For the Birds: From Exploitation to Liberation
From All-Creatures.org Animal Rights/Vegan Activist Strategies Articles Archive

FROM Marc Bekoff, Psychology Today / Animal Emotions
June 2019

Dr. Karen Davis has done more than perhaps anyone to reveal the complex and socially rich lives of birds. Her writing―intellectually rigorous, passionate, erudite, and witty―brings fully to the fore the great injustices we have perpetrated on these intelligent and loving creatures.
- Marc Bekoff

For the Birds: From Exploitation to Liberation

Birds are amazing sentient and intelligent beings. Often written off as being dumb–hence the use of the pejorative phrase "bird brain"–and unemotional, nothing could be further from the truth based on detailed comparative research and observations from others who love to watch and study these wonderful nonhumans. Many different birds also find themselves served up as meals, and it's well known that they are brutally treated as they come to rest on humans' plates.

I recently learned of a new book by Dr. Karen Davis, President and Founder of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia, called For the Birds: From Exploitation to Liberation-Essays on Chickens, Turkeys, and Other Domestic Fowl. Having known about Dr. Davis' groundbreaking work focusing on the well-being of "food birds," I wanted to know more about her new book. I was thrilled she was able to spend some time answering a few questions. Our interview went as follows.

Karen, Nicholas and Nathaniel

Why did you write For the Birds and how does it follow from years working as an animal activist?

All my life, I have loved birds. Everything about birds–their feathers, their faces, their voices, the way they act–has always affected me deeply. As a child growing up in Altoona, Pennsylvania, I knew song birds, but not chickens or turkeys. Later, when I met these birds, I was immediately drawn to them, as I describe in For the Birds. My experience with chickens and turkeys in the 1980s led me to found United Poultry Concerns in 1990 to promote compassion and respect for domestic fowl. I subscribed to poultry industry publications to educate myself and others about the suffering these birds endure in being locked up in filthy buildings and brutally slaughtered for “food.”

As well, I wanted to influence people to perceive chickens and turkeys in their own right, apart from the categorical traps in which they are typically held captive. Getting to know chickens and turkeys through reading about them, I also got to know them personally through our sanctuary. A successful challenge to the denigration of “domestic fowl” can indisputably be made by observing and interacting with them every day as I have done for more than thirty years. I have seen over and over how, beneath their industry-inflicted traumas, they are able to revive and be happy in an environment that stimulates their evolutionary sensibilities and enthusiasms.

Who is your intended audience?

My intended audience includes animal rights advocates, avian specialists, ethologists, teachers, and everyone who cares about and would like to learn more about chickens and turkeys through a lens that illuminates their lives. My book is for everyone who shares my belief that birds are amazing individuals and citizens of our planet who deserve our compassion, understanding, respect, and awe.

Amelia in her nesting place

What are some of your main messages and how can they be put into practice?

For the Birds incorporates key messages through themes I’ve pursued throughout my career. There is the theme of people literally consuming chickens and other animals, including the mental and physical suffering these animals endure on their way to being turned into food. There is the theme of belittling birds and other animal species, especially those destined for the table. This includes caricaturing them in ways that make it seem almost as if they “deserved” the punishments we heap on them in the lexicon of abuses that parallel and reinforce the literal abuses we dispense.

Modern chicken house in the United States

There is the theme of who chickens and turkeys are in and of themselves within their own worlds of experience and expression as revealed in circumstances that are as free as possible from the preconceptions that distort our perception of them. The figure of Procrustes came to mind one day as I was reading the summary of a talk by an agribusiness professor that distinguishes between the “science-based” view of animals and the “sentimentalized,” a.k.a. anthropomorphic, view. Procrustes is a tyrant in Greek mythology who keeps an iron bed on which he places his victims after stretching or shrinking the bed in advance to reshape them to reflect his will. If they are too short, he stretches them to size. If too tall, he amputates their excess length. Rhetorically and literally, exploiters do this to animals all the time. What I call the “procrustean solution” is the false kind of anthropomorphism that consists of “re-forming” individuals and groups destructively in order to have your way with them, and attributing your way to their will.

As for practical steps, I urge animal advocates to avoid rhetorical traps that can cause us to replicate and perpetuate the demeaning stereotypes from which we seek to rescue chickens and turkeys as part of our overall goal of rescuing them from the jaws of humanity. An example is comparing cognitively mature animals of other species to cognitively challenged human adults and cognitively undeveloped children. These types of analogies are absurd and unjust to animals. I call on animal advocates never to “apologize” for animals or for caring about them, and to hone a posture of affirmation worthy of those for whom we have chosen to speak. Facts matter and confidence matters. Keeping faith is essential. The rhetoric of exploitation requires a counter rhetoric of animal liberation. That is what For the Birds seeks to deliver on its promise to the birds and all creatures that we will continue our crusade on their behalf until they are freed, and free.

Are you hopeful?

The emotion inspired in me by chickens and turkeys that informs my writings is inseparable from the analytical perspective that I bring to a consideration of their lives. Focusing on my personal life with these birds over many years and on the injuries inflicted on them by people in countless ways, I would like to be able to share the optimism of those who believe that human beings as a whole will eventually, or already do deep inside, experience a fellowship with them more potent than the overt attitudes that overshadow the primal sympathies.

From rotting in cages to roosting in branches, former battery hens enjoy life at United Poultry Concerns

What would you like to see in the future?

I would like to see a world in which ethics and intelligence come together in humans to facilitate the best life possible for every being in every habitat on Earth. I want to see a world in which human beings value birds and other creatures free from an exploitative point of view. I want to see a world in which the slaughterhouse and its satellite operations are gone. I long for a world in which no chicken or turkey (or anyone) ever wakes up again in a nightmare that never ends for them until death. This is the basis of the work I do every day and would do even if it were foretold that the daily doom we inflict on birds and other beings was written into eternity. I want to see a world in which human food is animal-free. I prefer that this miracle should happen overnight.

What are some of your current projects?

The goal of United Poultry Concerns is to change how human beings view and treat chickens, turkeys, and other domestic fowl. In pursuit of it, we maintain a poultry paradise and produce a wide range of materials including books, videos, brochures, booklets, fact sheets, and our quarterly magazine Poultry Press. We have a wonderful, informative website. We’re currently partnering with a sanctuary in New Jersey to build a home for chickens rescued from a slaughter ritual known as Kaporos which we have protested for its gratuitous abuse of chickens since 1995.

Currently, we are supporting the Alliance for a Slaughter-Free Alexandria, in Northern Virginia, which has filed a lawsuit challenging the City Council’s approval of a poultry slaughterhouse that local business owners and residents do not want. With our guidebook Hatching Good Lessons, we assist school teachers seeking humane alternatives to hatching chicks in the classroom. As part of this project, we are actively supporting a bill in New York that would prohibit bird-hatching programs in schools. Each spring we host a Conscious Eating Conference in Berkeley, California. This year our conference looked at the implications of “sentience-free” food comprising in-vitro “meat” and “The Ethics of Cognitively Eviscerating Farmed Animals for ‘Better Welfare.’”

One of our most successful projects, starting in 2005, is International Respect for Chickens Day May 4th/month of May. For this occasion we invite animal advocates around the world to celebrate chickens and protest the bleakness of their lives in farming operations through actions designed to educate people in their local community and elsewhere through artwork, leafleting, library displays, vegan potlucks, or simply talking to family, friends or strangers about the plight – and delight – of chickens and how people can help them.

Last word to readers

I encourage every interested person to purchase a copy of For the Birds and read, ponder, and share its message. I encourage everyone who cares about birds to join United Poultry Concerns and support our work. Whatever you do, please don’t be shy. Stick up for chickens and turkeys. Make a place for them in your heart instead of your mouth–except as their advocate.

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Thank you, Karen, for such an informative, passionate, and inspirational interview. I hope For the Birds receives a broad global audience because the abuse of birds and other nonhumans for food knows no geographical or cultural boundaries. Your book could well be a game-changer.

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Dr. Davis also is the author of Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry; More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality; The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities, and other works including her children’s book A Home for Henny and Instead of Chicken, and Instead of Turkey: A Poultryless “Poultry” Potpourri, a vegan cookbook

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