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Drawing the line on human vital necessities

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On January 11, I (Karen Davis) posted a comment to the Jan. 10 New York Times article In a First, Man Receives a Heart From a Genetically Altered Pig. The comment sparked a critique by cognitive science professor, Stevan Harnad, which is posted on his website Skywritings.

Here is Davis’ comment, followed by Dr. Harnad’s critique.

Pig Escapes Slaughter – Artwork by Sue Coe.

“Every single objection to the experimental use of animals – vivisection, genetic engineering, etc. –has been ignored and overridden by the scientific industry, and this is not going to change no matter how morally obnoxious, heartless and cruel to the members of other species. The majority of human beings are completely speciesist and regard (other) animals as inferior to ourselves and fit to be exploited for human ‘benefit’ including mere curiosity. Among the latest animal-abuse crazes is the factory-farming of octopuses. Of course! We just HAVE TO BE ABLE TO EAT THESE ANIMALS! The human nightmare is too overwhelming and it cannot be stopped although those of us who care about animals and object to how viciously we treat them must continue to raise our voices.” – Karen Davis

The following is the critique from Stevan Harnard:

Karen Davis is a wonderful, tireless, passionate, and invaluable advocate and protector for animals. I share almost every one of the feelings she expresses in her comment that Marc [Bekoff] posted.

But, for strategic reasons, and for the sake of the victims that we are all committed to rescuing from their terrible fates, I beg Karen to try to pretend to be more optimistic. I will explain

From Karen Davis, UPC:

KD: Every single objection to the experimental use of animals – vivisection, genetic engineering, etc. – has been ignored and overridden by the scientific industry.

This is true, except that there is no “scientific industry”: there is industry and there is science, and sometimes some scientists collaborate or even collude with industry. But scientists are more likely to be persuaded by evidence and ethics than industrialists.

KD: … and this is not going to change no matter how morally obnoxious, heartless and cruel to the members of other species.

That there is a monumental, monstrous, and unpardonable amount of human moral obdurateness, heartlessness and cruelty toward other species is patently and tragically and undeniably true.

But that “this is not going to change” is just an (understandably bitter) hypothesis based on countless years of unremitting (and increasing) suffering inflicted on other species by humans.

The hypothesis may or may not be true.

So I think we should not proclaim the hypothesis as if it were true – as true as the fact of human-inflicted suffering itself. The hypothesis cannot help the victims, for their only hope is that the hypothesis is false. And if the hypothesis is false, proclaiming it is true can harm the victims by promoting a self-fulfilling prophecy that could discourage activism as futile.

KD: The majority of human beings are completely speciesist and regard (other) animals as inferior to ourselves and fit to be exploited for human “benefit” including mere curiosity.

This is alas numerically true. But it does not follow that the hearts of the majority cannot be reached, and opened. There are many historical precedents for this in wrongs that humans have inflicted on humans (colonialism, feudalism, slavery, bondage, genocide, warfare, torture, rape, subjugation of women, infanticide, racism). It cannot be said that these wrongs have been eradicated, but they have been outlawed in the democratic parts of the world. Nor can it be said that the majority of human beings either practices or condones them.

It is still legal, however, to do all these things (colonialism, feudalism, slavery, bondage, genocide, warfare, torture, rape, subjugation of females, infanticide, racism) to other species. And it is true that the vast majority of human beings either do some of these things or consume their products. But there is evidence also that in the global information era we are becoming increasingly aware and appalled at these practices, and condoning them less and less. It is toward this awakening that activism is having a growing effect.

KD: The majority of human beings… regard (other) animals as… fit to be exploited for human “benefit” including mere curiosity.

True, but here (in my opinion) is the conflation that we activists should avoid at all costs:

With the vast majority of humanity still supporting the bondage and slaughter of animals, despite the total absence (in most parts of the world) of any necessity for human health or survival (-HS), just for taste, fashion and fun, this should never be conflated with life-saving biomedical measures (+HS).

People still demanding bondage and slaughter for -HS uses certainly won’t renounce it for +HS uses. Conflating the two can only strengthen the resistance to renouncing either. The call to renounce +HS can only expect a serious and sympathetic hearing once -HS has been renounced (or is at least far closer to being renounced than it is today).

(This is not at all to deny that much of biomedical research on animals, too, is -HS, as Kathrin Herrmann and many others are showing, should be exposed by activists as such, and should be abolished. But any implication that it was wrong to try to save the life of this dying man is not going to encourage people to renounce -HS. I believe it would be more helpful to use it to draw the -HS/+HS distinction, and point out that unlike +HS, -HS has no moral justification at all.)

KD: Among the latest animal-abuse crazes is the factory-farming of octopuses. Of course! We just HAVE TO BE ABLE TO EAT THESE ANIMALS!

Of course eating octopuses (“sea food”), whether factory-farmed or “naturally” harvested and slaughtered, falls squarely under -HS use, alongside the use and slaughter (whether factory-farmed, “traditionally” farmed, or hunted) of whales, seals, fish, chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, pigs, cows, calves, sheep, goats, lobsters, crabs, shrimp, mussels… any sentient species that is not necessary for human HS.

KD: The human nightmare is too overwhelming and it cannot be stopped although those of us who care about animals and object to how viciously we treat them must continue to raise our voices.

Yes, let’s continue our activism on all fronts to protect the tragic victims from our anthropogenic horrors, but, please, for the sake of present and future victims, no matter how frustrated and impatient (and angry) we feel that the horrors keep persisting, let us not proclaim the hypothesis that they are “too overwhelming and cannot be stopped.”

Stevan Harnad
Editor, Animal Sentience
Professeur de psychologie, Université du Québec à Montréal
Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Science, McGill University
Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Science, University of Southampton
Comité consultatif, Droit animalier du Québec (DAQ)

Does Guilt Have a Place in Animal Rights Activism?

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Special to the Mirror by Karen Davis, the President and Founder of United Poultry Concerns.

This article was first published today, December 6th on Animals 24-7.

If animals are largely overlooked in the range of human endeavors, is it any wonder that their suffering is barely accorded human knowledge, and that it makes sense to speak of the “secret” and “hidden” suffering of animals?

Even so, many people regard pain and suffering as morally objectionable and would agree with the Reverend Dr. Humphry Primatt, who wrote in 1776, “Pain is Pain, whether it be inflicted on man or on beast; and the creature that suffers it, whether man or beast, being sensible of the misery of it whilst it lasts, suffers Evil.”

Ecology of Pain and Suffering

Yet the idea that pain and suffering are evil per se is not always true. Pain can be constructive as well as debilitating. Pain that is degrading in one situation may be uplifting in another, as when a person suffers for the sake of a loved one or a worthwhile cause. Philosopher Jeff Sebo writes, for example, that “people often claim that traumatic events serve as catalysts for rational behavior, helping them to reprioritize their lives and focus on what is important.”

At the most basic level, pain is informative. Physical pain informs us biologically that we are injured or ill, while the pang of guilt informs us morally that we have done or are doing something wrong. Few would argue that a morally pain-free person is enviable simply because lacking a conscience is soothing and freedom from moral restraint is gratifying.

The fact is, not all pain is the same. While it is true that pain is pain regardless of who suffers it, other considerations apply. For instance, if I have to choose between suffering from cancer and suffering in a concentration camp, I will choose cancer. Why? Because cancer is not a sign of human character; it’s a malignant physical disease, not a malignant assertion of human will. Cancer is unfortunate, whereas a concentration camp is evil.

The contrast between human agency and random occurrence is important to counter the claim that it makes no difference whether a human or a nonhuman animal, say, starves to death from natural causes or as part of someone’s research; whether she or he suffers in the course of natural predation or in the machinery of somebody’s factory farm. Pain has a context. There are not only degrees and durations of pain; there are also causes and conditions. There may be motives and attitudes that enter into it that include a guilty, if unacknowledged, consciousness.

Clearly seen, each episode of pain reflects the environment that produced it. Images of animals undergoing vivisection and slaughter, Auschwitz inmates recounting their experience of being experimented on by Nazi doctors, the testimony of the doctors themselves, all show that there is a moral ecology of pain and suffering, as well as a natural ecology of misfortune, which may or may not overlap.

Pain is a symbol in the sense of something that is a part of – that stands out from and illuminates – a larger reality. To talk meaningfully about pain, we must take into account the conditions in which it occurs, including whether those conditions are primarily moral – involving human attitudes, motives, and conduct – or natural, like a plague or an earthquake. We will not then be confounded when someone dares to assert, as I once heard a researcher say at the National Institutes of Health concerning the head-bashing experiments that were being conducted on baboons at the University of Pennsylvania, that what “happens” to animals in laboratories isn’t so bad, because “life is full of suffering.” A guilt-free mind is indeed a great comfort.

By contrast, Thomas Coates, who is quoted at the beginning of this article, goes on to say in his Facebook comment, “There are a lot of things I used to do that were immoral. Guilt has continuously guided me to learn and improve. I’d hope that anyone watching this footage [of turkeys enduring massive cruelty on a turkey farm] will experience guilt and use it to make more educated and kinder decisions.”

Can Guilt Constructively Penetrate the Wall?

Animal advocates struggle with how to get people to care enough about animals to do more than just passively agree that animals shouldn’t be made to suffer. Speaking of activist efforts in China in words with global applicability, Mercy For Animals’ president, Leah Garcés, was recently quoted in Why the future of animal welfare lies beyond the West: “I think we have to keep throwing spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. We have not cracked the code. Nobody has.”

Should the “spaghetti” we throw include an effort to induce consciousness of guilt in people who are in a position to make a positive difference for animals in their personal lives? B.R. Myers wrote in The Atlantic, in 2007, in Hard to Swallow: The gourmet’s ongoing failure to think in moral terms: “Try forcing most Americans to consider the suffering of the animals they consume, and they will conclude . . . that the whole exercise has more to do with punishment than persuasion.”

As for encouraging people to feel guilty about contributing without reasonable cause to the suffering and death of a fellow creature, I think guilt is an appropriate and even a necessary feeling to have toward one’s innocent victims, as long as it empowers rather than impairs the ability to think and act better as a result. Guilt can be motivating along with pity and remorse and the uplift of deciding to wash one’s hands of contributing further to an abuse, and in this way transform the guilt incurred when one behaved less mindfully.

Further Reading: Moral Injury in Animal Advocates and Nonhuman Animals and the Commonality of Being Reduced to “Lesser Beings”

KAREN DAVIS, PhD is the President and Founder of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. Inducted into the National Animal Rights Hall of Fame for Outstanding Contributions to Animal Liberation, Karen is the author of numerous books, essays, articles and campaigns. Her latest book is For the Birds – From Exploitation to Liberation: Essays on Chickens, Turkeys, and Other Domesticated Fowl published by Lantern Publishing & Media.

Essay: Moral Injury in Animal Advocates and Nonhuman Animals and the Commonality of Being Reduced to “Lesser Beings”

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This article written By Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns. This article was first published October 26, 2021 on Animals 24-7.

Through the years, people have asked me how I can stand knowing what chickens and other farmed animals go through without going insane. One person, a psychotherapist, wrote to me recently about “living day and night with these horrors,”: “When I read about them,” she said, “I am filled with so much grief that I feel suicidal. I would not say anything so tiresome as ‘I can’t read about it,’ because of course I could. I just wish I could find a way not to be so filled with despair when I do. It keeps me from being more active in animal rights because I can’t imagine living with those feelings of overwhelming, helpless fury.”

What led me to think particularly about what has become known as “moral injury” was an article, On Moral Injury, in the August 2020 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Moral injury involves the guilt and shame one feels in witnessing and facilitating an atrocity – facilitating by actively contributing to it or simply by watching it and doing nothing to stop it, including the frustrated desire to end the atrocity and rescue the victims.

An example cited in Harper’s is photographers, reporters, and humanitarian workers in war zones who develop guilt over merely recording human suffering and not preventing it, even though it is not their job to intervene, and they know that. Even if some do manage to save a few victims, the guilt and vicarious trauma remain, since they can’t save everyone no matter what. Kevin Carter, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of a starving child in Sudan, wrote before killing himself in 1994, “The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist.”

Not surprisingly, the Harper’s article says nothing about the guilt of bearing witness or passively contributing to the suffering and death of nonhuman animals that so many of us feel, resulting in chronic depression that can become a kind of mental illness and even lead to suicide in some cases. Added to our vicarious immersion in the human-inflicted suffering and deaths of billions of helpless animals is our despairing sense that most people don’t care. As the psychotherapist quoted above went on to say, “Working with all kinds of people who don’t give a thought to suffering animals, I’m hoping to wake them up to their feelings and consequently to their awareness of the feelings of other creatures, but it is probably delusional that they will get far.”

Ethical Conflict in Veterinary Culture

Searching for professional discussions of moral injury on the Internet relating to nonhuman animals, I found one area in which it has been described: the veterinary profession. “Ethical conflict and moral distress in veterinary practice: A survey of North American veterinarians” published in 2018 considers the conflict within veterinary culture between providing futile, non-beneficial care to an animal patient at the behest of a client who wants their pet treated, even though treatment will not only be futile but deeply distressful to the patient. Though not legally or professionally bound to provide futile treatment, veterinarians struggle with their sense of obligation to their clients versus the welfare of their patients, “perhaps reflecting a cultural conflict between pets as family members and as property.”

Perhaps more to the point is what veterinarian George Bates wrote to me earlier this year:

“An article in the current Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association [A case study of ventilation shutdown . . .] describes in excruciating detail experiments with ventilatory shutdown (or ‘VSD+’ as they are calling it nowadays) for ‘depopulating’ swine herds. In addition to an in-depth discussion of the instrumentation and technical aspects of their death chamber that make the Nazi engineers of Auschwitz seem desultory, the authors thoughtfully mention the psychic pain visited upon those humans involved in such enterprises and the possible need for mental health counseling, but nothing about the less ethereal physical suffering attendant to death by hyperthermia.”

Ethical Conflict in Animal Advocacy Culture

Cultural conflict, professional and personal, appears in the animal advocacy community, especially where farmed animals and other institutionally abused animals are concerned. At best, only a tiny fraction of these victims can be saved in rescue operations, and one’s personal agony over their unmitigated misery and the blasé attitude of society including the legal system, government, corporations, farmers, experimenters and others, are a source of unappeasable anguish and justified anger, despair, and disgust.

In From Hunting Grounds to Chicken Rights: My Story in an Eggshell I describe my own moral injury linking the soul wound of vicarious suffering to the actual, physical suffering endured by animals whose own souls are injured by the brutal and bewildering treatment they receive:

“As a college student, I was obsessed with trying to imagine what it would feel like to be in a place that was utterly inimical to one’s sense of self, against one’s will – to be forced into the abyss of total imprisonment, moral abandonment, and bewildering cruelty – a concentration camp or a death camp where everydaysuffering is overwhelmed by abnormal, human-induced suffering. For me, it is natural to try to imagine what it must be like for a nonhuman animal (like a chicken, or a turkey, or a sheep) to be forced into a human-contrived, inimical universe. For these individuals, the hell they experience is unnatural. There is nothing in the psyche of chickens to prepare them for having their beaks burned off at birth and being crammed inside a filthy building filled with toxic gases along with thousands of other suffering, terrified birds.

“How do these foraging creatures, with the leafy green world of the jungle embedded in their genes, experience entombment? How do turkeys – birds who evolved not only to run and fly, but to swim, roost high in trees at night, and roam with their mothers for five months after they hatch – how do they experience being stuffed into buildings as contaminated as cesspools? How does a grazing animal feel when forcibly herded onto a huge ship, jammed in a filthy pen, and freighted from Australia to Saudi Arabia or Iraq. How is it for a sheep to float sea-sickeningly across the Persian Gulf on the way to slaughter?”

I’m sure that these animals experience, proprioceptively within themselves, not only the violation and humiliation of their bodies but the violation and humiliation of the very essence of who they are and were meant to be through their natural evolutionary development.

Cross-Species Humiliation

The author of an article published in Harper’s Magazine on the psychology of humiliation says, “I believe the exaggerated response to humiliation is unique to our species.” The exaggerated part maybe, but the sensation of humiliation itself, the sensation of being stripped of one’s dignity, degraded, despised, defiled and treated like a thing – this experience I do not regard as a uniquely human experience. I believe the humiliation of being forced to “stand naked” in front of the Nazis noted in the article has a counterpart in other creatures, as when ethologist Konrad Lorenz observes in his article, “Animals Have Feelings,” that the hesitation of battery-caged hens “to lay their eggs in the close neighborhood of other cage inmates is just as instinctive as the hesitation of a civilized person to defecate in front of others in a similar situation.”1

Clementien Koenegras, President of Karuna Society for Animals and Nature in Puttaparthi, India, wrote to me in September this year:

“I look at the production of billions of little chicken lives, forced into existence, their bodies and children owned by the producer. The suffering, abuse and cruelty they are subjected to results in an existential trauma that prevents any possibility of expressing who they are. Inside the mass-produced little bodies there is ‘nobody home’ – their conscious, emotional and spiritual existence has been disconnected from their physical bodies by trauma. They are not being rescued. Nobody is coming for them.”

Clementien Koenegras bottle feeding a bear cub
Clementien Koenegras. Photo courtesy of Animals 24-7

The Metaphysics of “Lesser Beings” – Clementien Koenegras

Clementien Koenegras, quoted above, sent me the following notes on September 12, 2021. I am sharing them here, slightly edited for publication, with Clementien’s kind permission. Her thoughts about the suffering of animals are informed, she says, by “20+ years of shelter work 24/7.” (See www.karunasociety.org.) She writes:

“’Lesser Beings’’ are life forms that have been traumatized/compromised to the point of being incapable of being the life forms they are meant to be. They have experienced an existential trauma that makes them ‘less of themselves.’ This condition has many consequences including for the life forms they are connected with.

“My personal traumatic experiences and the damage done to my ability to function as a human being have brought me very close to the lives of abused domestic and wild animals.

“I want to contribute to the understanding of the concept of ‘Lesser Beings’ by consciously going back into a deep undisclosed realm that I share with all abused life forms.

“Specific events in my own life, the destruction of my dignity, show how I became a ‘lesser being’ enabling me to be a ‘Reporter’ for those whose cries are not heard or understood.

“My forced withdrawal into myself and my following disconnection from the world have made me aware that abused animals are similarly not capable of maintaining the inner connection with their own source, nor with the world. Their trauma makes them ‘Less of Themselves,’ incapable of being the life form they are meant to be.

“It is my understanding that no cure or welfare measure will solve the problem, if the root cause of how ‘lesser beings’ are created is not acknowledged and understood.”

Is “Anybody Home” in the Psyche of a Traumatized Animal?

I am drawn to this definition of “lesser beings” in part because the term “lesser beings” has traditionally been ascribed to animals deemed inferior to other animals in a schematic hierarchy from highest (humans) to lowest. A typical example in Christianity is the notion that animals don’t have “souls.” I am drawn to this definition because it intuits and proposes, based on personal observation, logical inference, and evolutionary kinship, that other animals, like ourselves, can experience moral injury and soul wounds just as we do. Where I differ somewhat from this definition of “lesser beings” is in my belief that there is indeed “somebody home” in the traumatized psyche of a nonhuman individual. Who a morally injured animal intrinsically is and was meant to be resides, I believe, in the recesses of the psyche including the body, however overwhelmed the individual is by unnatural, unmitigated suffering.

Two caged hens dreaming of roosting in trees
Photos courtesy of Mercy For Animals and United Poultry Concerns

I’ve said this in writings going back to the first edition of my book Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry (1996; 2009). This year I read an academic article whose author, Thomas R. Verny, bolsters my belief that every bodily cell is a repository of memory and anticipation and that no memory, be it ancestral or personal, traumatic or happy, is truly lost ‑ forgotten, suppressed or repressed perhaps, but not gone:

In Enduring memory: How can animals whose brains have been drastically remodelled still recall their kin, their traumas and their skills?, Verny concludes (unfortunately based on vivisection experiments on flatworms): “In aggregate, the evidence suggests that aspects of intelligence and consciousness traditionally attributed to the brain have another source as well. Our memories, our tastes, our life knowledge, might owe just as much to embodied cells and tissues using the same molecular mechanisms for memory as the brain itself. The mind, I conclude, is fluid and adaptable, embodied but not enskulled.”

This view accords with my conclusion to Chicken-Human Relationships: From Procrustean Genocide to Empathic Anthropomorphism:2

“Scientists cite the persistence of ‘ancestral memories’ in intensively bred, factory-farmed chickens who, though they have never personally experienced so much as the ground under their feet, have “the same drive to scratch away to get their food,” given the opportunity, as do their junglefowl relatives who spend long hours scratching away at the leaves of the forest floor to reach the tiny seeds of bamboo which they love.

“Perhaps these deeply structured memory formations, retentions, and ineffable networks of knowledge in the body and brain of a bird have something about them tantamount to what may be called ‘phantom limbic memories’ of their dismembered body parts and the experiences inscribed within those parts that make chickens, and all other animals, who they truly are. Wingless, featherless, blind and brain-damaged, entrapped in the hell of humanity, do they recall their wholeness in the phantom limbic soul of themselves? And if they do, are such memories of their essential identity, eluding the procrustean blades of annihilation, experienced as a compensation or a curse? When hens in a battery cage fall asleep, perchance to dream, how do they feel when they wake up?”

Can a Wounded Soul Heal?

The Harper’s article “On Moral Injury” that prompted this essay ends with a quote by psychiatrist Anthony Feinstein in praise of the “resilience” of the human species, which he says enables us to withstand “the evil and darkness” we project and will continue projecting into the world. “But our souls are scarred,” he says. Since human beings will continue committing atrocities as a matter of course, the issue for him is how to “heal our souls” in the face of this fact. Unlike Feinstein and various others quoted in the article, I do not see how morally, viscerally sensitive people can “heal” or be “healed” in the face of such knowledge including the relentless onslaught of the suffering we inflict on innocent, helpless individuals. Palliated perhaps, but healed?

I wonder whether Feinstein and Janine di Giovanni, the author of the Harper’s article, could empathize with those of us who suffer moral injury over the human-caused suffering of animals; I wonder if they could empathize with the traumatized animals themselves. Those of us who do animal rescue and sanctuary work know that traumatized nonhuman animals share with us a “resilience” that is almost heartbreaking to facilitate and contemplate. The only real way to “heal” ourselves is to help them recover who they truly are, and were meant to be, as best we can, through our advocacy and “managed” care for them and for ourselves.

A moral injury can empower us; it doesn’t have to be fatal.

NOTES

  1. This essay was originally published as “Procrustean Solutions to Animal Identity and Welfare Problems” in Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, ed. John Sanbonmatsu, Copyright 2011. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. It is reprinted with permission in my book For The Birds: From Exploitation to Liberation: Essays on Chickens, Turkeys, and Other Domesticated Fowl, published by Lantern Books in 2019.
  2. Konrad Lorenz, “Animals Have Feelings,” trans. E.M. Robinson, Der Spiegel 47 (1980).

Farmed Animal Welfare Law Betrayed in Massachusetts

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The following is from a report by United Poultry Concerns

Massachusetts voters in 2016 passed a ballot measure for pigs, calves, and laying hens that would have required 1 1/2 square feet of living space for each hen. Regulations were to become effective this month, and the law was to take effect on January 1, 2022 meaning that by that date, the state’s egg producers were to have complied with the space mandate.

But most likely that is not going to happen. As reported by Food Safety News (FSN) in Face egg shortage or adopt national standard are choices for Massachusetts on Oct. 14, 2021, a proclaimed “shortage” of eggs in the U.S. plus the failure of MA egg producers to comply with the law has led instead to MA Senate Bill 2470. Now in the state legislature and effective Jan. 1, 2022 if passed into law, the bill reduces the space requirement per hen from 1.5 square feet per hen to 1 square foot per hen, thus subverting the will of MA voters and making life more miserable for the hens – a bleak, unfulfilling life even with a foot and a half of living space for each “cage-free” hen.

FSN rightly reports that battery cages for hens, in which 74 percent of 243 million U.S. hens are currently confined, are designed to achieve high density of hens within the battery-caged environment: more hens per unit = more eggs = more money.

What is not made clear is that uncaged, or “cage-free,” operations are designed to achieve the same high-density purpose as battery-cage operations. Instead of crowding hens in cages or on a single huge “cage-free” floor, producers are stuffing many more hens into these “cage-free” buildings by stacking them on platforms placed vertically above the floor as well as on the floor.

FSN suggests that the purpose of these “vertical aviaries” is to allow the hens “to fly upward, perch and roost,” echoing the redesigned legislation which states that “1 square foot of usable floor space per hen . . . provides hens with unfettered access to vertical space.” This “unfettered access” claim, practically speaking, is false.

In practice, if a hen on a platform tries to flutter down to the floor, she can break or dislocate her wings, legs or breast bone in her frustrated effort to land in a space that is free of hens. Chickens do not choose to land on other chickens, and they do not want to hurt themselves by doing so, and will therefore often stay where they are rather than risk injury. These hens face a similar challenge in trying to fly up from one platform to the platform above.

FSN rightly observes that battery cages do not provide enough space for occupants to “fully open wings, let alone to run, or jump.” But neither do these “cage-free multi-tiered” buildings. Consider that one square foot equals 144 square inches and that half a square foot equals 72 inches and that a three-to-four pound hen needs a minimum of 74 square inches merely to stand, 197 square inches to flap her wings, 135 square inches to ruffle her feathers, 172 square inches to preen her feathers, and 133 square inches to scratch the ground, as noted in the May 1990 Poultry Digest.

In addition it must be pointed out that a law stating that each hen must be able to fully extend her limbs, especially her wings in the conventional “cage-free” setting, does not mean that all hens simultaneously could do that if they wished. It merely means that one hen at a time must be able to spread one or two wings at a time. MA SB 2470 would require only that hens have enough space to stand up, turn around, and lie down. The proposed MA law will be consistent with other states’ cage-free standards, rather than being competitively disadvantaged, says FSN.

What Can I Do?

Be sure to read the comments to Face egg shortage or adopt national standard are choices for Massachusetts in Food Safety News, posted below the article by Gail Eisnitz of the Humane Farming Association, Mary Finelli of Fish Feel, and Yours Truly, Karen Davis, of United Poultry Concerns (“Chicken Advocate”).

If you are a Massachusetts voter, please tell your state legislators that you want the original 2016 law to remain in effect unchanged. Request a written reply.

For more information on “cage-free” standards, see:
California Ballot Initiative to “Prevent Cruelty”

Covid Expert Dr. Fauci Funded Abusive Experiments on Beagles

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The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), under the leadership of Dr. Anthony Fauci, directed $424,455 to researchers at the University of Georgia in September 2020 to infect dozens of beagles with disease-causing parasites.

The experiment was to test an experimental drug on them, according to documents obtained by White Coat Waste Project (WCW).

According to an NIAID task order form released via a Freedom Of Information Act request, the 28 beagles were to be allowed to develop infections for three months before being euthanized for blood collection.

According to emails obtained by WCW, the study began on Nov. 12, 2020, meaning the beagles would have been scheduled to be euthanized in June 2021.

Films Explore the Ethics of Backyard Chickens

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These films explore chicken farming in America, and provide a brief history of the chicken industry and discussion of the adverse environmental impact of the industry on land, air, water, human/animal health and well-being. With Karen Davis, PhD, Founder and Director of United Poultry Concern.

Until All are Free is a film about the interconnection of all beings and our planet…It’s a film about justice, compassion and saving our world.

Fighting for Tule Elk in Point Reyes

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In this United Poultry Concerns podcast environmental activist and earth warrior Diana Oppenheim talks about her love for the Point Reyes National Seashore on the coast of Northern California and the fight for the fate of the tule elk who live there. Ranchers lease the public land to use for breeding, grazing, and killing cows for their “grass-fed” flesh and “local” dairy products. The ongoing tule elk conflict is a fight for resources, water, and the very lives of the sensitive elk species.

Diana founded the grassroots campaign forELK.org to help save the tule elk. She just completed a trip to Washington, D.C. to present over 100,000 petitions to Secretary Haaland at the Department of the Interior to end ranching in Point Reyes and stop the proposed killing of the endangered tule elk on public lands. Hope and Diana discuss the issue with the elk as well as the larger environmental impacts of regenerative animal agriculture and the problems with local, grass-fed animal products.

United Poultry Concern’s Humane Hoax Chicken Webinar Videos are published

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United Poultry Concern’s Second Annual Humane Hoax Chicken Webinar finished on May 29, 2021. UPC uncovered the rich, complex lives of chickens, and the pervasive, harmful lies of the chicken industry. Expert speakers brought a unique perspective that was well researched, interesting, and inspiring.

Below are videos from the webinar:

Hope Bohanec and Justin Van Kleeck
Exposing the Humane Hoax in the Chicken Industry

Dr. Tushar Mehta, Plant Based Data
The Ecological, Health, and Zoonotic Risks of Poultry and Egg Consumption

Rachel McCrystal, Woodstock Sanctuary
Speaking of Chickens

Quincy Markowitz & Rebecca Moore
Panel: Chickens on the Couch, Dismantling Who Is a Companion Animal

United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl.
www.UPC-online.org

Poultry Production and the Devastation of its surrounding environment

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A Newsweek article published April 28 about a current dearth of commercial chicken “wings” concludes the marketing account with the perspective of UPC’s President, Karen Davis in the following three paragraphs:

The demand for U.S. chicken abroad increases production at home, production which Karen Davis, president of United Poultry Concerns, said devastates its surrounding environment. In the United States, 8 billion chickens are consumed each year, and American chickens produce nearly 86 million tons of manure a year.

Davis says this manure does not just create toxic environments for the chickens, but it also presents major disposal problems. While some can be used for fertilizer, much ends up in runoff. According to a report by Environmental Integrity Project, the chicken industry contributes about 12 million pounds of nitrogen to the Chesapeake Bay each year. Today, 82% of the bay is partially or fully impaired by toxic contaminants, the Chesapeake Bay Program found.

“The environmental issue is very important, because the plight of the chickens again spills out into the larger environment,” Davis told Newsweek. “One of the effects of the chicken industry is the destruction of wildlife and wildlife habitat. It just ruins every place it opens for business.”

Learn more:
Environment Impact of the Poultry Industry

Microsanctuaries: How to provide sanctuary to individual animals…now

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According to the Microsanctuary Resource Center, while the microsanctuary model in many ways focuses on typically farmed species, any vegan home can be a microsanctuary when caring for animals who aren’t usually seen as “companions”: chickens, pigs, fishes, mice, rats, rabbits, insects, and more.

A microsanctuary can be as small as one rescued individual.

A microsanctuary starts from the premise that our space and our resources, no matter how limited, often are still sufficient for us to provide sanctuary to individual animals RIGHT NOW in order to prevent them from ever again being used as commodities. Additionally, microsanctuaries aren’t to be seen as stepping stones to larger sanctuaries but ends unto themselves: providing the best care to microsanctuary residents is a worthy goal, and the pressure to get bigger should always come second to sustainability and some degree of self-reliance. (In other words, beware of fundraising… Relying on outside funds to take in and care for MORE animals will always be in some degree of tension with doing what you can with what you have. 

United Poultry Concerns in Machipongo has been featuring microsanctuaries in their podcasts. The latest Microsanctuary podcast is on Sweet Peeps Sanctuary in Alabama. Founder Tracey Glover shares how each of the chickens in her care have individual personalities and how she has learned that chickens are incredibly social, gentle, curious, and smart. The Microsanctuary Series will feature a different small sanctuary once a month through the summer of 2021.