Sat, 21 Sep 2002

Tastes Like Chicken

A guest post by Craig Maier. ...

I was researching the Helen Brach (candy company) Family Foundation, and I found out that they are a contributor to a little organization known as United Poultry Concerns, a vegan eco-feminist outfit, which (according to The Center for Consumer Freedom) is dedicated to ridding us of eating turkey at Thanksgiving and banning (it's true) rubber chickens. Poultry farming is dirty, unpleasant and heinous work for both the workers and (most certainly) the chickens themselves, but it's interesting to see what happens when academics get ahold of a good cause.

UPC President Karen Davis, who keeps over 100 birds in a bona fide chicken sanctuary (or "Poultry Paradise"), has been quoted as saying: "If it were up to me, there would be no 'domestic' animals, by which I mean there would be no slavery, no animal property, no 'pets.' Other creatures would live their lives, raising their families, having their own projects. ..."

Davis, a Ph.D. in English from Maryland, has written widely, but perhaps her most important essay is entitled "Thinking Like A Chicken," which was published in a peer-reviewed anthology by Duke University Press. A sample, taken from a portion of the essay called "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 and traverse.

No lies. Honest Injun. Actual scholarship!

Quite interesting, indeed.

Posted at: 15:32 | permalink