others were busy experiencing their very first moments of bewildered freedom however they could, staggering in a daze, or clumsily searching for a vague something, or hiding away, or huddling together, she just stood there alone in her soiled, bedraggled feathers, her belly down encrusted with the filth she had been forced to live in all her life, her featherless neck rubbed raw, the stump of her upper beak barely long enough to cover her tongue, her lower jaw splintered and extending pathetically in mid air like a begging hand. She didn't even look around, as though the effort of seeing, of absorbing anything more, was too much. As though she had no reason to anticipate anything but more anguish, more pain, more abuse, more of the bleakness she'd experienced growing up in the line of egg production.
Hours later, she was still in the same spot, inert, stunned,
disconnected, barely alive. But now she had laid an egg and was standing
over it as though over something completely foreign, something that had
never been part of her body. There she was, barely able to sustain her
own life but still churning out the eggs that were draining her. There
she was, surrounded by a world that finally, incredibly, improbably,
wished her life, but still unable to return to full life, still
depleting herself by retching more eggs, still standing dazed and alone
in the middle of the open barn.
I don't know what she felt as
she stood there, defeated on her first day of life and freedom, but I
know that what we felt even more intensely than sorrow for her wounded
life, was searing shame. Shame for the devastation that we – the moral
animals, the only animals with a choice, the absolute power holders of
the animal kingdom – inflict daily, intentionally, unnecessarily on the
weak, the downtrodden, the hapless innocents of the world. Shame for the
fact that we do it for something as frivolous as a taste, a taste that
can be so easily, so elegantly, so abundantly replicated from
cruelty-free sources. Shame for our depraved appetites. Shame for our
perverted humanity. Shame for our absolute corruption.
By morning, she took her first stiff, self-willed steps, her first
astonished steps into life that was finally free to begin. She stepped
into her free life quietly, easily, the way we step into our vegan lives
– not as though entering a new and foreign world, but as though
returning to a deeply familiar one, as though coming home.
This article was written by Joanna Lucas.
The truth about "free-range", "cage-free" and "humane" eggs, dairy and meat.