From: wheeler@SUPER.ORG (Ferrell S. Wheeler)
Newsgroups: rec.food.veg
Subject: Viva, the Chicken Hen
Date: 14 Oct 92 13:32:06 GMT



VIVA, THE CHICKEN HEN
(JUNE? - NOVEMBER 1985)

By Karen Davis
from Between the Species, Winter 1990
_________________________________________________________________
"A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg." -- Samuel
Butler
_________________________________________________________________

Buried in the trees behind the fence at the back of our yard,
there's a chicken house which opens onto the cow pasture on the
other side.  It belongs to our landlady.  When we first rented this
place several years ago, I used to pass by it regularly on my way
to the pond at the bottom of the pasture slope.  A ramshackle
structure made of wood with a door latch tied shut with a string,
the chicken house sits low on the pasture side under the sky,
surrounded by broken pieces of old farm equipment scattered and
piled every which way.	Approached from the overgrown garden path,
it rests among flickering shadows of yellow and green leaves, with
shafts of sunlight and small breezes filtering through.  When we
first moved here it was empty, and I, a lifelong suburbanite, gave
scarce thought to what manner of life it had housed before our
coming.  Peering through the dusky screen at the garden end, I
could see a compacted dirt floor with a large metal cylinder in the
middle, and over at the far end, a low shelf crammed to the roof
with junk.  Stray wisps of white feathers lay about, some lifted up
by the breeze.

One July day on my way to the pond I stopped short.  Through the
leaves, I thought I saw white forms moving around on the other side
of the screen.	Listening, I thought I heard voices.  A moment
later I was staring through the screen.  White, young-looking
chickens covered the ground.  Several, when they saw me, came over
and sank down in front of me.  Back then I knew almost nothing
about chickens, but I could see that their legs weren't right.
They tended to be thick and swollen with the toes curling inward
and outward in odd sorts of ways.  Many could barely make their way
to the metal feeder which stood at a considerable distance, under
the circumstances, from the water through rigged up along one wall.
A few fumbling steps and they would sink down on the broad, heavy
breasts, their eyes peering at me.
_________________________________________________________________
"Fleshly bodies of broiler chickens grow heavy so quickly that
development of their bones and joints can't keep up...Many of these
animals crouch or hobble about in pain on flawed feet and legs."
-Jim Mason & Peter singer, Animal Factories
__________________________________________________________________
"A chicken is an obnoxious bird.  A turkey is too mentally
unendowed to even stand upright." -Stephanie Brush, The Washington
Post, Style Section
__________________________________________________________________

>From then on I used to visit the chickens almost every day,
wondering dimly as to their ultimate fate.  One morning in late
August I went out to see them as usual.  Only, this time the place
was deserted.  Then I saw her.	["When you choose a career in the
poultry industry you may not see a chicken or an egg or a turkey--
except at mealtime."--Careers in the Poultry Industry: A Job is
Ready When Your Are].

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, unlike the chicken I had
found some weeks earlier stretched out and pounded into the dirt.

I made her a bed by the stove, close to our kitchen table.  We
named her Viva.  Neurotically adapted to corners by now, Viva would
hide her head in whatever closest corner she could find inside the
house, or if outside she would often stick her head under a bush or
pile of cur grass and just stay that way.  Despite this, she liked
to be outdoors.  To see her sitting among the bright leaves
scattered over the grass in the autumn sunshine, you would not have
guessed what her legs and feet were like.  Yet she liked to move
around.  When we first had her she used to cover a surprisingly
wide territory in spite of her hardship, for though crippled, she
was quick and I would sometimes catch her hobbling vigorously to
some point or other straight across the yard with her little wings
fluttering.
_________________________________________________________________
"I was host of a live talk show in Columbus and whatever happened,
happened.  Once we had a chicken-flying contest.  One chicken flew
right into the lighting board.	Zap!  so, what do you do?  We had
no commercials, so I threw it to the band."  -Robb Weller, The
Washington Post TV Week
_________________________________________________________________

She used her wings for balance in order to get about.  To steady
herself, and to keep from falling, she would spread them 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.  Much of her energy was spent upon this procedure
every other step or so.

At first I hoped that exercise would help strengthen her legs, but
as her body grew bigger they got worse.  Often I would find her
sitting with them spread out on either side of her, and sometimes
they would even get caught in her wings, causing her terrible
confusion and distress.  One day I noticed that certain parts of
her legs and feet were a greenish-blue, and wondered if she had
some disease.  I'd been thinking lately that even if she were not
in actual physical pain, which I wasn't sure of, she was still in
some kind of acute misery, for she acted as though she was.  She
hid her face in corners more and more as the weeks went by, and
ordinary efforts like eating and turning around were increasingly
done with a commotion which left her exhausted.

One of the most touching things about Viva was her voice.  She
would always talk to me with her frail "peep 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,
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.

I decided to have her looked at, so I made an appointment and on a
Saturday morning took her in a bed of straw in a cardboard box to
the veterinarian's office an hour away.

The veterinarian asked briskly, was this some sort of pet, what was
it?  No, I said, not exactly--Viva was our companion, she had been
abandoned and she lived with us in our house.  The veterinarian
looked at me.  She said, "Most people would not care what happened
to a chicken."
_________________________________________________________________
"Assuming that no one really cares about a chicken, the broiler
producers tell blatant lies to the public, and since neither the
press and television nor the animal welfare societies are
interested in the welfare of farm animals, the lies pass
unchallenged." -Peter Singer, Animal Liberation
_________________________________________________________________

She spread out Viva's wings and showed me that the undersides were
black and blue like the blotches in her legs and feet.	She said
that because of the struggle with her condition, Viva's body was
full of wounds, inside as well as out.	I asked, what is her
condition? and she said Viva suffered from a congenital leg defect,
called splay foot, an inborn weakness in her joints typical of
birds bred for the modern food industry.  ["Dramatic changes have
taken place within the industry.  Instead of 'scratching for their
food,' today's pampered chickens are the products of advanced
science and technology."--Careers in the Poultry Industry: A Job is
Ready When Your Are].  She said Viva should be euthanized and that
she would use an inhalant, which is more gentle than the usual leg
injection.  She had to look in on another animal just now which
would give me time to spend a last few minutes alone with my
friend.

I pulled up a chair next to the box on the table with Viva in it.
Just then a young veterinary aid rushed in, "Where is it?  Can I
see it?  I've never seen a chicken," she said making for the table.
She left.  I thought my heart would burst.  Viva was very peaceful,
and when I spoke to her she piped back in the way she had, her
little tail pulsing its perky beats, from somewhere inside.
_________________________________________________________________
"A chicken is an obnoxious bird."
_________________________________________________________________

The veterinarian took Viva away.  Later, as I was leaving, she said
that Viva would not die fast enough so she had to use a leg
injection after all.  She thanked me for caring about a chicken
["Assuming that no one really cares about a chicken..."].  I placed
Viva in the car on the front seat beside me.  The box in which she
had travelled alive she was carried home dead in.  My husband and
I dug a hole in the corner of the yard and laid her inside.  We
covered her up with the dirt.  I made a note on the inside cover of
my dictionary:	On Saturday, November 28, 1985, soft Viva died.
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