Animal Rights Zone

Fighting for animal liberation and an end to speciesism

Endless Prison

Written by Lynley Tulloch

In response to an article in the New York Times, titled: "Wishing They All Could Be California Hens", [http://goo.gl/PjkJN0], Lynley Tulloch wrote the following article for ARZone. 

It's an endless prison that has no beginning and no end. You try to stretch, but there is barely room to turn around. Your feet shift on sloping steel bars, grimly searching for Earth they will never feel. Your heart yearns for something, but you don't know what, having never known anything but the prison. So you stretch uncomfortably lifting wings that will never fly, shredding useless feathers against unforgiving bars. The prison becomes your mind, your mind becomes a prison. You go to sleep. You wake up. You lay an egg. It's the same thing. Day. After day. After day. After day. 

Putting your head through the bars you twist it awkwardly, searching in anticipation for something new. An ancient song echoes on the edges of existence, it calls gently, softly, sweetly. Rustling leaves, tinkling sunlight, gurgling water ... Just out of your mind. Out of existence and out of your mind. The artificial light goes out ... a long dark night arrives, your feathers fall like leaves, your skin bleeds in tiny streams, your eyes turn dull like a dark pond. You stop laying eggs. The song dims, you are old before your time. Crouching and huddled you have all but given up. Your heart no longer yearns for something, but you don't know what. 

Someone lifts you from the prison. Desperately you claw at the cage, the only security you have ever known, the only reality you can rely on. The ancient song has now stopped completely, you cannot hear it, and you do not know it anymore. You are yanked roughly from the cage and thrown into a crate. Briefly, just for a second or two, you glimpse the sun, feel the air as you are loaded on a truck. The song begins again, slowly even while you panic. A slight hope is reborn. For what, you don't know. But there is hope and fear and desire and pain. Pain. Your wing hurts; it is broken as you were thrown roughly. Your flesh is bruised. The noise of the truck is unbearable, for sensitive ears designed to hear a worm turn in the ground. You are driven somewhere, but you don't know where. 

Then you are hanging upside down, shackled by your feet, your broken wing is really hurting now. The sharp shiny knife slices your throat and red blood now runs in a stream of pain. You flap your broken wing desperately despite the pain. Then you are removed and the last thing you know is the hell of burning, scalding water as you sink with relief into death.

This was written by Lynley Tulloch in response to an article in the New York Times, titled: "Wishing They All Could Be California Hens", in which it was claimed: "Hens in California are living the good life" and "Hens in most other states don’t have it so good". [http://goo.gl/PjkJN0], due to a Californian ballot measure approved in 2008 which claims to have imposed "more generous living conditions for egg layers in their state". 

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