Chicken problems

I am tempted to say that everyone is ignoring the elephant in the room, but in fact it is a much smaller animal. In recent weeks we have learned that a ChickfilA truck caters to the appetites of students, and presumably others, on a local university campus. A professor there has questioned “welcoming” the truck because of the purported antigay views of the company’s ownership. Would the university allow access to a food truck from a company owned by a member of the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazi party?

But however compelling, or at least thoughtprovoking, that question may be, I have been astonished that no one to my knowledge has asked an even more pertinent question, namely: Does a university (or any other institution) want to welcome a business that is built on the harming or killing of innocent beings?

I am talking, of course, about chickens. There is a difference, you know, between chickens and chicken. The latter is a tasty food. The former are sentient beings who are capable of a range of feelings, including pain and suffering, have individual personalities, and presumably value life in their own way as much as we humans do ours.

Yet in the United States alone we humans slaughter nine billion chickens every single year to turn them into chicken. Chickens are in fact the largest contingent of abused domestic animals by far. Quoting Wikipedia: “The Humane Slaughter Act requires the proper treatment and humane handling of all food animals slaughtered in USDA inspected slaughter plants. It does not apply to chickens or other birds. In industrial slaughterhouses, chickens are killed prior to scalding by being passed through an electrified waterbath while shackled.” And yet perfectly delicious and nutritious dietary alternatives exist to eating chickens, and all other sentient beings (including other humans!).

So however much we want to oppose bigotry in any form, no matter how tenuously connected to a business enterprise, I think we want to oppose animal cruelty as well. Replacing a ChickfilA truck with, for example, a KFC truck would not solve this problem.

Joel Marks Milford