Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[HiEverybirdy]

@BDutch - on the topic of calendar fame and molting, isn't Janice Miss June 2023 from the BYC calendar? Hope she's doing better with her hard molt.

Peck is on the upswing from her surprisingly hard molt. Here's a photo from just before she finally lost that little upside-down tail feather yesterday. Amazing how much whiter her feathers are with each molt. She's like a ptarmigan ready for snow.

 

[BDutch]

Proximity fosters empathy and distance enables lack of caring.
It is not just about animals, also about people.
To facilitate the killing of groups of people it is common to dehumanize them in various ways so they feel like ‘other’ and less close.
Money can be raised for the victim of an accident in your community. Worse injuries across the world are hard to fund treatments for.
Once a chicken is in your care it is yours and you have a responsibility - they are ‘family’ of sorts.

Thanks for the response and explanation.

If a chicken never comes into your care it is just part of the mass of chickens out there that you cannot do anything about.

This is not true. People who think they can’t do anything about it, are wrongly wired. Not eating animal products that have been treated very badly does help!

Indirect contributions like funding the industry or supply chain that causes suffering are harder to internalize and ‘feel’.
I think Richard Dawkins would easily explain this phenomenon in a way that makes it entirely logical. Caring for things close to you like family is necessary to preserve the gene pool. Species or others is a more abstract concept and therefore lower priority.
It is all wired into our brains.
With intellect you can overcome your biological wiring, but it is not a natural act.

Thanks for pointing out I used my intellect to rewire my brain.

 

[Molpet]

Thanks for the response and explanation.

This is not true. People who think they can’t do anything about it, are wrongly wired. Not eating animal products that have been treated very badly does help!


Thanks for pointing out I used my intellect to rewire my brain.

 

[Shadrach]

To clarify before chipping in on this: this is the topic

rather than roosters, aggressive or otherwise?

Yes, in broad terms. I'm interested in our perception of the chicken and how it's led and to the current state.

 

[Vulpes vulpes]

This reply is not especially meant for you Shad, but a general thought about how we treat animals, use and abuse them for fun and meat. The chicken in the pot just triggered me to think out loud.

I suppose we all agree that eating animals that had a good life is better than eating animals who suffered throughout their lives. Unfortunately most people don’t really care. Proof: in the supermarket they choose the cheap meat and not the ones with a label indicating they had a better life. Very few have the opportunity to buy from a friend, knowing they had a good life, which is obviously about the best we can do if we want to eat meat without killing ourselves.

I don’t really understand people who eat chickens or other animals every day, knowing they are such wonderful creatures. And if they do eat animals, why criticise people who kill a rooster bc he doesn’t behave like they want him to behave. Why needs one animal protection, and others can be slaughtered for meat?

There are more strange things going on with chickens. Buying female chicks from large hatcheries seems common practice in the US. People buy these chicks often/mainly to avoid to have to deal with cockerels themselves. Some people don’t even realise 50% of the chicks were killed to make this possible. And what about the luck they need to survive the transport. It seems the chicks often have health problems bc of the nasty transport.

Letting a creature suffer and die that they don’t see seems normal for many people. On the other hand most people do care and feel responsible for the animal they have bought or gained. It often becomes an animal to care for intensely if they get sick. Some even care for their chickens like a family member, no matter the vet costs.

Therefore I think the feelings people have for animals are completely un-logical and our thoughts towards animals are all mixed up.

It really would help the animals in general if people start to respect the ‘gifts’ from animals on our plate. Eating smaller portions or a vegan meal more often would help a lot too.

It's part of the human condition. We're hardwired to feel empathy; our species survives by forming tight social bonds within our groups, so more empathetic and altruistic hominids were more successful. However, empathy only naturally extends to what is tangible to us: our family, our friends, our pets, our culture. Battery hens and feed lot cattle are in the brains of most only as vague concepts. We know they exist, but only in the same way we know Antarctica exists. Very few of us have seen and touched Antarctica, and even fewer have spent a day out on the ice. If you started caring for Antarctica the same way you cared for your own child, that means that you also need to give the same empathy to the Gobi desert, the Mariana trench, the stratosphere. And if you do that, then you don't have any space left to care for yourself, let alone your family, friends, and pets. And then you realize why we're only hardwired to feel empathy for what is tangible. One simply lacks the bandwidth to empathize with every one of the billions of chickens in cages. Yes, we should be eating less meat, and the meat we do eat should be responsibly sourced, but doing that is hard, and if you do that then you also have to donate to sheltering the homeless, and only eat organic, and stop using plastic, and stop driving a car, etc etc etc. You can hardly blame an individual person for not doing this, especially considering that our consumerist society works hard to make it easier to forget how others are suffering. Mother Culture never gets tired.

 

[Vulpes vulpes]

Abstract metaphor tax:

 

[Vulpes vulpes]

We have a special weather statement here: very strong front and high winds. They're saying chances of thunderstorms and a 2% chance of tornadoes (!!!!!)

 

[Mother of Chaos]

We have a special weather statement here: very strong front and high winds. They're saying chances of thunderstorms and a 2% chance of tornadoes (!!!!!)

Stay safe! I read about the atmospheric river coming in from the Pacific.

 

[Skyeknight]

I recommend to add some dried insects like mealworms/ tiny river crabs

Tiny river crabs? Do you mean crayfish? Anyways just pulling old cows out of the canal to show my tax! Managed to feed a crayfish to my CX pullets. When I tried before they wouldn't touch them, but back then they also didn't know what to do with insects. My normal chickens still won't eat them though.

 

[Vulpes vulpes]

Stay safe! I read about the atmospheric river coming in from the Pacific.

Thanks here's the official alert:

"A cool and unstable airmass over northwest Oregon and southwest Washington today will result in scattered showers and thunderstorms through Wednesday evening. Stronger showers and thunderstorms will have the potential to produce locally damaging wind gusts up to 60 mph and/or a funnel cloud or brief tornado."