“I fell off the chicken truck and am hurt! I was just left on the side of the road still alive as cars whizzed past me—what an awful life I have had. Please let me die a noble death. Please share with the world—my pain. Please change!!!”

When I walked back to Flagpole from the post office Monday morning, a white plastic bag sat on our doorstep. Inside the bag crouched a chicken, and underneath the bag was this note.

Our Flagpole crew gathered around the bag, everybody concerned for the chicken, which had a bloody, skull-splitting crease on its head. What to do? Our office manager, Paul Karjian, called the UGA vet school, where he has a close connection. He knew the students there would take it in, and they did, though, alas, it was too late. In addition to the head wound, the chicken had a massive gash across its abdomen that we could not see. It died a couple of hours after it got to the vet school.

You’ve seen them: along the bypass, along the highway. Would you rather fall off the chicken truck to flounder until finished off by a car or continue the trip to the end and get the ice pick in your brain? What’s your choice? Either way, you’re out of the crowded, dung-steeped, drug-induced, force-fed existence that has been your “life” since you hatched. At least if you make it to your destination, I get to enjoy you as chicken fingers or chicken salad. This poor fowl was denied its destiny.

The trembling bird I held in my hands—de-chickenized though it was—reminded me starkly just who it is I am eating and what it goes through to reach my plate. This was no yard chicken pecking peacefully around the house until the time comes for me to thankfully wring its neck in order to feed the preacher at Sunday dinner. This was an escapee from a concentration camp who had never known sunlight or fresh air: a mere commodity. God’s eye, we are told, is on the sparrow, but surely even He averts His gaze from the 10,000 chickens crammed into the commercial chicken house to be pumped up for industrial slaughter.

People have eaten meat from time immemorial and will continue to do so. Throughout most of history, you killed what you raised or hunted. Factory farming has created this vast disconnect between the food we eat and how it is raised. Few of us could stand to observe all those chickens crammed into all those houses and hauled to the de-gutting line. Fortunately, we don’t have to observe it, unless we happen to glance up at the chicken truck ahead of us or find one of its escapees.

This same kind of disconnect allows us to laugh at cows parachuting into football stadiums urging us to consume more chicken. While we’re smiling, our drone missiles kill women and children half a world away to provide us with the gasoline to drive to the chicken place. We pump our gas and pick up our chicken and watch the game—bloodless.

We hire our soldiers to do our fighting for us like we pay our factories to slaughter the animals we eat—far away and out of sight. Don’t try to tell me about it, either, because I won’t listen. The game is on, and here come those funny cows. After that, a slice of real life and the gripping drama of genuine human struggle: “American Idol.” Don’t say we’re not involved.

So, what do we do? Shut down the $22 billion a year chicken industry? Pull out of Afghanistan? Educate ourselves about what we’re doing as a nation and as individual people? None of that is going to happen. Around here, the best we can do is to continue buying local produce and meat raised by the old, more humane methods that provide our food free from cancerous additives and assembly-line commodification.

For the rest of it, as citizens of our vast, impersonal, irresponsible killing machine of a nation, perhaps we’d better pray there is no God—and eat mo’ chicken.

Pete McCommons

editor@flagpole.com