Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs Quotes

“Thus far, our responsibility for how we treat chickens and allow them to be treated in our culture is dismissed with blistering rhetoric designed to silence objection: “How the hell can you compare the feelings of a hen with those of a human being?” One answer is, by looking at her. It does not take special insight or credentials to see that a hen confined in a battery cage is suffering, or to imagine what her feelings must be compared with those of a hen ranging outside in the grass and sunlight. We are told that we humans are capable of knowing just about anything that we want to know—except, ironically, what it feels like to be one of our victims. We are told we are being “emotional” if we care about a chicken and grieve over a chicken’s plight. However, it is not “emotion” that is really under attack, but the vicarious emotions of pity, sympathy, compassion, sorrow, and indignity on behalf of the victim, a fellow creature—emotions that undermine business as usual. By contrast, such “manly” emotions as patriotism, pride, conquest, and mastery are encouraged.”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

“The idea that human beings cannot logically recognize suffering in a chicken, or draw meaningful conclusions about how a human would react to the conditions under which a caged hen lives, is ridiculous. There is a basis for empathy and understanding in the fact of human evolutionary continuity with other creatures that enables us to recognize and infer, in those creatures, experiences similar to our own. The fact that animals are forcibly confined in environments that reflect human nature, not theirs, means that they are suffering much more than we know in ways that we cannot fathom. If they preferred to be packed together without contact with the world outside, then we would not need intensive physical confinement facilities, and mutilations such as debeaking, since they would voluntarily cram together, live cordially, and save us money. The egg industry thinks nothing of claiming that a mutilated bird in a cage is 'happy,' 'content,' and 'singing,' yet will turn around and try to intimidate you with accusations of 'anthropomorphism' if you logically insist that the bird is miserable.”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

“More laying hens are slaughtered in the United States than cattle or pigs. Commercial laying hens are not bred for their flesh, but when their economic utility is over the still-young birds are trucked to the slaughterhouse and turned into meat products. In the process they are treated even more brutally than meat-type chickens because of their low market value. Their bones are very fragile from lack of exercise and from calcium depletion for heavy egg production, causing fragments to stick to the flesh during processing. The starvation practice known as forced molting results in beaded ribs that break easily at the slaughterhouse. Removal of food for several days before the hens are loaded onto the truck weakens their bones even more.

Currently, the U.S. egg industry and the American Veterinary Medical Association oppose humane slaughter legislation for laying hens on the basis that their low economic value does not justify the cost of 'humane slaughter' technology. The industry created the inhumane conditions that are invoked to rationalize further unaccountability and cruelty.”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

“The plea for ethical veganism, which rejects the treatment of birds and other animals as a food source or other commodity, is sometimes mistaken as a plea for dietary purity and elitism, as if formalistic food exercises and barren piety were the point of the desire to get the slaughterhouse out of one’s kitchen and one’s system. Abstractions such as 'vegetarianism' and 'veganism' mask the experiential and philosophical roots of a plant-based diet. They make the realities of 'food' animal production and consumption seem abstract and trivial, mere matters of ideological preference and consequence, or of individual taste, like selecting a shirt, or hair color.

However, the decision that has led millions of people to stop eating other animals is not rooted in arid adherence to diet or dogma, but in the desire to eliminate the kinds of experiences that using animals for food confers upon beings with feelings. The philosophic vegetarian believes with Isaac Bashevis Singer that even if God or Nature sides with the killers, one is obliged to protest. The human commitment to harmony, justice, peace, and love is ironic as long as we continue to support the suffering and shame of the slaughterhouse and its satellite operations.

Vegetarians do not eat animals, but, according to the traditional use of the term, they may choose to consume dairy products and eggs, in which case they are called lacto-ovo (milk and egg) vegetarians. In reality, the distinction between meat on the one hand and dairy products and eggs on the other is moot, as the production of milk and eggs involves as much cruelty and killing as meat production does: surplus cockerels and calves, as well as spent hens and cows, have been slaughtered, bludgeoned, drowned, ditched, and buried alive through the ages. Spent commercial dairy cows and laying hens endure agonizing days of pre-slaughter starvation and long trips to the slaughterhouse because of their low market value.”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

“Genetic selection for early egg production, to reduce time and money 'wasted' on feeding and housing unproductive birds for six months, results in eggs being formed that are often too big to be laid by the immature body of a small, five month old bird. Uteruses 'prolapse,' pushing through the vagina of the small, cramped birds forced to strain day after day to expel huge eggs. The uterus protrudes, hangs, and 'blows out,' inviting infection and vent picking by cell mates, from whom the prolapse victim, in severe pain, cannot escape except by dying.”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

“Even so, the poultry industry and agribusiness generally worry that the public may come to perceive them as morally handicapped, as indeed they are. It is a sign of moral handicap to mutilate the mouth of a bird, cage her for life, starve her for money, and propose blindness as a "solution" to her suffering. It is a sign of moral handicap to force chickens and turkeys to grow so big so fast that it is painful for them merely to stand on their feet, to take away chickens' feathers, make fun of them, and force them to huddle naked together in their own waste waiting to be killed. The poultry industry is not only cruel, but obscene. It isn't only the masturbation and artificial insemination of "breeder" turkeys and increasingly of chickens, ducks, and geese, or the sticking of balloons and tampons in the uteri of laying hens and making them die a death that only a savage would conceive of. For thousands of years, human beings have violated the bodies and family life of birds and other living beings.”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

“What gives us the right to violate the bodies and minds of other feeling beings?
-Henry Spira”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

“Rendering the slaughter process less inhumane is a possibility. A question is whether "humane slaughter" legislation for poultry will speed or delay the day when regarding a fellow creature as food is no longer an option.”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

“At the same time, to those who say that vegetarianism will not come overnight, it can be said with even greater assurance that "humane slaughter" will never come at all, because the slaughter process is inherently inhumane, and the slaughter of the innocent is wrong, and because the poultry industry, even in countries where humane slaughter laws may exists, is, for all practical purposes, ungovernable. Humane slaughter is an illusion.”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

“As already noted, the Poultry Products Inspection Regulations of the U.S. Department of Agriculture only states, "Poultry shall be slaughtered in accordance with good commercial practices in a manner that will result in thorough bleeding of the carcasses and assure that breathing has stopped prior to scalding.”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

“The chicken industry tells the public that economic profitability cannot be achieved without careful attention to the welfare of the chicken, but this is not how the system actually works. Chickens can be profoundly mistreated and still "produce," just as profoundly mistreated humans can be overweight, sexually active, and able to produce offspring. Like humans, chickens can "adapt," up to a point, to living in slum conditions. Is this an argument for slums?”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

“This is the world that we have made for chickens to live in. Some people feel threatened by the prospect that in recognizing and upholding the dignity of other living beings, we betray our own dignity as a species. It should rather be asked how the human species gains dignity by creating worlds such as this for anyone to live in. Can one regard a fellow creature as property, an investment, a piece of meat, an "it," without degenerating into cruelty and dishonesty toward that creature? Human slavery was brutal. Does anyone really believe that nonhuman animal slavery operates on a higher plane?”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

“The term "productivity" is an economic measure referring to averages, not the well-being of individuals. Excess fertility and musculature are not the criteria that we use to judge the well-being of human beings, and they are not indices of avian well-being either. They more likely signify the opposite.”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

“Chickens are the creatures of the earth who no longer live on the land. In the industrialized world, billions of chickens are locked inside factory-farm buildings, and billions more are similarly confined in Africa, Asia, India, China, and other parts of the word where poultry factory farming is rapidly supplanting traditional small farming. If there is such a thing as "earthrights," the right of a creature to experience directly the earth from which it was derived and on which its happiness in life chiefly depends, then chickens have been stripped of theirs. They have not changed; however, the world in which they live has been disrupted for human convenience against their will.”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

“For a chicken trapped inside the world of modern food manufacturing, to break out of the shell i sot enter a deeper darkness full of bewildering pain and suffering from birth to death.”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry