453
What does all this mass slaughter and interspecies perversion say about human
nature, expressly? Everyone who considers the horrifying contradictions will necessarily come to her/his own conclusion. In his work Peaceable Nature: An Optimistic
View of Life on Earth, Stephan Lackner takes on Darwin, extolling the vegetarian
giants of the earth, hippos, elephants, and rhinos, and in spite of all the violence and
“man’s unstable nature” concludes that “Life is a desirable good”.
50
Lackner points
out that a toad is estimated to consume “10,000 insects during each warm season.”
And asks if such violence and attrition “produce any noticeable improvement in the
living apparatus of the surviving insects?” His answer is “No; the mosquito has
remained the same through the eons”.
51
It seems an imperative to reverse the correlation: has humanity, in its vast killing fields of chickens, in some way improved?
Has the chicken (or the cows, the fishes, turkeys and pigs, etc.) become less of a
chicken? This is more than a mere evolutionary paradox, these most provocative
turns of fate, and deliberate, terrible ruses of nature. In the United Kingdom, “poultry” diversity was first displayed in 1845 in London. Some of the bird portraits
showed up in the Illustrated London News. “Specimen birds” had become something of a cult.
52
Such that, while slaughtering them, we marveled at their beauty.
Chickens are the staple meat dish for the vast majority of all Homo sapiens.
Breeds are particularly diverse in such countries as Belgium, Germany, France,
Egypt, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam. But their
600+ breeds span every nation. There are millions of pet chickens (not just at
Easter), but that represents an estimated tiny fraction of the nearly one trillion chickens that have been slaughtered by humans during the past 40–50 years, an incomprehensible Holocaust.
53
But of course today intensive poultry breeding, genetic manipulation, and outrageously cruel confinement continue more fervently than ever, though at least there
has been a free range revolution in the last several decades, typically conferring
some semblance of a normal, if utterly human-dominated, life upon those few lucky
millions of chickens that are kept out of wire mesh jails and bunkers, where numerous avian disease outbreaks and continued infliction of pain 24/7 often keeps chickens from ever being able to stand up or spread their wings, 2–3% of them dying
50 Stephan Lackner, Peaceable Nature, Harper & Row, Publishers, San Francisco, 1984, p. 18.
51 ibid. p. 38.
52 See Farm Animal Portraits, by Elspeth Moncrieff with Stephan and Iona Joseph, Antique
Collectors’ Club, Suffolk, 1996, Ch. 8 – “Developments in Poultry Breeding,” pp. 276–288.
53 See Lisa Boone, ”Chickens will become a beloved pet — just like the family dog”. latimes.com.
August 26, 2017. See also, “A Warning from the Chickens of the World,” David Waltner-Toews,
The Walrus, July 8, 2020, republished in MAHB, July 22, 2020, https://mahb.stanford.edu/libraryitem/a-warning-from-the-chickens-of-the-world/ Accessed July 22, 2020.
48.4 Intelligence Quotients
What does all this mass slaughter and interspecies perversion say about human
nature, expressly? Everyone who considers the horrifying contradictions will necessarily come to her/his own conclusion. In his work Peaceable Nature: An Optimistic
View of Life on Earth, Stephan Lackner takes on Darwin, extolling the vegetarian
giants of the earth, hippos, elephants, and rhinos, and in spite of all the violence and
“man’s unstable nature” concludes that “Life is a desirable good”.
50
Lackner points
out that a toad is estimated to consume “10,000 insects during each warm season.”
And asks if such violence and attrition “produce any noticeable improvement in the
living apparatus of the surviving insects?” His answer is “No; the mosquito has
remained the same through the eons”.
51
It seems an imperative to reverse the correlation: has humanity, in its vast killing fields of chickens, in some way improved?
Has the chicken (or the cows, the fishes, turkeys and pigs, etc.) become less of a
chicken? This is more than a mere evolutionary paradox, these most provocative
turns of fate, and deliberate, terrible ruses of nature. In the United Kingdom, “poultry” diversity was first displayed in 1845 in London. Some of the bird portraits
showed up in the Illustrated London News. “Specimen birds” had become something of a cult.
52
Such that, while slaughtering them, we marveled at their beauty.
Chickens are the staple meat dish for the vast majority of all Homo sapiens.
Breeds are particularly diverse in such countries as Belgium, Germany, France,
Egypt, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam. But their
600+ breeds span every nation. There are millions of pet chickens (not just at
Easter), but that represents an estimated tiny fraction of the nearly one trillion chickens that have been slaughtered by humans during the past 40–50 years, an incomprehensible Holocaust.
53
But of course today intensive poultry breeding, genetic manipulation, and outrageously cruel confinement continue more fervently than ever, though at least there
has been a free range revolution in the last several decades, typically conferring
some semblance of a normal, if utterly human-dominated, life upon those few lucky
millions of chickens that are kept out of wire mesh jails and bunkers, where numerous avian disease outbreaks and continued infliction of pain 24/7 often keeps chickens from ever being able to stand up or spread their wings, 2–3% of them dying
50 Stephan Lackner, Peaceable Nature, Harper & Row, Publishers, San Francisco, 1984, p. 18.
51 ibid. p. 38.
52 See Farm Animal Portraits, by Elspeth Moncrieff with Stephan and Iona Joseph, Antique
Collectors’ Club, Suffolk, 1996, Ch. 8 – “Developments in Poultry Breeding,” pp. 276–288.
53 See Lisa Boone, ”Chickens will become a beloved pet — just like the family dog”. latimes.com.
August 26, 2017. See also, “A Warning from the Chickens of the World,” David Waltner-Toews,
The Walrus, July 8, 2020, republished in MAHB, July 22, 2020, https://mahb.stanford.edu/libraryitem/a-warning-from-the-chickens-of-the-world/ Accessed July 22, 2020.
48.4 Intelligence Quotients