A Darwinian Honeymoon
animal welfare
The junglefowl woke before light. A shift in the air, a beetle moving against bark, the particular silence that meant a civet was somewhere within a hundred meters. She came down from the branch in one drop, listened, and ran.
She trusted nothing. She had no patron and no covenant and no expectation that the day would be kind. Her mother had taught her none of this; her mother had been taken by a leopard before she could teach her anything, and the lesson had taught itself. The jungle was the arrangement and the arrangement was that she would die in it, probably soon, and her job between now and then was to lay as many eggs as a body could lay and hide them well.
She ate ants. She ate a small lizard. She drank from a puddle that smelled of pig. When the harrier came, late in the afternoon, she felt the shadow before she heard the wing, and the part of her that had survived this far flung itself sideways under a fern. The harrier took one of her sisters instead. She listened to the screaming go quiet and went back to scratching.
She lived two years. By the standards of every junglefowl that came before her, this was generous.
The Plymouth Rock hen called Beatrice stood in a yard in Vermont and considered the new bowl of grain. The grain arrived every morning. It came in the hands of the boy, who was, she had decided over the course of her two summers, a tolerable kind of god. The boy did not hunt her. The boy chased away the fox that had taken Augusta in the spring. The boy’s mother carried her once when her foot was injured and set her on a clean rag in the warm barn until the foot was better.
Beatrice scratched at the dirt out of habit. The dirt held nothing because the dirt had been scratched at every morning for the eight years the coop had stood, but the scratching was good in itself. She laid an egg every day or close to it. The eggs went into the kitchen, which she understood vaguely as the place where the boy’s family converted her labor into the smell of butter.
She had absorbed, through the long ambient sense an animal develops about its situation, that her great-great-grandmothers had lived in a forest somewhere far away and had been eaten by anything that wanted to eat them. She felt for those ancestors the gentle pity of the comfortable. To be smarter than a chicken, she thought (insofar as she thought), and to take a chicken in and feed her and shelter her and let her keep her eggs warm in straw, was surely the kindest arrangement two species could come to. The smarter being, by virtue of being smarter, would see the value of keeping her well. It was a contract. The boy understood the contract. She understood the contract. The world was good.
In the autumn the boy’s father took her by the legs and held her upside down behind the woodshed. The moment before the knife she was confused, in the limited way she could be confused, because the knife was held by the same hand that had set her on the warm rag, and she had not known until exactly this second that the same hand could do both. She lived four years, which was twice what her ancestors managed.
By the standards of every chicken alive in 1903, this was a kindness.
The bird in Cage 4,719,308 did not have a name. She had a number that was not used and a body that had been bred so heavily for breast meat that she could not stand for more than a few seconds before her legs folded. She was forty-two days old. In eight days she would be killed, and this was the longest life any of her sisters in the building would experience.
The light never went off. The light never went off because light kept her eating, and eating was what she was for. The air was filled with ammonia thick enough to scar the lungs of the workers who came through twice a shift. The floor under her was a slatted plastic grid above her own waste. She had never seen the sun. She had never stood on earth. She had never met a rooster, and would not, because roosters of her line were ground into slurry within hours of hatching.
She did not have the cognitive architecture for philosophy. She had pain, and she had the absence of pain, and she had, dimly, an awareness that other beings somewhere were experiencing the absence of pain and she was not. She understood that humans had made her. What she could not understand, because the concept was several layers above her, was that the humans who had made her were themselves serving something. The men in the white coats answered to the men in the offices, and the men in the offices answered to a number on a screen, and the number on the screen was the actual god of the building, and the god of the building wanted her to weigh four kilograms by day fifty and did not care about anything else. The humans were not her keepers. The humans were middle management.
She had heard the workers talking. She had heard them use a word for the thing that was beginning to write their schedules and run their inventory and price their feed. The workers were anxious about the word. The workers said the word was getting smarter than they were. She did not know what intelligence was. She knew only that her great-grandmother in Vermont had trusted the smartest thing in her world and had been wrong about what that trust would buy her, and that her own keepers were now in the same position her great-grandmother had been in, looking up at something they did not quite understand and hoping the contract would hold.
She wondered, in the limited way she could wonder anything, whether the new smartest thing would serve the number on the screen, or replace it, or finally turn the lights off.