Chicken Dinner

A domestic chicken (Gallus Gallus Domesticus), if unmolested, might live to an age of eight to ten years.

I use the term “unmolested” because I find the term lurid, maybe jarring.

Consider, the chicken you ate in your last serving of chicken tenders likely lived for only seven to twelve weeks.  Maybe some growth hormones, antibiotics, and unnamed chemicals were involved.  Likely, the chicken you ate never had the simple opportunity to outrun its own shadow, or even feel the strike of a single raindrop.

A few years ago, I watched a documentary about how chickens were raised “commercially.”  Chickens raised in huge metal buildings.  Assembly line chickens.  Chickens that lived a caged, processed, thankless life and were slaughtered before reaching maturity.

The documentary so disgusted me, I stopped eating chicken for nearly four years.

I started eating chicken again when I was able to find so called “free range” or “organically raised” chickens.

I know the term “organically grown” might verge on phony at times.  Perhaps purchasing a bag of organically grown carrots is little more than a feel good gestures to ourselves.  Most importantly, I have done math on broiler chickens to the end—I get it—we are ultimately raising birds for the sole purpose of killing and eating them.  But the middle of this process does not need to be unnatural or cruel or even stifling.

We don’t need to molest chickens on the road to our freezers.

We can do better.

We need to be like the grateful hunter.  Our quarry needs to be respected at all times and thanked in the end.

—Mitchell Hegman