Animal Rights Poetry and Prose By Heidi Coon from All-Creatures.org

Buffy - Lucky Duck

One lucky duck

She was too young to lay eggs

She was too skinny for meat

She wasn’t worth the feed over winter to fatten her up on the poultry farm she was born in.

Bird farmers are purging surplus before winter.

Buffy lucked out because she was offered for free along with 4 others. The others were plump, older

She was one of hundreds of fowl with no future of their own. Surviving but not living...just a meal in waiting for a necrovore.

A roast.

Seared, gravied, buttered, & broiled. Glazed and carved like wet clay....tho, pottery is treated with gentler hands.

Living beings bred to be killed for food.

Discrimination based upon species, Buffy was bred and hatched for a chopping block. Her slender neck would have been severed, her beautiful soft blonde and white feathers would have been torn from her skin. Her remains would have been shrink wrapped in plastic and frozen or refrigerated for a customer.

She was destined for mouths to grind her remains between their molars.

Her masticated flesh was to be swallowed and digested.

She was destined to become waste moving along an intestinal tract, pushed by flora until being expelled out of an asshole.

Until 10/20

That day I drove south...bound for a bird farm that had no use for her. It was a beautiful morning.

Now?

Her name is Buffy.

Buffy lives in each moment foraging on a full acre, surrounded by fence, deciduous and evergreen trees to snooze under, a safe house at night.

She shares a fresh pool with seven duck friends, and two geese.

She has no idea what cruel fate awaited her before her home coming.

Or, maybe she did have some idea...the farmer sold all sorts of poultry birds and waterfowl. He ‘processed’ them for the purchaser.

Processing is just more camouflaged language of the speciesist aperture that commodifies beings. Chopping their heads off, ripping feathers out of their decapitated corpse, then packaging the remains for consumption.

Vile, sure.

It’s quite possible Buffy had seen/heard/smelled killings during her stint in the avian joint.
Trafficking.

She was born twice, really.

Hatched from her egg and being thrust into the slammer to rub shoulders with larger birds of multiple species.

Then, after her car ride home in a soft avian carrier...she was carried to the front porch.

I whistled for the ducks which prompted their excited replies. (Buffy spoke for the first time since I got her in my car upon hearing their quacks, chirps and honks)

Her peeps turned to quacks as the resident ducks and geese got closer...I unzipped the carrier and she burst out, flying towards a bewildered Peking, Cordelia, Abernathy, Sid, Astrid, Babette, Trixie and FouFou.

There had been a re-establishing of the pecking order. There had been snooty Trixie snubbing Buffy. There had been chasing by both geese and the big drake, Peking.

That night, they all walked into their house, and I watched as they all settled after their victory quacking of going to bed.

Ducks celebrate a lot, if you aren’t aware.....

I said nite nite, and locked their door.

The next morning....they all burst out excitedly quacking for the new day.

113 billion eggs are laid annually in the USA alone

31 million ducks killed for flesh annually in the USA alone

Buffy is a runner duck known mostly for big egg production. Runners are also eaten…i was told that for what runners lack in size, they make up for in taste.

©Heidi Coon, 2024

Go on to: "But my kid loves fishing"
Return to Poetry and Prose by Heidi Coon
Return to Animal Rights Poetry