stress-free chickens
While shopping today at a local health-food store (shut up—I'll outlive ALL of you), I found myself drawn in by the almost-subliminal Muzak system which normally plays whale songs and, I don't know—the sound of placental sacs softly bursting or something. A mellow-sounding pre-recorded male voice was touting the virtues of the store's free-range earth-friendly chickens vis-a-vis Evil Corporate Chickens.
"Our chickens hang out in stress-free environments," said the voice—I swear on my life, those were his exact words. Setting aside the anthropomorphic silliness of chickens "hanging out" at a health resort, soaking their pain away in mineral-enhanced whirlpools, and receiving Shiatsu claw massages, this startling announcement set the gears spinning in my head.
I believe I read somewhere that the bodies of animals whose last moments are intensely stressful—such as those of Corporate Chickens—release stress-related chemicals which ruin the meat's taste once us grubby humans shove it in our mouths.
But even though the health-food robot-man's proclamation superficially appears to be chicken-friendly, the chickens get still get KILLED in the end. Not that I'm bothered by the mass slaughter of chickens—birds are merely reptiles with feathers. What DOES bother me is the pretense that these people give a fuck about the chickens, and by extension, the planet. Their only concern is that the meat tastes better. If they cared about the chickens, they wouldn't be feasting on their carcasses in the first place.
No matter how hard we try to be nice, we're still clawing each other to death in the pecking order.
