Regarding domesticated versus wild animals, the relevant distinctions for Leopold are between things that are “ unnatural, tame, and confined ” and things that are “ natural, wild, and free. ” Domesticated animals, farm animals in particular, “ have been bred to docility, tractability, stupidity, and dependency. ” They are “ creations of man, ” making “ the complaint of some animal liberationists that the ‘ natural behavior ’ of chickens and bobby calves is cruelly frustrated on factory farms ” about as meaningful as “ to speak of the natural behavior of tables and chairs. . . . Leopold to all appearances never considered the treatment of brood hens on a factory farm or steers in a feed lot to be a pressing moral issue ” (Callicott 1980, 314, 330). 2
In the midst of these reflections I moved to a place where for the first two years the owner continued her practice of raising a flock of about a hundred chickens each summer for slaughter. That is how I became acquainted with Viva, the chicken hen, the first chicken I ever really knew. In the essay that I later wrote about her, I have described how one day in August, I was surprised to discover the chicken house, which I had gotten into the habit of visiting, deserted.
This dilemma, crystallized for me by my recent encounters with Sagan, Callicott, and Viva, led me to compose an essay, “ Farm Animals and the Feminine Connection, ” on the triangular affair between feminism, farm animals, and deep ecology. I argue that although nonhuman animals are oppressed by basic strategies and attitudes that are similar to those operating in the oppression of women, it is also true that men have traditionally admired and even sought to emulate certain kinds of animals, even as they set out to subjugate and destroy them, whereas they have not traditionally admired or sought to emulate women. Animals summoning forth images of things that are “ natural, wild, and free ” accord with the “ masculine ” spirit of adventure and conquest idolized by our culture. Animals summoning forth images of things that are “ unnatural, tame, and confined ” represent a way of life that Western culture looks down upon. The contrast can be vividly seen in our literature. Whereas in Herman Melville ’ s Moby Dick the hunters of the great white whale conceive of their prey as an awesome, godlike being, in William Golding ’ s Lord of the Flies the little boys view the nursing sow, whom they violently rape with a spear, as an object of disgust. 3 The analogy between women and nonhuman animals overlooks perhaps a more specifically crucial comparison between women and farm animals.
Then I saw her. She was stumbling around over by the feed cylinder on the far side where the low shelf piled with junk makes everything dark. A shaft of sunlight had caught her, but by the time I was able to get inside she had scrunched herself deep in the far corner underneath the shelf against the wall. She shrank as I reached in to gather her up and lift her out of there. I held her in my lap stroking her feathers and looked at her. She was small and looked as if she had never been in the sun. Her feathers and legs and beak were brownstained with dirt and feces and dust. Her eyes were as lusterless as the rest of her, and her feet and legs were deformed. I let her go and she hobbled back to the corner where she must have spent the summer, coming out only to eat and drink. She had managed to escape being trampled to death in this overcrowded confinement shed, unlike the chicken I had found some weeks earlier stretched out and pounded into the dirt. (Davis 1990, 34)
I took Viva into our house, where she lived with my husband and me until she died a few months later in November. She was severely crippled but resourceful, and determined to get around. To steady herself, she would spread her wings out so that the feather ends touched the ground, and standing thus she would totter from side to side in a painstaking adjustment before going ahead, a procedure that had to be repeated every other step or so. Just one unsuccessful foray off the rug onto the hardwood floor caused her to avoid bare floors thereafter. Viva was not only strong-willed and alert; she was expressive and responsive. One of the most touching things about her was her voice. She would always talk to me with her frail “ peep ” which never got any louder and seemed to come from somewhere in the center of her body which pulsed her tail at precisely the same time. Also, rarely, she gave a little trill. Often after one of her ordeals, in which her legs would get caught in her wings, causing her terrible confusion and distress, I would sit talking to her, stroking her beautiful back and her feet that were so soft between the toes and on the bottoms, and she would carry on the dialogue with me, her tail feathers twitching in a kind of unison with each of her utterances.
This kind of nature and experience did not seem to have a niche in environmental ethics, including the radical branch of deep ecology, making environmentalism seem in a certain sense to be little more than an offshoot of the prevailing scientific worldview with its hard logical categories and contempt for the weak and vulnerable. Concerning farm animals, even the animal community tended to stand clear and, as ecofeminist animal advocate Harriet Schleifer pointed out, to hedge on the issue of “ food ” animals and vegetarianism, making the public feel “ that the use of animals for food is in some way acceptable, since even the animal welfare people say so ” (Schleifer 1985, 70).
During this time a letter appeared in The Animals ’ Agenda from a woman requesting that more coverage be given to farm animals, coverage similar to that accorded to whales. The editor ’ s note that followed explained that “ the plight of whales remains a high priority with both animal advocates and environmentalists. ” Whales, wrote the editor, are “ intelligent, amazing, and benevolent creatures ” whose increasing fund of world sympathy, built up by the agitation on their behalf, had yet to protect them. “ Given that, if we can ’ t protect the whales, what chance do we have of protecting the chickens of the world? ” (Dahl 1987, 47). It seemed, however, fair to ask what chance there could ever be of protecting the chickens of the world if their only defenders viewed their plight as less than a “ high priority. ”
Not only men but women and animal protectionists exhibit a culturally conditioned indifference toward, and prejudice against, creatures whose lives appear too slavishly, too boringly, too stupidly female, too “ cowlike. ” Moreover, we regard conscious logical reasoning as the only valid sort of “ mind. ” Evidence that chimpanzees possess such a mind is a primary reason why many are now insisting that they should be granted “ human rights. ” Human rights for chimpanzees? Yes. Human rights for chickens? Meaningless.
This brings in the question of deep ecology. The philosophy of deep ecology, with its emphasis on the ecosphere as a whole, including both sentient and nonsentient beings, presents a salutary challenge to the reductionist logic and homocentric morality of Western culture. As the branch of environmentalism that emphasizes the spiritual component of nature and of our relationship to the natural world, deep ecology offers deliverance from the Western exfoliative global enterprise based on mechanistic models and unbridled greed of acquisition and inquiry masquerading as progress.
However, like its parent stock of environmentalism, deep ecology is infested by a macho mystique, whereby “ things natural, wild, and free ” continue to be celebrated and phallicized as corresponding to the “ human ” order of experience and idealized existence. Activities such as hunting, fishing, and meat-eating are extolled on recreational and spiritual grounds as part of the challenge posed by Leopold to “ think like a mountain. ” Homage is paid to the “ hunter-gatherer ” lifestyle, with virtually all of the tribute going to the hunter and none to the gatherer. Armed with the new ethic, men essentially give to themselves a new lease to run with the predators, not the prey, and to identify with the “ wild ” and not the “ tame. ” Western culture ’ s smug identification with the “ knower ” at the expense of the “ known ” stays intact, albeit mysticized in a headdress claimed to derive from the Mythic Past.
Thus it is not surprising that many proponents of deep ecology cannot find an ethical niche for farm animals or for the qualities of mercy and compassion and the desirability of treating others as we wish to be treated. I discuss
ed these issues in a further essay, “ Mixing Without Pain, ” and there things stood until my participation in the 1992 Summit for the Animals meeting recalled them to my attention so vividly that I wrote a reply, “ Clucking Like a Mountain, ” the kernel of the present essay, this time from the viewpoint of a battery-caged “ laying ” hen.
In the meantime, a year and a half before the Summit for the Animals meeting, in October 1990, I had founded United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that addresses the treatment of domestic fowl in food production, science, education, entertainment, and human companionship situations and promotes the respectful and compassionate treatment of domestic fowl as fellow creatures rather than a food source or other commodity. United Poultry Concerns grew out of the above experiences, and from my volunteer internship at Farm Sanctuary (an enterprise based on the rescue of factory farm animals) where I extended my acquaintance with chickens and got to know turkeys, ducks, and geese.
Back home I discovered that another lame hen had been left behind following the owner ’ s removal of the flock to the slaughterhouse. Tulip was my beloved friend for a year until she died of a heart attack, to which chickens bred for rapid growth and excessive muscle tissue ( “ meat ” ) are susceptible. Since then, chickens have become the center of my personal and professional life. I had an enclosure built onto our kitchen for rescued chickens who have the run of our three-acre yard. Amid the darkness of my knowledge of the horrible experiences inscribed within billions of chickens by our species, they are the peace and the light.
As usual, farm animals are relegated to the wasteland of foregone conclusions in which they are considered to be not only ecologically out of tune but too denatured and void of autonomy for human morality to apply to them. The recognition that human beings are specifically and deliberately responsible for whatever aberrances farm animals may embody, that their discordances reflect our, not their, primary disruption of natural rhythms, and that we owe them more rather than less for having stripped them of their birthright and earthrights has not entered into the environmentalist discussions that I ’ ve encountered to date. The situation of these animals, within themselves and on the planet, does not appear to exact contrition or reparations from the perpetrators of their plight, while the victims are per se denied “ rights, ” of which the most elemental must surely be the right of a being to be perceived before being conceptually trashed.
In an article following “ Triangular Affair, ” Callicott assigns farm animals a fixed, degraded niche in the conceptual universe. “ Barnyard animals, over hundreds of generations, have been genetically engineered (by the old-fashioned method of selective breeding) to play certain roles in the mixed community [human communities including domesticated animals]. To condemn the morality of these roles . . . is to condemn the very being of these creatures ” (Callicott 1988a, 167). I think to myself, listening to the trumpet blasts and iron oratory of environmentalism, how could the soft voice of Viva ever hope to be heard here? In this world, the small tones of life are drowned out by the regal harmonies of the mountain and their ersatz echoes in the groves of academe. A snottish article in Buzzworm: The Environmental Journal (Knox 1991) on animal rights versus environmentalism clinched matters.
This is how I came to write “ Clucking Like a Mountain ” (contained within this essay), in which I examine the ethical foundations of environmentalism from the imaginary viewpoint of a factory-farm battery hen via a human interpreter. Leopold ’ s plea for humans to think ecoholistically — “ like a mountain ” — has been taken by some environmentalists as a mandate to exclude from substantive and ethical consideration the individuated existences that help constitute the mountain, particularly those classified in Leopold ’ s terms as “ unnatural, tame, and confined ” in contrast to those regarded as “ natural, wild, and free. ” The ontological result is a holism devoid of contents, resembling an empty shell. The ethical result is moral abandonment of beings whose sufferings and other experiences are inconsequential compared to the “ big realm. ” I raise questions concerning our moral obligations to genetically altered and weaker creatures, especially those debilitated by our activities, pointing out, moreover, that domesticated chickens have been shown to retain their ancestral repertoire of behaviors, which undermines the prima facie assumption that they have been rendered docile and servile through breeding for specific traits.
Clucking Like a Mountain
“ Why do you keep putting off writing about me? ”
It is the voice of a chicken that asks this.
— Alice Walker (1988, 170)
In answering the call of ecologists to think like a mountain, I have to know whether this would conflict with my effort to think like a chicken. For I have chosen with the American writer Alice Walker to be a microphone held up to the mouths of chickens to enable them to step forward and expound their lives. I am glad that I have been able to see and identify with a chicken, though I grieve that my ability to communicate what I have seen and have identified with may be limited by profound but obscure obstacles which it is nevertheless my task to try to traverse. To think like a mountain implies a splendid obligation and tragic awareness. Environmentalist Aldo Leopold coined this image in 1949 to contrast the abiding interests of the ecosphere with the ephemeral ones of humans, arguing that unless we can identify with the ecosphere and “ think like a mountain, ” our species and perhaps even our planet are doomed. 4
Individuals inspired by Leopold and others have poignantly expressed on occasion the yearning of many humans to break out of our isolation as persons and as a species and to recover, through the story that connects us with all beings, our larger identity in the heartbeat of the living universe (see Seed et al. 1988, 57). I prize these thoughts but have been saddened that Aldo Leopold may not have intended that chickens, too, should give voice in the Council of All Beings along with California Condor, Rainforest, Wombat, Wildflower, and the rest of the biotic host convened in empathic rituals designed to reconstitute the experience in humans of a larger ecological Self. In the Council of All Beings, says a workshop guideline, “ the beings are invited to tell how life has changed for them under the present conditions that humans have created in the world ” (Seed et al. 1988, 111).
The Summit meeting had as its featured speaker environmentalist-historian Roderick Frazier Nash, who presented the attractive holistic concept of environmentalism along with the, to me, unattractive outlook in which species and biosystems prevail over the individuals composing them — except in the case of the human species, for which environmentalism in general seems to provide an exemption. Concerning hunting, the familiar justifications were given, including the inquiry how and why the sacrifice of one or two deer should matter as long as the herd or species is preserved from decimation or extinction. Humans are predators by nature. In Nash ’ s “ dream of Island Civilization ” essay, the ecotopian future is one in which “ Humans could take their place along with the other predators . . . in an expanded ecological brotherhood ” of all beings (Nash 1991/92, 2). Ideally, an intensely urban culture would flourish on the basis of a hunter-gatherer society complete with predator initiation rites. The exciting hunter part is vividly evoked; the boring gatherer part is left for the reader to infer.
Megaphone please.
I am a battery hen. I live in a cage so small I cannot stretch my wings. I am forced to stand night and day on a sloping wire mesh floor that painfully cuts into my feet. The cage walls tear my feathers, forming blood blisters that never heal. The air is so full of ammonia that my lungs hurt and my eyes burn and I think I am going blind. As soon as I was born, a man grabbed me and sheared off part of my beak with a hot iron, and my little brothers were thrown into trash bags as useless alive.
My mind is alert and my body is sensitive and I should have been richly feathered. In nature or even a farmyard I would have had sociable, cleansing dust baths with my flock mates, a need so strong that I perform “ vacuum ” dust bathing on the wire floor
of my cage. Free, I would have ranged my ancestral jungles and fields with my mates, devouring plants, earthworms, and insects from sunrise to dusk. I would have exercised my body and expressed my nature, and I would have given, and received, pleasure as a whole being. I am only a year old, but I am already a “ spent hen. ” Humans, I wish I were dead, and soon I will be dead. Look for pieces of my wounded flesh wherever chicken pies and soups are sold.
According to Callicott, the treatment of hens on a factory farm has not been morally important in the development of environmental ethics. Ecologically, this hen, like other domesticated “ farm ” animals, is not on a moral par with the authentic and autonomous creatures of the world but with all of the intrusive human technologies, from dune buggies to hybrid corn, doing their dirty work of contributing to the despoliation of the biotic community into which they had been inserted. Moreover, it is about as absurd to complain that the natural behavior of a chicken on a factory farm is frustrated as it would be to talk about the “ natural behavior ” of a piece of furniture. Black slaves were “ metaphysically autonomous. ” Wild animals are metaphysically autonomous. Even caged wild animals retain metaphysical autonomy as “ captive, not indentured, beings. ” But cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens? Veal calves and domesticated turkeys? Callicott asserts, “ They have been bred to docility, tractability, stupidity, and dependency. It is literally meaningless to suggest that they be liberated ” (Callicott 1980, 330). 5
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