The life of a chicken, if you were the chicken

Hello.

Today, you will learn about the life of a standard chicken, if you were the chicken.

This is what you would go through, if you were a chicken in an enriched cage, or a battery cage. There really is no big difference, appart from a few centimetres. Which is not big. There is no big difference.

So, if you eat eggs, please, imagine this:

You are in a cage. One of your cage mates has been slowly dying, and is dead now.

You are slowly dying too, and slowly going insane, from the constant boredom, lack of stimulation, nothing to do. From the constant non-stop clucking of other chickens, just like you, sounding more like a roar, than any type of cluck at all,

You are covered in burns, inside and out, from the amonia. You have picked all your feathers out, your body is bare and full of cuts when it should be full of thick, lush, beautiful feathers.

Well, at least you have a tiny bit more space to move around, now that your one of your cage partners has died. But you and the other chickens in the cage pluck on her, eat her, cannibalize her.

You pluck yourself to, due to the lack of stimulation, terrible conditions, boredom, from the burns and the cuts, the constant roaring sound of what is meant to be gentle, calm clucks of happy chickens, but terrified, bored, suffering, loud, horror clucks.

You have never lifted your wings in your whole life, and you never will get to. Unless perhaps, in your last few moments. Just as if you, in your human form, never got to move your arms, but they are completely mobile.

So many others of your kind around you have disabilities, deformities from the constant selective breeding, and terrible conditions you all live in, and have lived in for years. So many are dead.

You lay your special, individual, potential children every day, but you never get to see any of them.

They are doomed to have a miserable life, and never even get to see you, not even for two seconds.

If your child is female, she has the same miserable, sad, lonely but filled with others like you, life.

If your child is male, well he will go through absolute misery, but just for not as long as you, and not in the same way as you.

He is to be killed in a gas chamber, being burned on the inside and out, or he is to be blended alive, in a grinder, called ''the macerator''. ''The Macerator'' sounds like the name of a movie with really evil people in it, or a nickname for a serial killer.

But no. It is standard practice, it is what you are defending, paying for, and it is what you want to continue happening. It is what normal individuals pay for. Being blended alive.

Or your potential children, your potential special, individual children, are sent to be sold as eggs, in some store, or restaurant, or food facility.

So anyway, after a few years, your day comes. This is your special day.

This is the first day in your whole entire life, where you will ever get to see the sun, the sun you were meant to spend your whole life under, the first time you will ever get to see grass, the grass which you were meant to spend your whole life roaming over, the first time you will ever get to breathe in fresh air, fresh air that you were meant to be breathing your whole life, or...

Mabye not. Mabye you will never even get to see any of that. You might be in the middle of others like you, just like you, so squished you can't even see out of the thin openings in the metal bars that separate you and the outside. You might never even get to breathe in and smell the fresh air, because the air might be so stuffy where you are from being squished from other around you.

But before that, you are violently taken by humans, and put into crates. Many others like you around you break their wings, or other body parts, in the process, because it is so violent. You are then tucked onto a truck, a horrible, horrific truck.

But all this misery is soon to be over.

Because right now, you are headed to the slaughterhouse.

When you arrive at the slaughterhouse, you are picked up, violently, violently, and you are placed on shackles, like a criminal, and hung upside down. You break your legs in the process. You can barely hear your own screams, it's so loud. You can barely hear the humans shouting at each other in an attempt to communicate, it's so loud.

You are utterly terrified. This may be the most terrified you've ever been. But it may not.

You see blood all around you, and all of a sudden your head is dunked in water, and you feel a shock, and electric shock, go all through your body. Imagine that, an electric shock, going all through your body.

But this shock, this terrible shock, is not to render you unconscious, no no.

It is simply to paralyze you.

To paralyze you so it's easier to cut your throat.

You see others all around you, others who missed the electrocution, others who are still flapping their wings while bleeding out, others going to the backup cutter, a person who cuts the chickens who didn't get cut in the first attempt to kill them, all of this in a roar so loud you can't even hear what is meant to be your own, gentle, cluck, but what is a loud, horrified cluck, mixed in with the scent of blood, and hundreds or thousands of other terrified horrified fighting for their life clucks and chickens, and slaughterhouse workers screaming to simply communicate with each other, because it is so loud.

All of a sudden, you feel a blade touch your throat. You feel the biggest cut you've ever felt, bigger, and redder, than all those ammonia burns, bigger and redder than you bare skin exposed because all your feathers were plucked out...

The pain is like nothing you've ever felt before, but mabye it is like nothing compared to everything you've lived through in your life, or mabye it's no different, you've been in pain all your life.

The last things you see are blood, others like you, who lived with you, dying, being electrocuted, flapping their wings in terror, the last thing you smell is the pungant smell of blood, of death, of cruelty, and the last thing you hear is like a roar, a constant, ever lasting, never ending roar, of others, just like yourself, fighting for their lives. You make your last small contribution to this roar.

Then you slowly feel blood gushing out of your throat, you start to close your eyes. You start to feel hazy, to lose consciousness, the constant sound of the roar is slowly fading away, or becoming even more apparent, and louder. It's the same thing for the smell of blood, of death, of cruelty. It's the same thing for this horrific sight you're seeing.

You stay like that for a few seconds, or a few minutes,

Then, a few moments later, you are, finally, in peace, for the first time in your life.

You are dead. You are killed.

The human race have successfully completed their mission to destroy you.

To sell your body for some cheap meat in some store, or some fast food place or restaurant, and your eggs in some place too.

But you might not even be in peace yet.

There might be someone, eating your body parts, or your eggs, screaming at a vegan activist outside of a fast food place because the vegan is against it. Like that. More screaming. More shouting.

You are then emptied out into a toilet bowl, then a sewer, treated like waste, like garbage.

The end.

So, do you still want to eat eggs now?

Up next: The life of a ''free range'' chicken, as if you were the Chicken.