Coming Home

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In Portuguese: De Volta Para Casa

I don't know how they experienced their arrival at the sanctuary – that moment when the van doors opened, and the light of day filled their eyes for the first time in their lives – but I know that, for one breathless moment, when we first looked at the one hundred souls safely tucked inside, we didn't see the tangled mess of soiled feathers, the open sores, the broken bones, the chopped off beaks, the mocked lives. All we saw – in one breath of infinite relief and elation – was one hundred souls who will go on breathing. And, for one instant, the glow of their living presence obscured everything else – the wreckage we'd made of their lives for our amusement, the despair still engulfing the 56 billion left behind, the darkness of a humanity that imposes untold misery for a taste.

For one rich instant, we luxuriated in the sweetness of those one hundred happy endings. Then, we embraced anew the toil of rising, standing, bearing, shouldering, suffering, nurturing one hundred new beginnings.

The one hundred birds who were now gazing at the open sky for the first time in their lives, were industry trash, "spent" hens rescued from a "free-range" egg facility where they had endured a lifetime of physical, social and psychological deprivation, females whose depleted bodies were no longer able to churn out eggs at the unnaturally high rate of production they had been forced to sustain all of their young lives, and were being sent to slaughter, to be replaced with a new generation of victims whose bodies would be used up in a fraction of their life span, and then mass killed, erased, scrubbed from existence, not a trace of their earthly existence left over, not a feather, not a song, not a child, not a dream.

Nothing in their captive lives had prepared them for freedom. Born in incubators and raised by machines in isolation from mothers, families, and communities who could teach them the skills and strengths that living requires, they had no social skills that would gain them acceptance in a free bird community, no language that was comprehensible to chickens outside their gulag and, after a lifetime of systematic abuse, most had lost even the ability to nurture themselves. Yet there they were. Asked to live and be free.

For the first few minutes, they were eerily silent. No one peeped, no one one moved. They just watched us with the breath of frail creatures. Some lengthened their bare necks and peered at the sun-filled world with silent, briny eyes, blinking, looking at the great outdoors with eyes unaccustomed to daylight, open spaces, or any other sight except the bareness of the windowless shed they had been confined to since infancy. Others slumped with infinite fatigue, caving within themselves – shoulders sinking, wings dragging, heads drooping, too weak and weary to even look up. A couple were dead, their cooling bodies wilted over their still warm eggs, their feathers stirring hauntingly in the living breeze, their eyes lidded so completely that they seemed to have never existed, to have never illuminated that face, shut with such finality, as though determined to keep the horrors of the world finally, safely, irreversibly out.

Everyone remained still and silent until Chris climbed into the van and started gently lifting one by one into Michele's cupped hands. Then, in one instant, the entire group went into a blind panic. They ran to the back of the van screaming, swarming, climbing on each other's backs, trying frantically to hide or escape, huddling together for a shred of comfort, an extra millimeter of protection, an extra millisecond of existence, still attached to the mockery we'd made of their lives, still trying to save them, still hoping (for what?).

As gently as we handled them, held them, cradled them before putting them on the straw-covered ground, they still cried out in fear for their pathetic only lives. That was the only sound we heard them utter that day and for many days to come – the sound of fear, pain, despair – the tragic record of a life of torment. And, with each rebirth, with each new bird lifted from the bleakness of her past onto a free future, we felt both the giddiness of life that was released at last, finally free to become, and the weight, the call, the tug, the stab in the heart of the lives left behind, still trembling in fear, still stirring faintly with absurd, irrepressible hope.
When they first touched the straw-covered ground, most of them just stood there, motionless for a minute or two, looking around, bewildered, exhausted, rocking from foot to foot as though rehearsing a walk they were about to take for the first time in their lives – the first astonished steps into a life that was finally free to begin – stepping in place for a few beats, then staggering to one of the corners of the barn and joining one of the two huddles that were quickly forming there. And that's where they stayed. For a long while, none of them ventured out in the middle of the open barn. They remained hidden in their corner huddles, still and silent except to stir or sound in fear.
It was painful to watch. They didn't seem to know the simplest, most natural of all things: how to be in their own bodies, how to inhabit their own lives. They were moved by a peculiar sort of alertness, an alertness I'd never seen before. They were keenly aware of everything around them, reacting to the slightest move, faintest rustle, softest sound – the drop of a leaf making the entire flock cower as if struck by a physical blow to the body. But, at the same time, they seemed strangely disconnected from everything including, or especially, their own battered selves, inhabiting their mournful, bedraggled, besmirched lives with a sort of eerie, forlorn detachment, a sort of sorrowful resignation, most of them making no attempt to preen their filth-encrusted feathers, mend their wounds, protect their frail bones, or replenish their starved and parched bodies. Each, dragging into this new life the devastated landscape of her past – the amputated beaks, the hunched backs, the slumping shoulders, the brittle bones, the featherless patches covered in bruises and abrasions, the defeated gaze, the uncertain gait.

You could see, in the mutilated face of each bird, the record of her struggle to escape the hot knife that seared off her beak in a cloud of acrid smoke: The beak was cut all the way to the root, or severed at an angle, or the jaw had splintered and protruded from under the shattered upper part, or there's was a lump at the end of the beak, a strange, botched attempt at self healing, or a tumor had developed in response to the trauma and obstructed the nostrils. You could see in what direction each bird had desperately yanked her head to escape the blade – down, or up, or sideways – you could see how violently she had writhed and how wide the scream had opened her beak as the knife cut through bone, cartilage and soft tissue – the beak is severed straight or at an angle, its tip is rounded or flat, or the lower jaw forks and splinters, or the upper part is missing altogether, or the tips are melted into a round opening, frozen into a permanent expression of bewilderment, a grotesque semblance of lips puckered in a kiss.
But you could also see, with infinite gratitude and sadness, the inner light of each bird's life, her golden beauty, her intense yearning to live and become still glowing through the darkness.

That day, and for weeks to come, many stayed huddled together, seeking a meager measure of warmth and solace under the battered wings of another. They refused to leave the barn, keeping themselves tucked in an out-of-the-way corner and gazing at the great, big, happening world outdoors from inside the shed. Others focused exclusively on the patch of world immediately in front of them and air-pecked neurotically, for hours on end, at invisible targets.

Some, tried to make themselves invisible, squeezing themselves in the nearest, smallest nook, even if the space was barely large enough to mask their faces. You could see them trying to disappear inside these absurd bunkers, their bodies and scraggly tails sticking out, but their faces hidden, their eyes covered, protected from the unbearable, overwhelming, frightening sights and sounds of life. They stood frozen in their meager, pathetic hiding places, heart racing, body trembling, wishing for nothing but an end to the terror, a sliver of comfort and peace.

A few bold souls ventured out in the open middle of the barn, seemingly certain that herein lied the thing they had yearned for all of their young lives – whatever that thing was to a person condemned to a desolate environment – mind nourishment? knowledge? a sense of possibility? Their curiosity, their need to feed their starved minds, was stronger than caution.
One intrepid young hen jumped into a grain bowl not because she wanted to eat – nourishment could wait – but because she wanted to do something she had been denied her entire life: take a dustbath. You could hear her fluttering and scuttling inside the bowl, burrowing in the grain, covering herself in it, throwing it in the air like confetti and, as the beads scrubbed and cleansed her scab-encrusted skin, what was left of her feathers fluffed like a ragged rose, her brittle wings and legs went akimbo in ecstatic abandonment, her eyes rolled up dreamily, lids weighed down with the sweet weight of delight. The first dustbath of her life.

Next to her, at a nearby water bowl, three hens gathered around and drank, unhurriedly, as though they had all the time in the world – they did! – dipping their mutilated beaks in fresh water, letting the cool mirth of each sip roll down the tongue, one glittering drop always hanging at the tip, eyes closed, heads thrown back, chins lifted to high heaven, beak parted as if in a silent song to the open sky.
And then there was the young hen who hadn't moved from the spot where she was first laid down. Who was still leaning against the perch ladder, one wing draped over the lowest rung, the other hanging down to the ground as though trying to hold herself up, keep her balance or regain it.

When gently nudged, she staggered as far as the nearest water bowl and parked herself there, went no further. She just stood there, the angle of her folded comb pointing to a frightened, dazed eye. Many of them froze this way when they first set foot on free ground, unsure what to do, where to go, unsure what to do with the fact that there WAS somewhere to go, a horizon that stretched farther than the prison wall they'd seen all of their barren lives, a space that was filled with something they had never experienced in their entire lives – open sky, sunlight, birdsong, the scents of a living earth – and a floor that cushioned the foot, rustled, murmured and yielded sweetly under each step, a floor that did not punish every step like the wire mesh floors they'd walked on all their lives – a floor covered in straw!

But this little hen never moved. She stood frozen in the same spot for hours, unable or unwilling to eat or drink even though food and water was only a few inches away.
While the others were busy experiencing their very first moments of bewildered freedom however they could, staggering in a daze, or clumsily searching for a vague something, or hiding away, or huddling together, she just stood there alone in her soiled, bedraggled feathers, her belly down encrusted with the filth she had been forced to live in all her life, her featherless neck rubbed raw, the stump of her upper beak barely long enough to cover her tongue, her lower jaw splintered and extending pathetically in mid air like a begging hand. She didn't even look around, as though the effort of seeing, of absorbing anything more, was too much. As though she had no reason to anticipate anything but more anguish, more pain, more abuse, more of the bleakness she'd experienced growing up in the line of egg production.
Hours later, she was still in the same spot, inert, stunned, disconnected, barely alive. But now she had laid an egg and was standing over it as though over something completely foreign, something that had never been part of her body. There she was, barely able to sustain her own life but still churning out the eggs that were draining her. There she was, surrounded by a world that finally, incredibly, improbably, wished her life, but still unable to return to full life, still depleting herself by retching more eggs, still standing dazed and alone in the middle of the open barn.

I don't know what she felt as she stood there, defeated on her first day of life and freedom, but I know that what we felt even more intensely than sorrow for her wounded life, was searing shame. Shame for the devastation that we – the moral animals, the only animals with a choice, the absolute power holders of the animal kingdom – inflict daily, intentionally, unnecessarily on the weak, the downtrodden, the hapless innocents of the world. Shame for the fact that we do it for something as frivolous as a taste, a taste that can be so easily, so elegantly, so abundantly replicated from cruelty-free sources. Shame for our depraved appetites. Shame for our perverted humanity. Shame for our absolute corruption.
By morning, she took her first stiff, self-willed steps, her first astonished steps into life that was finally free to begin. She stepped into her free life quietly, easily, the way we step into our vegan lives – not as though entering a new and foreign world, but as though returning to a deeply familiar one, as though coming home.

Joanna Lucas
© 2007 Joanna Lucas
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Egg production on ANY scale, from hobby farms to factory farms, is predicated on the mass killing of "unproductive" birds—the male chicks (roosters), who do not lay eggs, and the hens themselves when they become "spent" (unable to lay eggs at a profitable rate), at 1.5 to 2.5 years of age, a fraction of a chicken's lifespan. The day-old roosters are killed by suffocation or maceration at the very hatcheries that supply backyard egg enthusiasts and big producers alike with laying hens. If the roosters are hatched on the farm, they are killed on the farm, usually as adolescents.  

For more information about the cruelty and injustice inherent in ALL egg production, from backyard farms to factory farms, please see these links: 
What's Wrong With Backyard Eggs?
Why There is No Such Thing as Humane Eggs—in a Nutshell 
What Happens to the Roosters?
What Happens to the "Spent" Hens of Backyard Egg Farms?
The Faces of "Free-Range" Farming
Their Eggs, Not Ours
The Humane Egg

If living ethically is important to you, please remember that there is nothing humane about “humane” animal farming, just as there is nothing ethical or defensible about consuming its products. When confronted with the fundamental injustice inherent in all animal agriculture—a system that is predicated on inflicting massive, intentional and unnecessary suffering and death on billions of sentient individuals—the only ethical response is to strive to end it, by becoming vegan, not to regulate it by supporting “improved” methods of producing dairy, eggs, meat, wool, leather, silk, honey, and other animal products. For more information, please read The Humane Farming Myth. Live vegan and educate others to do the same.

The Faces of "Free-Range" Farming

Read the story of the hens' Rescue and their Restoration.

If you want to present this video on a large screen, please contact us at peacefulprairiesanctuary@gmail.com and request a high resolution version.

When showing The Faces of "Free-Range" Farming, we strongly recommend that it be accompanied by our complementing literature, for complete information on why vegan living is the only humane alternative. Our leaflets, The Faces of "Cage-Free" Egg Production and Cage-Free" Eggs Vs. Battery Eggs – Can You Tell the Difference?, address the reasons why egg production is inherently cruel and unjust.



Why there is no such thing as "humane" egg production on ANY scale, no matter how small – in a nutshell.

The most important and most overlooked ethical aspect of human consumption of hens' eggs is that, for every egg laying hen at the farm, a rooster chick has been murdered at the hatchery.

No matter where the egg production facility is, what its size is (large farm or backyard operation), and no matter what the 'visible to the public' conditions are, the egg-laying hens are obtained from the same hatcheries that kill the baby rooster chicks at only one day old. If the "free-range" farm hatches its own chicks, two important questions still remain.

1. What happens to ALL of the male chicks - not just few token roosters - but ALL of them?

2. What happens to the hens when they are no longer laying enough eggs for this facility to be profitable?

If the spent hens and ALL of the roosters were allowed to live out their lives until they died a natural death - chickens can live well over a decade - then that farm would soon have thousands of "spent" hens and roosters to care for. Obviously, the lifelong care of all of those birds, at all stages of a natural life span, would cut severely into any profits made by selling the eggs of younger hens.

So what happens to ALL of the boys? And what happens to ALL of the spent hens?

Hens are generally considered spent by egg-laying facilities at one to two years - meaning, the farm then has to provide predator-proof shelter, food, veterinary care, etc. for that same hen, for another decade. The roosters will require dozens of separate yards, predator-proof shelters, food, vet care, etc. for their entire lives.

In order to make a profit, the numbers simply don't add up unless the inevitable killing of roosters and spent hens is occurring.
________________________________________
Egg production on ANY scale, from hobby farms to factory farms, is predicated on the mass killing of "unproductive" birds—the male chicks (roosters), who do not lay eggs, and the hens themselves when they become "spent" (unable to lay eggs at a profitable rate), at 1.5 to 2.5 years of age, a fraction of a chicken's lifespan. The day-old roosters are killed by suffocation or maceration at the very hatcheries that supply backyard egg enthusiasts and big producers alike with laying hens. If the roosters are hatched on the farm, they are killed on the farm, usually as adolescents. 

For more information about the cruelty and injustice inherent in ALL egg production, from backyard farms to factory farms, please see these links: 
What's Wrong With Backyard Eggs? 
Why There is No Such Thing as Humane Eggs—in a Nutshell 
What Happens to the Roosters?
What Happens to the "Spent" Hens of Backyard Egg Farms?
Their Eggs, Not Ours
The Humane Egg  
 
If living ethically is important to you, please remember that there is nothing humane about “humane” animal farming, just as there is nothing ethical or defensible about consuming its products. When confronted with the fundamental injustice inherent in all animal agriculture—a system that is predicated on inflicting massive, intentional and unnecessary suffering and death on billions of sentient individuals—the only ethical response is to strive to end it, by becoming vegan, not to regulate it by supporting “improved” methods of producing dairy, eggs, meat, wool, leather, silk, honey, and other animal products. For more information, please read The Humane Farming Myth. Live vegan and educate others to do the same.

A Wing And A Prayer

Before that bad December spell, that stretch of dark days when the fury of three consecutive blizzards left them trapped without heat, food or water in a frozen barn, Libby and Clara had pretty much ignored each other. It's not that they disliked each other, it's just that, other than gender and species, they didn't have much else in common.

They were different persons, with different temperaments, different interests and abilities, different histories, different memories, different perceptions of the world, different expectations, different ways of coping, different crosses to bear. They inhabited different worlds, with different inner climates, different emotional geographies, different pleasures and perils of the soul, different soulscapes.

They hardly even looked like they belonged to the same species – Clara, manipulated to grow grotesquely large for flesh production, Libby, bred to stay sparrow-small for egg production – and, when they first arrived at the sanctuary, before they had had a chance to learn the complex song structures developed, used, and passed down by generations of free sanctuary chickens, they didn't even sing the same language.

Clara peeped in the insular language of her death camp – the desolate birdsong developed by baby birds in grim isolation from mother, family, community and nature, and lacking the very sounds to communicate those fundamental sentient experiences.

Libby was the last remaining minstrel of the idiosyncratic language of her gulag – the stammering semblance of a chicken language eked out by her fellow captive orphans, and extinguished with them, its last sounds of despair uttered on the way to slaughter.

Both had absorbed those tragic languages and, with them, the despair inherent in their meaning. Both arrived at PPS with their weird, choppy, stammering, incomprehensibly structured sounds, their crippled lives, their mutilated bodies, their dark memories. But each carried her old burdens and her new freedom differently.

Libby aimed for the sky, she seemed always to barely touch the ground she walked on, always seemingly detached from the physical, constraining, bothersome weight of the earth. Clara, on the other hand, treaded in the thick of life. For better or for worse, she remained firmly rooted in the good, the bad, the possible of her immediate, tangible world.

You could see her lovingly, attentively, avidly studying, whatever patch of yard she could still get to in her progressively disabled body, and savoring every minute detail of it – the quantity of grain, its type and color and texture, maybe even the number of pecks it took to collect it, the thickness of the straw on the ground, its warmth and texture, the coolness of each patch of grass at different times of day, the best dustbathing spots, the comings and goings of others, the precise movement, sound and scent patterns of things. Given that she was trapped in a body programmed from birth to harm, wound and betray itself for human entertainment, it's not surprising that she gravitated towards things, places, and persons she could predict. It's not surprising that she craved the sense of safety and stability inherent in those small, good, solid things whose integrity was so unlike her disintegrating body.

It's not surprising that she derived a measure of joy, pleasure, possibility from the small, good, predictable things in her life, the things that were miraculously still there, that she could miraculously still touch, that were still flooding her senses, still stirring feelings, still able to evoke something deeply good at times – a sense of comfort, a sense of promise, a sense of hope – and still able to lift the burden of life for a brief moment. The taste of grapes, sweet grain, blueberry muffins, the small, safe, warm confine of Chris's lap, the feel of Michele's hair caressing her back, the bliss of a preening session, the physical presence, closeness, warmth of her few friends – these were things she could still count on.

But, as you got to know Clara better, you realized that, even without the cross of her growing disability, she would have still kept the same close and constant connection with the concrete, tangible details of her life, she would still have given the same warm attention to what was there to touch, taste, see, smell, hear. She was an earthy soul, grounded for better or for worse in the thingness of things, the material, physical details of her daily life. She liked the things she could measure precisely, and return to without surprises. She was a map maker of sorts and everything figured tenderly in the constantly revised map of her diminishing world – even Libby, that spectacular comet-like event that blazed out of the barn at dawn, and blazed back in at dusk with reassuring regularity. Perhaps, especially Libby, that creature who was in enviable constant motion, never in one place, hardly touching the ground she walked on, always floating seemingly just above it, barely connected with any tangible thing, zooming fairly-like from place to place in fast, silent and spectacular motion, gliding silently in and out of sight like smoke, always on the edge of your vision, always in motion, never in one place long enough to be watched but always watchful, and always aware of everyone's every move.Even flightless as she was, Libby's entire being spelled "bird". There was something winged, weightless, lithe, spirit-like about her. And, even though she had had the flight bred out of her, she was more evocative of flight and freedom than a condor.

She was a sky-bound creature and even the flightlessness in her wings could not diminish the impression that she was lighter than air. And, the more you knew Libby, the more you realized that her being sky-bound, aerial, gravity-defying was not an impression as much as it was the physical manifestation of who she was. She seemed grounded not in the tangible reality of things, the way Clara was, but in a sort of active disbelief of it.

She didn't see the concrete things that Clara compulsively, lovingly collected, she imagined something else. She didn't see the tumbling weed that you, Clara and I saw, she imagined something else – perhaps a fox, or a strange bird, or a fantastical foe... She didn't see a sputtering hose, a patch of tall grass, a broken ladder, she imagined something else – a snake?, a jungle?, a horizontal tree? She was burdened with the blessing of an active imagination. She bolted at the slightest rustle of grass, she refused to enter certain barns, she went to great lengths to avoid certain grassy spots, circling them cautiously, leaving plenty of distance between her and their invisible border, as though they were inhabited by a clear and present danger, she refused to approach strings and cords, she spooked at the sound of tractor engines... but she also celebrated things invisible to the rest of us. Out of the blue, and for no apparent reason, she would start flapping her wings, shaking her head, prancing, strutting, dancing, and celebrating something that, though imperceptible to anyone else, was real and well worth rejoicing to her. Some invisible joyful thing had just happened (or perhaps was sensed, or recalled, or anticipated, or imagined) and Libby was the happy recipient.We're not sure exactly what she saw at any given time, but we're sure she didn't see what you, Clara, and I saw. Unlike Clara, who was grounded for better or for worse in the burden and the blessing of her physical reality, who saw cause and effect much the way we do (water droplets = rain, not a betentacled entity tapping Libby's back with 10,000 needles), Libby seemed to make connections based on something closer to myth and imagination than concrete reality, something based more on how things felt (to her) than what things were.

For as connected as Clara was with what WAS there – the tart, tingly, tangible, glittering thingness of things – Libby was connected with what MAY be there – the winged possibility of things.

They were different persons, Libby and Clara – different temperaments, different interests and abilities, different histories, different memories, different perceptions of the world, different expectations, different ways of coping, different crosses to bear. They inhabited different worlds, with different inner climates, different emotional geographies, different pleasures and perils of the soul, different soulscapes.

And if, that December night they embraced each other with such urgency, such unflinching certainty, it wasn't because the shared experience of pain, fear, and trauma melded their individual differences into the common foundation of similar experience, but probably precisely because it didn't, probably precisely because it increased their sense of difference and otherness.

When the third of seven back-to-back blizzards hit Eastern Colorado that December and buried the entire sanctuary under 8 feet of snow, Libby and Clara were trapped in their barns without any heat, food, water, or dry straw for 24 desperate hours.

They were trapped in their dark, frozen barn, with the wind howling outside, and the roof rattling, and the barn walls shaking, and the inside of the barn slowly filling with snow, and the food and water supplies dwindling, and the breath of death, the physical sensation of defeat tangibly felt all around them, and Chris and Michele desperately digging on the other side of the snow-covered door, and our muffled voices betraying an ever growing despair, and the rhythm of our movements betraying a deeper and deeper exhaustion. For 24 hours, Libby and Clara were trapped together.

Sparrow-small Libby, who could have easily climbed on Clara's broad back to escape the frozen straw below, or who could have easily burrowed under Clara's ample breast to escape the cold, extended her minuscule wing over Clara's giant back and covered a fraction of its raw, shivering baldness. It was an absurd, ineffectual gesture and certainly not felt as warmth-giving by either one of them. But, all day and all night, through a crack in the only barn wall that wasn't completely obscured by snow, we could see the two of them huddled together in this pathetic, absurd, sublime embrace, Libby's moth-wing extended to cover a fraction of Clara's giant, featherless back, Clara's chin caressing the top of Libby's head.

We don't know what Libby imagined was happening at that moment, or what Clara knew was happening, but there they were, two winged persons, the smallest sanctuary resident taking a giant bird under her moth-wing. And, on the other side of the frozen door, there we were, two bare-handed humans digging escape tunnels with our rickety shovels, clearing the cosmic mass of snow one teaspoon at a time.

And all of us, on both sides of the frozen door, knowing with a certainty deeper than language, deeper than species, that our seemingly ineffectual gestures were absolutely necessary. All of us expressing in action, in will, in heart – not in words, not in song, not in sound – the certainty, deeper than language, deeper than species, that ultimately the only thing that saves us, delivers us, redeems us, and ultimately the only thing that survives even the smallest, weakest, most vulnerable one of us, is that form of supreme, unconditional benevolence known and needed by all sentient souls because our very lives depend on it, that benevolence collectively imagined, desired, invoked, deeply felt and concretely experienced as love. Not love for someone similar – a mirror image, a clone – but love for someone completely different. A mysterious other.And there we were, all of us stranded in the middle of a frozen world, fighting the darkness with two teaspoon shovels and a moth-wing, affirming life in the middle of mass extinction, hope in the middle of cosmic despair, light in the middle of the darkest night. There we all were, laboring, toiling, struggling, hoping against all hope to unfreeze the world with a flightless wing and a wordless prayer. We did. We do. Every day of our vegan lives.

Joanna Lucas
© 2007 Joanna Lucas
________________________________________
If living ethically is important to you, please remember that there is nothing humane about “humane” animal farming, just as there is nothing ethical or defensible about consuming its products. When confronted with the fundamental injustice inherent in all animal agriculture—a system that is predicated on inflicting massive, intentional and unnecessary suffering and death on billions of sentient individuals—the only ethical response is to strive to end it, by becoming vegan, not to regulate it by supporting “improved” methods of producing dairy, eggs, meat, wool, leather, silk, honey, and other animal products. For more information, please read The Humane Farming Myth. Live vegan and educate others to do the same.

Herd Mentality

I know why I want to be Hillary's friend. She is interesting, she is gentle, she is beautiful, she is full of being and of happening and full of praise for being and for happening, she is full of knowledge, insights, and subjective experiences I can't even imagine, she is selfless, she is strong, she is subtle, she is brimming with social, emotional and ethical intelligence.

I can also guess why Hillary has no interest in being my friend. She grew up on an industrial-scale farm that exploited thousands of sheep for wool, meat and dairy, a place where human contact, though sporadic, was always traumatic, always filled with terror, pain, insult, humiliation, and loss – something to fear and to flee, something that sent waves of horror throughout the entire herd. From a very young age, she absorbed the collective fright that flooded her community every time they were chased, cornered, shoved into chutes, corralled, grabbed one by one, bound, and subjected to painful, invasive, and terrifying procedures.

So, part of her reservation is probably the memory of abuse. But most of her distance seems to come from something else, something closer to certainty and strength than fear and helplessness. Unlike Bijou and Seymour, who were raised in isolation as "experimental research subjects" and were in close, daily contact with humans, Hillary was raised by sheep and learned early on the identity, the wisdom, the language, the myths, the terrors, the rewards, the duties, the errors, the ethics, and the pleasures of her society and her species. She knows who she is. And if, after years of living in the peace and safety of the sanctuary, she still avoids us – gently, sweetly, almost politely, as though declining a well-meaning but decidedly odd, ill-fitting offer – it's not so much because we frighten her, but simply because we have nothing interesting or useful to offer her or her friends.

We have no insights that she or her friends would find useful or interesting, no good answers to her most important questions, no tips for where the good grasses grow, no appreciation of the flavors that are most exquisite to a sheep's palate, no discernment of the scents that are most pleasing to a sheep's nose, or most redolent to her brain, her memory, her heart, no ability to either hear or understand the sounds she finds meaningful, soothing, exciting, evocative, no organ to detect the subtle signals she receives from her environment – the rustle of insect wings, the breeze on the face of the pond, the pulse of the earth under feet, the shifts in consciousness we are unaware of but that she rides like waves, waves that move the entire flock from place to place like silent currents – we have no grasp on what she finds beautiful, meaningful, sacred.

We have no connection with, and no access to the poetic, happening, boundless world she inhabits, the mystic world where beauty is not a thing, but a feeling, a state of mind, a felt presence, a state of pure harmony, a world that is not fractured into 171,476 separate words but exists as one continuous breath that informs the whole being, the heart, the brain, the senses, a poetic world that begins and exists only past the edge of language. We have no access to this fluid universe that Hillary inhabits effortlessly, this living ocean teeming with rich and strange understandings. We look at the world (theirs and ours) from the outside, from a surface we keep willfully cold, and hard, and shallow – a steel cover of words and rationalizations cast over an ocean teeming with life, and heart, and hurt, and redemption.

And we tend to misinterpret even what little of her world we do manage to see. We come face to face with the exquisite democracy that a sheep community is – a community whose every member accepts, expects and is trusted to be of service to the others, an equal participant in leadership, in compliance and in solving the problems and tasks at hand, like protection, like finding grazing grounds, or safe camping grounds – and we deride it as stupidity.

We watch beings like Hillary lead and follow with equal ease – sometimes taking charge – when she has the answer that her family needs at that moment (where the good grasses grow, or where the deepest shade stretches, where the safest, most peaceful or most enrapturing spot in the entire sanctuary happens to be unfolding) – other times following – when any other group member indicates that they know where to find what the herd needs or craves at that time – and we call it mindless submission.

We see someone like Hillary stay effortlessly and fluidly connected with every member of her community, we see her community respond to her and one another with equal alertness – staying visually and psychologically connected at all times, communicating the good, the bad, the perilous news of every living moment in ways that, though too subtle for us to understand, are unmistakably clear to them, remaining alert to every sign of danger or delight, being aware of every inner and outer happening, every feeling, every sound, every subtle shift in facial expressions, mood, movement, or tone, and always prompt and precise in communicating it – we see their deeply intuitive way of being in the world and we call it dumbness.

We watch how she, a completely vulnerable, completely defenseless being, reacts to danger – not by running away, not by hiding, but by huddling with her family, by adding her mass, her body, her will, her life to the group, poised to face the assault together, ready to take what beatings may come, standing united for better or for worse, each individual offering his or her bulk, his or her body, his or her life to the group, thus making the group stronger, more resilient, more impervious to attack, more invulnerable, safer – we watch these everyday acts of supreme solidarity, selfless service and courage, and we discount them as "instinct". We watch someone like Hillary act out of an imperative to serve, and we call it self-interest.

We come face to face with someone as accomplished as her and turn her very identity into an insult – a "sheep".

It's easy to see why Hillary avoids us. What is harder to see is that we are secretly relieved that she does. To know Hillary, to truly know her, to know her as a person not a pet, an equal not a slave, is to be forced to see what we strenuously avoid seeing – our own gaping shortcomings.

In Hillary's presence, it becomes blatantly obvious how much less gifted we are than she is at all of the important things in life – love, peace, equality, service, responsibility, selflessness, connection, loyalty, trust, insight, bliss, gratitude for simply being and for happening.

Next to a being who is so acutely aware of self and others, we appear confused, utterly confused with our profoundly thwarted humanity, our deeply distorted sense of personal and species identity, so profoundly confused that we believe ourselves to be hunters when we are the quintessential prey, imagining ourselves to be carnivores when we have the physiology, anatomy and psychology of herbivores, believing ourselves to be the wise "stewards" of a world we've raped and pillaged to ashes, fancying ourselves to be more intelligent than all of the other miraculous species on earth, when we don't even know what species we are – apes? wolves? sharks? vultures?...

Next to a being who lives on flowers, we can smell the lingering scent of our own heinous crimes long after we become vegan – our own carrion breath, our own rotten egg belches, our own cheese-scented sweat, our own blood encrusted fingers.

Next to a being who is so profoundly peaceful and democratic, so harmoniously connected with her world, so flawlessly integrated in her environment – habitat on her back – we appear terminally unaware, selfish, violent and brutal, like the monsters of our own worst nightmares, with our naked bodies wrapped in dead skins or sheets of tangled sheep hair, sprouting tentacle-like legs and arms, the better to hold and strangle the world and everything in it, forever standing on our hind legs, in constant attack posture, in a never-ending assault on the Earth always taking, cutting, killing, controlling, always "improving" life that is already luminously, profoundly perfect in its every quivering detail.

Next to a being whose instinct to serve her community is more powerful than her instinct to save her own life, next to someone who would bear excruciating pain in silence rather than expose the community to danger, someone who would stand with the group and face danger and death together rather than scatter and run for her life when attacked, we appear hopelessly selfish and cowardly, pathetically incomplete and unfinished.

Hillary is what we, the Consumers of the world, admire, envy, want to be, and may never become: full and useful Citizens of the world.

Joanna Lucas
© 2007 Joanna Lucas
________________________________________
If living ethically is important to you, please remember that there is nothing humane about “humane” animal farming, just as there is nothing ethical or defensible about consuming its products. When confronted with the fundamental injustice inherent in all animal agriculture—a system that is predicated on inflicting massive, intentional and unnecessary suffering and death on billions of sentient individuals—the only ethical response is to strive to end it, by becoming vegan, not to regulate it by supporting “improved” methods of producing dairy, eggs, meat, wool, leather, silk, honey, and other animal products. For more information, please read The Humane Farming Myth. Live vegan and educate others to do the same.

Portrait of Marcie... A Beautiful Soul

In Greek: Το πορτραίτο της Μάρσι... Μια όμορφη ψυχή

In German: Portrait von Marcie... einer schönen Seele

In Hungarian: Marcie... a megtört lélek

When Marcie arrived at Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary, she had already lost everything—her freedom, her community, her family, her youth, every baby she had ever had, everyone she had ever loved, everyone she had ever trusted, everything that was familiar.

She arrived in this new world with nothing except, for the brief time before she went blind, the ability to see with her own eyes this improbable land of open vistas, big sky, free inhabitants, and people who wished them life, this Free State that billions of captive animals never experience, but that all yearn for to their last breath. And perhaps to believe it. Like all farmed animals, Marcie was defined not by what was there, but by what was missing—the visible and invisible amputations of a lifetime of slavery—mutilated body, broken spirit, wounded soul, stunted life, unfulfilled potential, her measure of pain filled to the brim, her measure of joy left utterly empty. In her years of confinement on a small family farm, where she repeatedly watched her babies being killed, so much had already been taken from her that, by the time she was rescued and brought to a place where she could finally begin her life, there wasn't much left to build a life on. Her first year at the sanctuary, when she could still see, she fled from anyone who looked like her abusers—any human being—and, for the rest of her life, she avoided anyone who looked like herself—every ewe, ram, or lamb at the sanctuary. She "hid" her big, beautiful, billowy self among the goats, dawdling along, so conspicuously ovine amid the gust of quick, slender, angular, light-footed goats, yet so secure in the belief that she was well camouflaged among these creatures who looked, walked, sounded, and acted nothing like herself. She traveled with them, foraged with them, camped with them, ignored the fact that, to everybody's mind but her own, they were a poor fit for her—too fast, too rowdy, too mischievous, too bold, too unpredictable—and forgave them their many trespasses, such as the times when they left her behind, way out in the field, ignored her calls for location, and went home without her. But, for reasons she well understood, she remained unflinchingly loyal to them for the rest of her life. Whatever Marcie saw in the goats, learned from them, received from them, was clearly something she needed. We joked that she thought she was a goat. But, more likely, the opposite was true: what seemed to draw her to the goats was not the imagined similarity, but the perceived difference. She seemed to want to be someone completely unlike herself, a different animal altogether, someone totally unlike the powerless victim she had been all her life.

So she joined the goats, and shared her deepest moments of peace with them. You could see her, and them, resting in the sun, in a trance-like, almost solemn state, as though listening together to a magnificent symphony and, in fact, doing just that: "hearing the leaves of spring, the rustle of insect wings, the wind darting over the face of the pond", and savoring the scent of the wind itself, feeling beauty, being absorbed by beauty—not what we call beauty, not the pretty things, but what is beauty: the knowledge inherent in all things, in a stone, a leaf, a blade of grass, the profound experience of harmony and connection with something deeply good, and deeply loving, the felt wisdom of being alive in a world of scent, and taste, and sound, and touch, with nerve endings responding in delight to every breeze, every faint happening, every detail in the world's face of dazzling color, and rolling movement, and depth.

Those moments—full of feeling, brimming with exquisite awareness, giddy with the life within—she shared with the goats. But, in her moments of sorrow, she was alone. And she had moments of wrenching, inconsolable sorrow, some triggered by invisible quakes, others triggered by events that even we could see and understand, such as the times when the smell of lambs born, torn from their mothers, and slaughtered on neighboring farms filled the air and stirred her old pain, a pain that didn't lessen with time, but seemed to grow new thorns every spring. Those were the times when she wandered off most often, becoming separated from her adopted herd, getting lost and, in her blindness, unable to find her way home. Because human presence terrified her, the only way we could guide her back home was to call out to the goats hoping that they would respond loud enough for Marcie to hear and follow the sound trail back to the herd. The goats, she trusted, but humans evoked nothing but horror—the horror she remembered, and the horror she anticipated at our hands.

We understood her apprehension, and went out of our way to not intrude in her safe zone. What we didn't understand then, and still don't fully understand today, is why she chose to narrow the physical and emotional distance between us, and got one inch closer to us every day until there was no distance left at all, until our noses touched, literally. She got nothing extra from our proximity. Nothing that she didn't already get in abundance while avoiding us—food, shelter, friends, treats were all readily available to her whether or not she accepted us. So why did she decide to trust us when, throughout her life, humans had done unspeakably cruel things to her for a taste of her babies' flesh, for a handful of wool, for a patch of lamb skin? Why did she suffer us, when she could just as easily ignore us?

It's hard to say. But the fact is, she not only accepted us, she sought us out. If, in her estimation, we had been inside the house too long, she knocked on the door with her hoof and summoned us out. We came out every time, treat in hand—because that's what we assumed she wanted. And, for the rest of her life, she "drilled" us out on the porch this way several times a day. Then, her last year with us, she extended her vigils into the night. She started to wait up for Chris, stationing herself on the porch, waiting quietly, patiently, as long as it took—until midnight, until the following morning, until Chris was safely home from work. She waited without complaining, without asking for treats, or attention, or companionship, or any of the pleasures that we thought motivated her to knock on the door day after day. She just anchored herself at the front door, and kept her late night, solitary, vigils away from the security of the herd, away from shelter, under the open sky. And nothing could get her to move—neither Bluto's boisterous barking, nor the alarming distance from her goats, nor the rain, nor the thunder, nor the snow. She stood there like a good mother, wedged between earth and sky, with a mixture of courage, trust, expectation, hope, and resignation, her massive body firmly anchored between the big, bad, perilous world and her self appointed charge, and she didn't budge until Chris was safely home. Only then would she finally get up, leave the porch, and amble to her barn for the night, with the treat of solid proof that both of us were alive and well.

It wasn't a "plan". It was a far simpler, far wiser, far more deeply felt truth than that. Marcie wished us life. She wanted for those she loved to continue to live, and she was determined that, for once in her life, they would. She demanded treat-in-hand proof of our wellness several times every day, and she guarded the porch at night until she was sure that both of her humans were alive and well. It was simple enough. Most of us can understand love. What most of us may never understand is how Marcie could forgive her abusers so completely that she was able to love their kin.

Joanna Lucas
© 2007 Joanna Lucas
________________________________________
If living ethically is important to you, please remember that there is nothing humane about “humane” animal farming, just as there is nothing ethical or defensible about consuming its products. When confronted with the fundamental injustice inherent in all animal agriculture—a system that is predicated on inflicting massive, intentional and unnecessary suffering and death on billions of sentient individuals—the only ethical response is to strive to end it, by becoming vegan, not to regulate it by supporting “improved” methods of producing dairy, eggs, meat, wool, leather, silk, honey, and other animal products. For more information, please read The Humane Farming Myth. Live vegan and educate others to do the same.

A Passionate Life

I heard Louise's voice long before I met her in person, commenting along not far away from the phone, actively participating in every conversation, offering comments, reprimands, or just plain merrymaking – joyous, questioning, telling sounds to the world. Because every conversation, regardless of language, was irresistible to her, she showed up whenever others talked – people, turkeys, cats, dogs, goats, pigs – offering rich and endless song structures whose meaning she clearly understood and seemed certain that others did too.

Sometimes, her voice was a faraway whisper, other times, a burst of sound delivered straight into the receiver. I could hear her all the way from Denver. No doubt, her voice was also heard all the way to Miami, Chicago, New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo, or wherever other calls to the sanctuary may have come from.

Louise had a distinctive, nuanced, richly inflected, impressively projected soprano voice that issued forth an irrepressible stream of emotionally charged sounds, sounds that recorded and communicated a wide range of subjective experiences with a clarity that was astonishing – astonishing not because she, a person of another species, expressed feelings, thoughts, perceptions, memories, meanings, stories, longings, nightmares, desires, triumphs, terrors so clearly, but astonishing because we, with our notoriously dull hearing and dim perceptions, were able to understand her so clearly. What Louise communicated through her rich vocabulary of sounds (and, as I learned when I finally met her in person, through touch, gaze, posture and body movement) was clear as speech.

It was meaningful sound, Louise's conversation, meaningful to her and her kind, but also meaningful to us because what she expressed, we tend to express in similar sounds: the high-pitched whines of worry, the cranky creaks of complaint, the low songs of contentment, the melodic breath of calm, the trumpet bursts of excitement, the syncopated whistles of wonder, the rapping, clanging, clattering rattles of outrage, the burning blares of anger, the fresh chimes of curiosity, the lulling whispers of trust, the long peals of sadness, the grinding growls of jealousy, the bold horns of joy, the choked half-beats of fear, the fluttering whimpers of defeat, the air- tearing whips of pain, the spitting, strutting, drumming bursts of confidence, the muffled mumbles of doubt, the crackling trills of mischief – sounds and rich inflections whose meaning and emotional charge we understand beyond words.

Often, Louise matched the shifting tone and mood of the phone conversation and, just as often, she sounded off dissonant responses, puncturing the flow of sound, issuing a counterpoint, an accent of sorts, a distinct, different and opposing note – either because she was responding to one of the myriad sounds in her surroundings, or simply because, to her ear, the musical phrasing of our conversation called for that counterpoint, that accent, that shock of contrasting color...

It is not unusual for chickens to "talk" to anyone who will listen. Most of them comment, inquire and interact tirelessly, with a remarkable ability to communicate fluidly and effortlessly the richness of their experiences, perceptions, feelings, finds. They initiate and sustain melodic exchanges, they sounder to each other constantly, they hum themselves to sleep in softer and softer whispers that often continue in their dreams – a stream of consciousness recording of sorts. But, often, what Louise did seemed more like singing than saying, more like simple, pure delight in the exercise of her own voice – its own vibrant expression, its own healthy working, the sensation of sound being produced as it was forced from the chest, issued from the throat, rolled off the beak, and heard back in infinite varieties of pitch, color, phrasing, rhythm – than the exercise of telling, asking, responding, warning, reassuring, correcting, alerting, negotiating... Her voice sang in pleasure. Sound was its own reward.

And no sound was uninteresting or unimportant to Louise – the rustling of insect wings, the hum of power lines, the cadences of footsteps, the droppings of mice, the breathing of moths. No sound was left unanswered. Each sound was a call, a cue, an imperative, each sound had a face, a meaning, a supreme identity. Each had an answer. And, in her constant singing to the world, Louise inevitably created new sounds, added to the world's sound, and changed it.

What did she have to sing about? There she was, one in 9 billion birds forced into grotesquely mutated bodies for human consumption – 9 billion this year, 9 billion the next, 9 billion the following – lucky not only to be alive, lucky to be alive that far. Everyone in her generation was dead – born in mid June, 2005, decapitated, dismembered, and flushed into sewers by mid August, 14 or more years before their time. Louise herself was struggling to survive in a body made intentionally nonviable, a body bred to grow morbidly large, morbidly fast, for flesh production.

Many of her friends from the "broiler" flock she was rescued with were gone too. Some had died suddenly, of violent heart attacks, when their hearts could no longer sustain their ghoulishly large bodies, some had died slowly, shutting down one system at a time, aging at an accelerated rate, terminally geriatric at age 2. They all had clung to their diminished life as long as they could, limping on bumble-feet, every step a stab straight into the bone, dragging their enormous bodies around on collapsed joints, every step another agony, their bodies more and more soaked in pain – feet, legs, wings, brittle bones, aching muscles – their combs paler and paler, their eyes dimmer and dimmer, their breath more and more labored, wheezing with every move, every breath a panicked gasp for air – grim evidence of our daily crimes against the innocent, the weak, the downtrodden of the world.

And there was Louise, still alive, still singing to the world – what did she have to sing about? – this one wounded life, acting as though she were a normal bird, shooting for this impossible normalcy as though it were within her reach, wanting to be involved in absolutely everything, every meal, every exchange of affection, every song, every single conversation. Responding to every single sound in her environment, tuned into the world's pitch, rhythm, timbre, tone, color, phrasing, cadence, tempo, inflection, leaving no call unnoticed, unheeded, unanswered, making her voice heard all the way to Denver, Miami, Chicago, New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo, or wherever phone calls to the sanctuary came from. Refusing to let her voice be silenced.

Then one day, without warning, she went from song- filled to quiet. She hid in a secluded nest and refused to leave, refused to move, refused to eat and drink, refused to be preened, refused to be held, refused treats, refused to sound back to the world. She sank under the weight of ruffled feathers, her eyes dimmed, her head drooped like a snowdrop, her voice wilted. When Louise stopped participating, talking, inquiring, commenting, socializing, we knew her end was near, and we also knew there was nothing we could do except try to make her passing as painless as possible, and knowing full well that it won't be painless, for her or for us. She grew still, closed her eyes and waited. She withdrew in a shroud of muffled sounds, so muffled they seemed like silence, a lullaby of sorts that she hummed to herself continuously, as though laying herself to a final rest and doing it Louise-style, exiting the world the way she had lived in it: on a stream of sound, palpable, visible sound, complete with specs of dust, feathers, muddles of mice, gathers of grubs, scatterings of grain, footsteps, gouty legs, dreams of flight and wings, or whatever she happened to be singing about in the urgency of that particular, singular, living moment – the world exhibited and exhibiting itself as sound, and now her exit exhibiting itself as whisper – song-filled to her last breath.

What we didn't know, and were amazed to learn, was that Louise was undergoing a different kind of transformation, a different kind of seachange. She wasn't dying. She was brooding. She had an egg she wanted to keep and she hid it from everybody under stilled body, closed wing, gathered straw, secluded nest, cover of darkness. No one knew. When we finally discovered her secret, it was too late to stop the process: the egg was soon to become a bird, and Louise was soon to become a mother. She had tricked us. She wasn't exiting the world, she was hovering in the gravitational pull of a new life.

She wasn't doing what "broilers" like her are bred to do – succumb to the tragic, nonviable, bodies we force them into for our sandwiches; she was doing what "broilers" like her, and all commercial poultry breeds, are bred not to do: "go broody", feel the drive to extend life beyond their own, and act on that drive. Louise not only heard that faint call to be a mother, she answered it as she answered every single call no others heard or wished to heed. True to form, she was adding to the world – not only a new voice, not only a new sound, not only a new experience for her kind, now a new life.

It was impossible not to be elated. A new life, a baby born into the Free State of the sanctuary, the only person in Louise's condemned nation who was going to have a full record of her existence, who was going to learn her own language from adults, who was going to learn the life skills of her community, and pass them along to newcomers as wisdom. It was impossible not to root for this new baby.

It was also impossible to ignore the tragic reality that yet another being would soon enter a life of total dependency. No matter how well loved, no matter how well cared for, this baby, like all domesticated animals, would never grow up to be independent. She would be forever at the mercy of her keepers' ability or willingness to feed, shelter, care for her. A handicapped life. Like all domesticated animals, she would never aquire the most basic skills to survive on her own and, outside the free space of the sanctuary, she would never even have the most basic right to exist. We work tirelessly to prevent this from happening. But Louise tricked us.

She anchored herself on her nest and refused to leave except once a day – for exactly 15 minutes – to drink and eat from the bowls across the room (not the ones we laid right next to her), and to relieve herself. As though all of the functions of the hankering body – the eating, drinking, straining, eliminating – had to be be carried out away from her nest. Then she'd make a hasty, urgent return, neck stretched forward, wings arched out to her sides as though clearing a path – way! way! way! – back to her nest, her destination, drawn back into the orbit of her single life-bearing egg, the golden center of her universe, calling, calling with a force she could not and did not want to resist. A force she wanted to increase. Her body, her life, her will, concentrated on the passionate life pulsing inside her egg.

There is something we know deeper than words, this thing she was doing, this birthing, brooding, mothering, this battered bird's selfless devotion to her baby, we know it to be sacred and we know it to be the only thing worth protecting, yet we squash it serially, mercilessly, between fork and knife, every day of our non-vegan lives.

Louise bloomed like a rose over her egg – a sky of roses and a bed of roses for this new life – a white rose of fluffed feathers and warm air pocketed in thousands of living down nooks, breezed through the living cilia, beating the warm air in rhythmic waves, each a valediction. Her cocoon was now teeming with the two-way communication that had already begun between Louise and her baby – whatever Louise called her baby, whatever cluster of melodic chirps designated her baby's self, quiddity, essence (do, re, mi), the baby's supreme identity, known beyond doubt to the baby, to the mother, to everyone of her kind, and invisible to human perceptions so dull that we can't even tell individual birds apart. If there had been several chicks, there would have been a song for each. We call it song because, when we use sounds that are so melodious, so flowing, so fluid, so salty, so sweet, and innocent, and true and soulful, so much like tears, we call it music. But it is language to them. It is meaningful sound, structured in meaningful ways to the speaker.

Louise's voice changed. It was so quiet now that you could not always hear it, but you could always see it throbbing in her throat – a pulse more than a sound. She was now poised to listen, not tell, poised to hear those faint sounds and signals from the other world, the baby's happening world. She listened. Her voice was now an instrument of guidance and affirmation, a beacon, a sound bridge between two worlds, a mother's voice issuing a mother's tacit vows ("I will protect you. I will nurture you. Your life matters. More than my own"). She sounded to her baby constantly, even in her sleep. And the baby sounded back softly, issuing chirps of response that only Louise could hear.

Then, one morning, the egg peeped so loudly, that all of us could hear it. Peep! Peep! Peep! That baby had pipes! She was Louise's baby allright, already signing at the top of her tiny lungs, already announcing her presence to the world, even before fully entering it. And she peeped into the evening, sounding off from Louise's secluded nest, from under cover of wing, gathered straw and secluded darkness. She was still peeping when we said good night, engaging in an audible duet with Louise, adding her high pitched chirps to Louise's low clucks and coos. God, how she sang! As though life was beautiful.

By morning, the nest was quiet. The baby was still, flattened under Louise's unwieldy body. A perfect, golden baby whose silent body Louise was still protecting by the evening of that day and into the next morning, and probably would have guarded as long as we would have left it there. Louise got her mutated body to live, to sing, to go broody – to do every natural thing that we breed out of the birds we intend to eat – but she couldn't fulfill her mothering with the crippled body we forced her into, too large to allow normal movement, too heavy to respond sensitively to the needs of a tiny, dependent baby bird, a body hoisted on joints too achy to move the body at will, unresponsive legs, lead-heavy breast. A body bred for nothing but death. I don't know what Louise felt as she sat on her quieted nest. I don't know how she experienced the sudden absence of warmth, the stilled pulse of her baby, the silenced voice of her chick. I don't know how she experienced the presence and company of this growing, happening child, this someone that she had focused her own life on, this someone that she had spent 21 full days and nights with, that she surrendered food, drink and freedom for, that she concentrated on to the exclusion of everything else. This someone that had called to her with a greater force than anything in her entire life had or ever will.

We humans call this kind of devotion love, in fact, we call it the purest kind of love. Few of us can obey and communicate it better than Louise did. If we feel it at all, most of us express it exactly the way she did: by action not words, by dedicating every ounce of our being to the beloved.

Few of us can express the experience of love and grief better than Louise did and does. But all of us feel it acutely even if we can't put it in words, or especially when we can't put it in words, when there are no words to shield us from the raw reality of feeling, no words, no intellectual constructs to distance us form the raw passion – only the dead baby and the burning reality of grief.

So I don't know what Louise felt as she roosted in her now silent nest, I don't know what she had anticipated as she mothered her egg, or what she remembered of her dark, motherless past, but I do know that she dedicated every ounce of her life force to fulfilling this something she desired and yearned for.

The chick didn't live, Louise didn't get to nurture her only child into adulthood. But she did become a mother, that much is undeniable and unforgettable, and it is something she will know and keep, an experience that will inform her for the rest of her life, long after she leaves her empty nest.

That experience, that mother blooming and loss, is now imprinted in Louise's song along with every other life experience she's had – from the silent, lonely hatching in the belly of a machine, to the motherless flock she was tossed with, to the skyless world she was confined to in order to be fattened for slaughter, to the arrival at the sanctuary, to today's eerily silent nest. We may not be able to hear that new sound in Louise's song, not with our limited hearing range, but the other orphans and mothers-to- never-be at the sanctuary can. Louise is the only one of the sanctuary flock who had that experience of becoming. And now there's a sound for it that wasn't there before. Now, there is a story.

Joanna Lucas
© 2007 Joanna Lucas
________________________________________
If living ethically is important to you, please remember that there is nothing humane about “humane” animal farming, just as there is nothing ethical or defensible about consuming its products. When confronted with the fundamental injustice inherent in all animal agriculture—a system that is predicated on inflicting massive, intentional and unnecessary suffering and death on billions of sentient individuals—the only ethical response is to strive to end it, by becoming vegan, not to regulate it by supporting “improved” methods of producing dairy, eggs, meat, wool, leather, silk, honey, and other animal products. For more information, please read The Humane Farming Myth. Live vegan and educate others to do the same.

The Slow Speed Chase Illustrated

Yesterday's Blizzard

After nearly two months of melting and shoveling, the 5' x 50' snow drift was finally down to bare (mud). Following last night's blizzard, we're back to square one.

This morning, the 8' tall barn doors were completely blocked by 8' high snow drifts. All east facing doors are also blocked by floor-to-ceiling drifts, piled on the inside AND the outside of each door. Everyone was trapped inside their barns and it took us hours of shoveling just to be able to open the doors, as the inside of the barns was full of snow too.

By noon, the birds barn, the big pig yard, and the potbelly pig barn were still inaccessible. It took us till late afternoon to dig them all out.

Pig Love

Pigs may "speak" the same emotional language as all other sentients – same desires, same hopes, same loves – but they look like us doing it – wrinkled noses, smiling lips, round cheeks, bare bellies and all – and the feeling of resemblance is probably mutual. They smile, spy, inquire, scold with their eyes, they gape in wonder, they cheat with calculated coolness, they slump in defeat, they shrug in confusion, they laugh out loud with open-mouthed enthusiasm, they play pranks, they play video games, they take showers, they get drunk given half a chance, they wallow in the mud in the best sense of the word: literally, copiously, with innocent and earthy abandon, they raise families together, swap nanny duties, sing to their babies while nursing. They sleep prodigally, and dream vividly, and they do it together, as a form of communion, communication and community building. They have favorite friends and favorite foes. They hold grudges, they forgive. They make eye contact with the clear understanding that eyes are where questions are asked, and answered. They fall in love like we do – to the exclusion of everyone else, madly, passionately, desperately in love.

Lucas, for instance, is in love with Petunia. There are eight other sows in his adoptive sounder. He eats with them, hangs out with them, cribs with them. They're friends, they do what friends do – play, banter, argue, bicker, make up, learn from each other, tease each other, forgive each other, keep each other warm, share the pleasures and perils of the soul together. Ernestine, Agnes, Bessie, Elsie, Iris, Charlotte, Sienna, and Sunshine. None of them compares to Petunia.

Petunia is wild, independent, self-sufficient. She walks alone, sleeps alone, eats alone, ignores the pig sounder, ignores visitors, ignores Lucas. She is a maverick, a loner, happiest in her own company.

To most sanctuary residents, she is someone to avoid. To Lucas, she is someone to adore – well worth leaving his hard earned place in his adoptive sounder for, well worth leaving his other projects and explorations, worth forsaking food and water for. She stops him dead in his tracks. She is compelling, arresting, electrifying. With her, in her presence, he seems to find that mysterious something he craves, that something which is worth pursuing even at the risk of unleashing Petunia's wrath.
Lucas is a risk taker. An explorer. Driven by pigly "what ifs?", "what elses?", "whys?", "hows?". A sui(dae) generis adventurer. Happiest in unknown territory, happiest if there's resistance, a force to push against, life that doesn't yield, but pushes back, like a sort of dynamic stability. A swinely swashbuckler. Driven by the need to influence the world around him rather than conform to its offerings (and his constant questioning and challenging of the world inevitably changes it). What, to others, is only a towel drying on a fence, to him is a potential link, a possible portal into something much bigger. What, to others, is the wild and furious pig known as Petunia, to him is wild, dangerous, virgin territory – a place no one else is willing to go, and the only destination that interests him – something irresistible.

Most of the time, his hunch that there is more to things than meets the eye is confirmed. For instance, pulling on that towel was far more than a tug on a soggy piece of terry cloth drying on a fence. It ended up being a cataclysm. It resulted in a series of events that brought down the entire fence, released a small flock of quarantined chickens into the pond yard, almost caused them to drown, and created a commotion of a magnitude that no one looking at that small napkin would have imagined. Similarly, jumping off the truck that was taking him and his family to their final fattening place was far more than a leap. It resulted in a series of events that saved his life, secured his future, and opened a new world. Literally.

He is a discoverer. Consumed with porcine curiosity. Driven by questions – those silent, inner currents that move us, sentients, to know, grow, go farther. You can almost hear the irresistible question behind Lucas' every imperious action. And it's almost impossible not to want to know the answer. "What if I chase a horse?" "What if I bathe in the drinking water fountain?" "What if I push this baby stroller around, screaming baby and all?" "What if I break into the people house, tear open the feed bags and spread the feed around?" "What if I keep returning to the sounder that rejected me, time after time?" "What if I leave the skyless pit I was born into?" "What lies beyond its crushing cement walls?" "What if I pursue Petunia, the baddest, meanest pig around?"... And he throws himself into these questions, with total fearlessness, total abandon. The answer seems to be worth the risk or asking. It's not just moxie. It is an explorer's personality, curiosity and cross.

Had he not escaped, he would have been caged, shoulder to shoulder, with thousands of other young captives like himself, fattened in the dark stench of a pig farm, crammed in a truck with dozens of other terrified victims, driven to the slaughterhouse in his final, frightened journey, and killed in cold blood, execution style: no hesitation, no mercy, no remorse.

Someone with Lucas' personality would have fought to his last breath. He would not have accepted his tragic life as inevitable. He would have struggled, scraped, screamed, expressed more vocally, and more visibly than others the absolute despair of being a suffering soul buried alive in a cement grave, condemned to a short, excremental existence, murdered for a taste. He would have lost.

By contrast, a docile pig like Oscar would have frozen in silent despair. He would have focused every bit of his energy on enduring, suffering, bearing the unbearable. He would have tried to accept, not challenge, the relentless misery inflicted on him. He would have spent his short time on earth like most farmed animals – taking the beatings and the mutilations, and the sunless hell of his existence, the way abused children take the abuse: as though it were deserved, as though the abuser's perverse pleasure were their only worth, and their only identity – without that, they are nothing.

Lucas is one of the few pigs in the world who is unscathed by the atrocities of farming. He's been free most of his life. Free to experience the world's terrible beauty on his own terms, and free to be increased by it, or crushed by it. Free to be deeply wounded and deeply healed. Free to grow from his own mistakes. Free to fall in love, and fall hard. He does.

He approaches Petunia, usually at dusk, when everybody is out, active, and eagerly anticipating dinner before the long night's rest. He is well aware of the danger – Petunia bit, boxed, bashed, pushed, plugged, punched, slammed, slugged and threw him down before. But he approaches her anyway.

He swaggers suavely towards her, snorts sweetly, tiptoes behind her, what's left of his tail, politely, submissively down, head bowed, eyes courteously averted. She either ignores him or scolds and spanks him. He comes back for more – nose in the breeze of her being, eyes half-closed, as though inhaling the rarest perfume, mouth parted in an ecstatic smile, and emitting a series of soft, gurgling whimpers to sweeten her mood, cooing in her ear like a dove – singing to her in languages that she may not understand but her heart may, will, must. And he, the unchallenged Bad-Bold-Beautiful-Bodacious Boy of the sanctuary, lowers his head, blinks shyly, and whimpers submissively when Petunia shoves him.
There is no mistaking that Lucas' stream of infatuated sounds at Petunia's side is a serenade of love, submission, supplication, seduction, scintillation. Nothing compares to Petunia, nothing distracts him from her. He follows her around while she is engrossed in foraging for tasty tidbits. She totally ignores him. He totally ignores her food finds. Even though he pretends to be interested in everything she uncovers, eats, and praises in low, contented grunts, he never even tries to touch any of those delicacies. It's just a way to get closer and stay closer longer, while she is occupied with that morsel. It's not the food, it's the fact that their noses are on the same scent-length, and, while she is rapt in her found treat, she suffers his cheek touching hers.

This is where he wants to be. This is his hog heaven. He has a whole sanctuary, a whole world of freedom to explore – and he does – but what he craves most is the small, dangerous, mysterious world that unfolds only at Petunia's side. He loves her. She is his greatest, most burning question – one that you can almost hear behind his every suave move, and perhaps the only Lucas question you almost don't want to know the answer to. "Will you love me back?"

Petunia doesn't love him back. She loves Chris.

Petunia was born into a pig farm. One of the millions of innocents who are forced annually into a life of abuse and degradation, told in words, in gaze, and in touch, every minute of their bleak lives, that they are contemptible, ugly, filthy, disgusting, unworthy of love, and unworthy of life, and thus deserving of the mutilations, the beatings, the deprivations, the torment, the terror, the atrocities we pile onto their heaving bodies in the name of our amusement, whatever that amusement may happen to be – ham, bacon, hot dogs, handbags, punching bags, doggie treats.

As a piglet, Petunia was subjected to the routine pig mutilations – tail docking, ear notching, teeth scraping – as a youngster, she was chased, taunted and tormented by teenagers, as an adult, she was starved, neglected and abused by her keepers. So it's not surprising that, today, Petunia avoids contact, defends her boundaries, acts tough, trusts no one. It's not surprising that the presence of others disturbs her, and that she, who was kept perpetually vulnerable and dependent, craves the safety of a space she can control.

What's surprising is to realize that Petunia's choice of seclusion is not the result of the abuse she endured, but simply her natural talent. Her ability to escape within, to shut the violent world out, and her vulnerable self safely in, is how she survived the dark times. Solitude is also how she relaxes, regenerates, processes, learns, makes meaning. She enjoys her own company, probably because she is more aware of her own feelings than most – which makes for a rich, interesting, densely populated solitude, a space worth visiting, defending and returning to. Whatever she hears, sees, feels, whatever subtle shifts in mood and consciousness she senses around her, can only be perceived without outside interference, it seems, in the quiet confines of an out-of-the-way mudhole, an empty barn, an open field. Petunia relishes her isolation with mystic abandon. Of course, most of us don't perceive Petunia as a mystic. To most of us, she is more like a minefield: seemingly calm and innocuous, but suddenly and dangerously explosive. Proceed at your peril. Enter Petunia's personal space and she will threaten. Come closer, she'll push and shove. Closer still, she'll bite. Leave her alone, and nobody gets hurt.

Only in her times of restlessness does she voluntarily leave her solitary world. Those are the times when the food tastes bland, the water stale, the straw bedding stings where it used to soothe, the mudholes are just plain muddy, the usual comforts are comfortless, the times when she wanders aimlessly from place to place, paces from barn to barn, from half-finished mudhole to half-finished mudhole, from group to group – inviting interaction only to reject it, acting the way we do when we've shed an old skin but haven't grown a new one to replace it – the times when something is struggling to surface: a new awareness, a new question, a painful memory.

Those are the only times when she tries to enter the pig barn, maybe seeking a sense of community, or family, or maybe hoping for guidance from kin who may have had the experience she is struggling to understand. At those times, the company of other pigs no longer seems to feel like an intrusion, but more like a possible solution, and the solitude she usually protects so fiercely, seems more like a prison than a safe haven.

She approaches the pig barn with her tail down, head bowed, eyes averted – not the usual Bigger-Badder-Beastlier-Than-Thou Petunia, but a smaller, humbler version of herself – petunia. But she doesn't even make it past the barn door. The minute Agnes, the matriarch, lays eyes on her, she chases her away in protracted, slow speed chases over the countryside. At the end of each "chase", both are so exhausted, they sleep where they drop – usually on opposite sides of the pig barn: Agnes, too tired to make it inside the pig barn, Petunia, too exhausted to cross the yard and go to her barn.
The scene may be repeated the next day, and the following but, soon, Petunia returns to her solitary, independent ways; eating alone, sleeping alone, roaming the sanctuary by herself, digging and savoring her own mudholes away from the madding crowd, needing no one, acting again like the pig she wishes she were – the tough, independent, invulnerable, untamed, dangerous minefield of a pig – and hiding again the vulnerable, wounded person she knows herself to be. From everyone but Chris. With him, she is unafraid.

When Chris is near, almost wings unfold at her sides. In his presence, her crushing invisible burden lightens, her full body armor dissolves, her beaten body glows from within, her broken heart hums like a beehive. Chris is allowed to lay his hands on her battered back, hold her scorned body in his arms, touch her scarred throat, and she closes her eyes, slows her breath to a melody, seems to lift her massive body on the very tips of her hooves, as though ready to receive and return something rare – that substance we generate and release into the world when we love – and she absorbs the benediction of this touch that enlivens, that gives tenderness and expects nothing in return, that contradicts, opposes and, maybe, can begin to erase what she had been told in words, in gaze, and in touch all of her "food animal" life: that she is contemptible, ugly, filthy, disgusting, unworthy of love, and unworthy of life, and thus deserving of the mutilations, the beatings, the deprivations, the torment, the terror, the atrocities piled onto her heaving body in the name of human amusement, whatever that amusement may happen to be – ham, bacon, hot dogs, handbags, punching bags, doggie treats. She responds with cooing, melodic sounds, small, rhythmic nods of the head to the beat of music you can almost see in her body, and a warm, unguarded stillness, a softness, an open display of vulnerability, a window into the depth of her great broken heart.

What you see at that moment is difficult to watch. You see the beauty of her living heart, and the lambent, limpid, illuminated soul. You also see the depth of its wound, and the near hopelessness of its mending, and her inextinguishable hope, need, desire that she may return to wholeness, and her belief that this man, who tells her in words, in gaze, and in touch that her life matters, will not only help her nurture this improbable, brave, new heart, but help her bear it.

Joanna Lucas
© 2007 Joanna Lucas
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If living ethically is important to you, please remember that there is nothing humane about “humane” animal farming, just as there is nothing ethical or defensible about consuming its products. When confronted with the fundamental injustice inherent in all animal agriculture—a system that is predicated on inflicting massive, intentional and unnecessary suffering and death on billions of sentient individuals—the only ethical response is to strive to end it, by becoming vegan, not to regulate it by supporting “improved” methods of producing dairy, eggs, meat, wool, leather, silk, honey, and other animal products. For more information, please read The Humane Farming Myth. Live vegan and educate others to do the same.