Advocating Effectively for "Broiler" Chickens and Turkeys: Bringing Their Hidden Suffering to Light

By Karen Davis from United Poultry Concerns
Date: Saturday June 7, 2008 10:00
Duration: 50 minutes

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A fundamental difficulty in drawing attention to the plight of factory-farmed animals is that every situation in which they appear is a mass situation. Except for the “veal” calf, whose solitary confinement stall and large sad eyes draw attention to him- or herself as a desolate individual, all that most people see in looking at animal factories are endless rows of battery-cages, wall-to-wall turkeys, thousands of chickens or pigs. They hear deathly silence or indistinguishable “noise.” They see a brownish sea of bodies without conflict, plot or endpoint.

To the public eye, the sheer number and expanse of animals surrounded by metal, wires, dung, dander and dust renders all of them invisible and impersonal. There are no “individuals,” no drama on which to focus, only a scene of abstract suffering. The misery of these animals is not even minimally grasped by most viewers who are socialized not to perceive “food” animals as sensitive individuals with projects of their own of which they have been stripped, such as their own family life and the comfort it brings.

The problem is most evident with “broiler” chickens and turkeys raised for meat. Unlike the more “dramatic” suffering of hens beating their wings against cage bars, for example, or of ducks having metal tubes rammed down their throats, the suffering of broiler chickens and turkeys is mostly hidden inside their genetically-wracked bodies in the vast compounds in which they are confined. A reporter for The Guardian described broiler chickens in a chicken house he visited as “a sea of stationary grey objects.”

In my talk I will present ways in which animal advocates can help bring the hidden suffering of “meat-type” birds empathically into public consciousness, with a stress on key points of information about the unnatural burden of suffering these birds embody – skeletal, metabolic, genetic. My talk includes a PowerPoint showing the contrast between normal chickens and turkeys and genetically-altered “meat-type” birds.