Chicken Conundrum

There’s a chicken processing facility not too far from my house, so as I’m driving to and from work I often see trucks full of live chickens on the highway on their way to the plant. Sometimes I don’t actually see the trucks, but there’s evidence of their recent presence in the form of small white feathers flitting around the road.

There are a few things that I find disturbing about these trucks:

• The chickens are jam-packed into cages that are so small, they can’t stand up; and there are so many chickens crowded into a single cage, they can barely move or turn around.
• The cages are wire mesh and open on all sides, which means, when it rains, they all get soaked; in the winter, the chickens probably freeze to death before arriving at the slaughterhouse, if not from the frigid temps, then from the wind chill of traveling down the highway at 65 mph.
• Once in a while there’s a single dead chicken on the side of the road, presumably because it fell from the truck. How did it get free from the cage? And since it’s in the cage with lots of other chickens, how is it that there’s only one casualty? (Perhaps the others are crammed in so tightly they don’t fall out even if the cage door is left open.)

I’m not some radical animal rights person, but I feel sorry for these little creatures. I think we could at least treat these poor birds with kindness before we kill and eat ‘em.