Not the noblest of animals
◊ Every day that I work, I e-mail myself gruesome pictures of clean-up after bird-flu outbreaks at poultry farms, car accidents, South American uprisings and stunningly beautiful "wild art" photographs, all by AP photographers.
In at least a few countries, people without the wherewithal to gas tens of thousands of chickens in a day to keep H5N1 from spreading stuff the chickens into large sacks, throw the sacks into large bulldozed pits and then fill the pits with dirt, burying the chickens alive. I'm still deciding whether this is more or less humane than the ways these birds would usually die.
Photographers sent out to cover bird-flu outbreaks take a lot of pictures of chickens, almost all of them alive; they can't always luck into health officials culling the local poultry farms. The photographers get up close to the birds to get better photos, and the birds' wattles and combs are almost always bright red and their eyes seem very large and wide in my memory, boldly staring down the camera lens. It's not hard for those pictures to pop up in my head as I pick apart a roast chicken.
There are also many pictures of birds being taken to markets, and birds being carried from markets, and birds being tied and dangled and carried by their legs, always upside-down. The awkward angles of their long, thin necks and the way their wings are stuck out at awkward angles make them look like they are trying to recover from a momentary loss of dignity, like stout little ladies in housecoats after a stumble.
I'm not saying chickens are the noblest of creatures, or that this is any worse than what most animals suffer during their short lives as the fruits of large-scale agribusiness, but it does make me very glad that I'm not a chicken � and a little sad that I'm a human.