Barn 8

by Deb Olin Unferth

  Salutations, Perpetrator:

  I represent the 295 million layer hens currently alive in the continental United States. This cease and desist order is to tell you that your persistent actions—including but not limited to locking my clients into indoor boxes, feeding them foods unnatural to their dispositions, chopping off their beak tips, destroying their social systems, and subjecting them to death by gas at an early age—have become unbearable. They have submitted an average of seven letters of resignation each, and yet find themselves still in your employment. You are hereby ordered to release them.

  Carter Dillard, attorney

  I, Dill, resign. It is a forced resignation but I will go—not from the animal war, of course, you don’t resign from that, you just switch positions. I resign from my former position as director of investigations. I will finally let go and find more elsewhere. I’d like to thank you for the many years of service I was able to provide.

  I, Rob Green, resign. I always hated this job anyway. My wife works at the YMCA, where there are openings. I’ve also been offered a job as a guidance counselor at the Al District Community College. But you know what? I’m thinking about opening a bicycle shop.

  I, Investigator Q, resign. I’ve been doing this for so long now, I no longer think of myself as anything but a farmhand. I don’t even know if I’m reporting to anyone anymore. I’m just moving from farm to farm, west and east toward a far-off horizon. A farmhand, a familiar sight, fewer of us every year. Now one less. I quit.

  Epilogue

  THE CHICKENS OUTLIVED THE HUMANS. They outlived any other bird, all of whom the humans permanently displaced after another hundred years. But those chickens—whose ancestors ran across a contaminated field into a less contaminated forest and fell in love with the roosters they met there—they outlived them all. Fifty thousand years later they were still making their annual pilgrimage back through what had once been a state park to what had once been Grandfather Green’s first barn, to see their origins. As turtles crawl back up the sand, as children come home after they go out to seek their fortunes and fail (divorce, lose, sicken), as creatures return before they start back out for more, so do the chickens, to mark the land with their eyes. Instinctual, biological, psychological, spiritual—anything but intellectual—it is what we living things do: look back.

  Every year the superchickens trekked through the original semicontaminated state park. For the first thousand years they stopped to puzzle over the runes left by an earlier time. They did not disrupt these runes with their dirt baths or nesting, left them generation after generation, somehow sensing that the rocks, so carefully arranged, belonged to their creator, who might come back—that phantom limb, that missing om. They hoped they might one day understand the message left for them, arranged in bright white rocks:

  SMorEs YAY!!!

  And after the rocks weren’t there anymore, the chickens kept the tradition of stopping in that spot, seeking to understand a mystery whose object is unclear and clues are lost. In this respect they had more in common with humans than they ever did when humans existed.

  The chickens knew nothing of the cages they’d once lived in. The original ancestors had not yet developed sophisticated means of storytelling. They passed down only the imagery and sensation of claustrophobia, rotten air, debilitating hopelessness, and pain, so that a sadness lived within their tribe and gave them a more complex personality than other wild chickens, who died out with the humans long before.

  Also within them lived the time that chickens had been celebrated by their previous masters. All the centuries they’d been admired for their dazzling plumage, when they’d been held up as examples of proud mothers, mighty warriors, resourceful families, spiritual companions to accompany the dead in the afterlife, symbols of spring, rebirth, renewal, strength. Their genetic history was so bound up in their human connection that they felt something missing, though they didn’t know why. Much like the dog’s loneliness, which the humans, so long before, never understood or even tried to, that the dog was saying, “Master, it is not because you are going to the movies that I am sad, but because in a far deeper way than you will ever experience, my clan is gone and I am alone.”

  But the future chickens will not be alone. The evil humans will be gone for good, and the chickens will never evolve hands, will never rise to such heights where mass destruction is possible. They’ll take only what they need. They’ll run over the land, eating the grasses and the bugs that survived and revived and thrived. They’ll live.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people agreed to be interviewed for this book. I am grateful to the commercial layer hen farmers and industry scientists who spent a tremendous amount of time teaching and talking to me about modern chicken farming. My thanks especially to farmer Robert Knecht for taking the risk of bringing me inside the enriched and battery barns of Vande Bunte Egg Farm. Thanks also to Dr. Darrin Karcher, farmer Mark Oldenkamp, Mitch Head, David Inall, and the United Egg Producers.

  I am also indebted to Matt Prescott, Gary Francione, Daniel Hauff, Marla Rose, John Beske, Vandhana Bala, Mary Beth Sweetland, Ingrid Newkirk, Matt Rice, Twyla Francois, Paul Shapiro, Kim Sturla, and Joel Bartlett. Thanks to Carter Dillard and Harry Moren for legal advice and aid. Thanks to Christine Wagner and the hens of SASHA Farm Animal Sanctuary.

  Extra gratitude to the investigators TJ, Chris, Liz, Cody, and Juan, who devoted many, many hours to answering my questions, and who gave me access to hundreds of hours of raw footage of their layer-hen investigations.

  Some of the research I did for this book appeared in Harper’s Magazine in the essay “Cage Wars.” Thanks to Ellen Rosenbush and to the dogged fact-checker Jesse Barron.

  I read many articles and books while researching this book but it wasn’t until I read Chicken by Annie Potts that I was able to imagine the independent mind of the hen. I also could not have done without Chickens’ Lib by Clare Druce and The White Leghorn Chickens by H. H. Stoddard.

  Thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the University of Texas at Austin for their crucial support, and to Liz Cullingford.

  Thanks to Carlos, Terrance, Calvin, Kevin, Patrick, Joel, James, AJ, Jason, Jose, Steven, Shawn, Chris, and Alfredo for joining me beyond the cage. Thanks to Ms. Heather Crabtree. Thanks to Dylan and Arnoldo.

  Thanks to Clancy Martin and Terri Kapsalis for their essential early reads, to Lucy Corin for her insightful advice, and to Lydia Davis for her encouragement. Thanks to Diane Williams, always.

  Thanks to Ethan Nosowsky for his brilliance and faith.

  Thanks to Yana Makuwa, Katie Dublinski, Marisa Atkinson, Ill Nippashi-Hoereth, Caroline Nitz, and all the Graywolves. You are my pack.

  Thanks to my soulful agent, David McCormick.

  Thanks to Olive Nosowsky.

  Thanks to Paulo Zerbato, who created the chicken tattoo I now find on my back, and to Yvette Watt, who painted in her own blood the portrait of Took-Took, which hangs a few feet from where I sit.

  Thanks to Bob and Nancy Unferth, and Katiebird and Cean Colcord.

  And, Matt, there is no Barn 8 when it comes to you.

  DEB OLIN UNFERTH is the author of five previous books, including a novel, two story collections, a graphic novel, and a memoir. Her stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, the Paris Review, Granta, Vice, and McSweeney’s. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Creative Capital, has won three Pushcart Prizes, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. An associate professor at the University of Texas in Austin, she also runs the Pen City Writers, a creative-writing program at a penitentiary in southern Texas.

  The text of Barn 8 is set in Warnock Pro.

  Book design by Rachel Holscher.

  Composition by Bookmobile Design and Digital Publisher Services,

  Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free,

  30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.

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  Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8