Page 326 - Wordsmith A Guide to College Writing

more precise, as Sunday dinner. Grandma did not eat

chicken that Sunday or for many Sundays thereafter.

These days, most of us have no such intimate contact
with our food before we eat it. Chicken comes from the

Colonel or from the Shop-Rite down the street. We have

lost touch with the way that animals are treated before

they reach our plate. All too often, animals raised for

food are treated cruelly—like crops instead of
creatures.

While chickens in Grandma’s time were allowed to flap,

squawk, and strut around the chicken yard until that

fateful dinner invitation came, today’s chickens lead
unnatural lives. They are born in hatcheries, raised in

cages on special diets, then crated like cantaloupes and

trucked to the processing plant. Who has not seen those

trucks, with chickens huddled several to a cage, and

cage piled upon cage? Feathers fly as the truck ferries
its terrified cargo down the highway, and by the time it

reaches its destination many chickens are already dead.

Why should we worry when the chickens are going to die

anyway? We should worry because we have, it seems to me,

a minimal ethical responsibility to give any animal we
use for food a decent life.

Some farm animals seem to have decent lives, but often

we do not see the whole picture. Cattle graze peaceably

in fragrant pastures and gather under trees to escape