Lucky Lily

by Roberta Spivek

These are trying times for animal lovers. In Britain, two million healthy sheep and cows have been slaughtered rather than vaccinated in the hoof-and-mouth scare, to protect not human health but British meat and milk exports. In Lancaster County, "mad-cow" fears have fueled European demand for cheval, dooming many of the 200 horses sold at New Holland's weekly "killer sales" to the slaughterhouse. Increasingly, globalization is claiming its animal victims.

And then there's the chicken I found in Washington Square.

My friend Sue and I were crossing the square, on our way to La Cigale cafe for lunch. Sue spotted it first, a ball of fluff in a tree. We're city girls; what do we know from a chicken? But there it was, about two weeks old, freezing to death. A school hatching project that got away? An Easter present some parent got sick of?

We hurried on, but my heart was on the tree branch. My first basic human instinct was to get someone else to take charge. I live with two cats; what would I do with a chicken? I told the waitress, who told the chef, who brought the chick inside in a box. The three of us worked the phones, but no friend or nature center wanted a domestic fowl. It was closing time. I brought the chick home.

And then began a chain of events that reaffirmed my faith in something, maybe a kind of balm for the world's pain. My upstairs neighbor, a doctor, offered the chick her apartment. We fixed it up in a cat carrier, over a heating pad, and fed it ground-up birdseed in a tiny Limoges dish.

For five days, the chick ate, drank, hopped around and cheeped like mad. It preened its soft feathers under our hands and flew to our knees, then our shoulders. Meanwhile, cyberspace was abuzz. Strangers e-mailed friends with farms. Mobilization for Animals' Jenny Reimenschneider, who'd raised hundreds of rescued chicks in her basement and found them all homes, offered phone numbers and advice. People told me chicken stories. A woman's pet chicken walked behind her on a string. An injured rooster slept in Jenny's lap.

Finally, Larry Robin of Robin's Books, who'd once kept a rescued gosling in his bedroom, found a home with family members near Kutztown. The family's teenaged daughter named the chick Lily and took it under her wing. By day Lily hangs out in the kitchen, until pecking order issues are worked out in the yard. By night she sleeps, safe from predators, with the other chickens in the basement. Lily likes to perch on the family's dog. Her first dustbath, an insect-prevention routine, elicited a noise like a purr. The family keeps their small flock for eggs and as pets, and promises to keep her even if Lily turns out to be Louis.

Most chickens are not so blessed. While chickens are foraging animals who live in small flocks, most of the 7 billion chickens and turkeys eaten annually in the United States are crammed into sheds with 10,000 to 50,000 other birds, on floors so full of droppings some birds are blinded by ammonia. Broiler hens and turkeys are fed to become so obese, their skeletons can collapse.

"The modern egg-laying hen lives jammed inside a little wire battery cage with three to eight other tormented hens amid stacks of cages in filthy sheds holding 50,000 to 125,000 debeaked, terrified, bewildered birds," says Karen Davis of United Poultry Concerns (www.upc-online.org), who runs a poultry sanctuary in Virginia. "Free-range" eggs may come from birds confined in a shed, or with access only to a mud yard infested with parasites. "Free-range" or caged, chicks are usually debeaked, causing permanent pain. Despite the tons of antibiotics in chicken and cattle feed, drug-resistant bacteria may be passed on to consumers searching for "healthy" alternatives to red meat.

A hundred years from now, if our planet survives, I believe people will look back on those of us alive today to measure what kind of people we were.

While our nation is mesmerized by Survivor, the icecaps are melting, 25 million Africans are dying of AIDS and eight billion animals — sentient beings all — are tortured and slaughtered in factory farms every year.

"Our acceptance of the moral significance of animal interests would imply a profound change in the human condition," writes Gary Francione in his Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? "We would finally have to confront our moral schizophrenia about animals, which leads us to love some animals ... and never once doubt their sentience, emotional capacity, self-awareness or personhood, while ... we stick dinner forks into other animals who are indistinguishable in any relevant sense from our animal companions."

While we may feel superior to French or Belgian consumers who eat our old carriage horses for dinner, we think nothing of feasting on a chicken that has been dumped alive into a scalding tank after having its throat slit. Not everyone can find a baby chick to resensitize herself or himself to animal suffering, but we can all become conscious of the moral choice we make every time we buy a carton of eggs, or order chicken wings in a restaurant.

Roberta Spivek co-founded the Carriage Horse Action Alliance, which helped change Philadelphia carriage horse ordinance last year. If you would like to respond to this Slant or have one of your own (650 words), contact Howard Altman, City Paper news editor, 123 Chestnut St., Phila., PA 19106 or e-mail altman@citypaper.net.