Of cock fighting, Michael Vick and chicken nuggets

I’ve been reading Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, a book about how humans interact with and view animals in their lives, anthrozoology. It’s no guilt trip, and it never waxes sentimental, but the author does point out some of our hypocrisies when we deal with animals.

For instance, cock fighting. We all know that cock fighting is cruel, and when we hear about someone getting busted for it, we tend to think, “Right on! That bastard!” But do we bat an eyelash when we mosey on over to the nearby fast food chain and order up a batch of Chicken McNibbles? Do we realize that by consuming that chicken, we are supporting an even crueler fate for those chickens than the ones who died in the cock fights?

“Rachel,” you say, “Slaughter isn’t the same as cock fighting.”

Damn right it isn’t. Let me tell you about the life of a fighting cock. I knew people who raised fighting cocks growing up. I never went to a fight, but I saw the kind of lives the birds had and the attention their caretakers showed them. There were no pitch-black feeding tunnels, only sunny pens or little hutches with tethers. The birds got to peck, scratch in dirt, mate, and if they got sick, their owners would tend to them. In short, they got to be chickens, and they lived healthy, normal lives (until a fateful match, naturally). After all, a sickly, sad, beaten bird can’t fight. But it can go to slaughter.

Compare that to the life of the birds at a Perdue farm on the Chesapeake coast. They live in lightless tunnels, standing in their own filth. The grow so fast that their bones are paper thin and break easily when being slung into crates for the trip to the slaughterhouse. And instead of dying in a fight with another bird, they get strung up, and sometimes aren’t even dead when they get dunked into the scalding bath before plucking, essentially being boiled alive. They live only six weeks, not six years or even six months.

Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that fighting chickens is kind or acceptable. I’m not trying to glorify it, and I’m sure not all people raising fighting cocks are doing so merrily in idyllic pastoral settings. But I find it amazing that people can get their hackles up over cock fighting, even demand that the farmers involved be persecuted for animal cruelty, but those same people don’t demand that the share holders at Perdue get tried on similar charges.

Everyone was shocked when they found out that Michael Vick was fighting dogs, but we were even more shocked when we found out that he loves animals. But he had to be a cold, evil, animal-hating bastard to do something so awful and cruel, right? Quite the opposite. Most people who own fighting animals really love them. But they’re in this weird headspace where they don’t see what’s going on as being wrong or cruel. It’s the same headspace we’re in when we passively consent to the torture and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of birds to feed ourselves and our pets. It’s the same headspace Perdue’s farmers are in when they look at their huddled, sickly, overbred, heaving masses of chickens. It’s something Temple Grandin refers to as “bad becoming normal.”

“Bad becomes normal” when you’re so used to a bad situation that you think that that is the status quo. For instance, my first job as a web designer was in a shop with some very introverted developers. I always felt sad and lonely and left out. I ended up at a new place with a bunch of more socially skilled developers, and I realized, “Wow, that place was really depressing! I didn’t realize how things were supposed to be.” Farmers who only ever see miserable living conditions believe there are no better living conditions possible.

We’re appalled by animal fighting because we aren’t used to it. If we were raised in communities where it was “normal,” we’d probably have no problem with it; same as we have no problem with eating birds from a company who doesn’t even put pictures of chickens on its web site. However, in a fighting community, you’re more likely to have a “this is wrong” moment after watching the grizzly outcome of a match, but you’ll never have that moment with Chicken McNibbles because the only outcome you witness in this community is tasty, breaded, and comforting. You never see the suffering. The companies involved don’t want you to have that moment of conscience, and they keep the aftermath hidden from sight so you can ignorantly continue to participate in what is a bad and broken slaughter system.

All said, I love chicken nuggets. I love eating them. But when I hear about cock fighting rings, instead of getting enraged and climbing onto my soapbox, I look down at that chicken nugget in my hand, and I feel guilt because I know I’m committing a far greater sin.