slamming live chickens into walls. He also saw workers plucking them
(again while alive) to ‘‘make it snow,’’ squeezing them to shower feces on
other chickens, suffocating them with latex gloves placed over their heads,
and tearing off heads in order to write graffiti on walls with blood. There
was more—the spy said he witnessed ‘‘hundreds’’ of acts of cruelty—but
enough! Allowing for the grim and onerous working conditions and poor
pay of slaughterhouse workers, everyone from the investigator himself to
, reporters, and the general public wanted to know why. The spy simply
declared that drop-kicking and slamming were for fun; the rest was done
‘‘to alleviate boredom or vent frustrations.’’^20
If one wonders whether social classes a few rungs above the bloodied
slaughterhouse proletariat display more sympathy with animals that are to
be consumed, I suspect the answer is negative. A demonstration presented
itself on May , when I happened to catch a segment of a cable
Food Channel program on a little Texas town’s celebration of the local tur-
key industry. The festival’s highlight, apparently, was a contest called ‘‘Bowl-
ing with Turkeys.’’ I stared in astonishment as succulent white people,
men and women, tossed and rolled frozen, shrink-wrapped turkeys, out-
doors, down an alley of artificial turf carpet toward bowling pins. With every
minor knockdown, the competitors jumped, squealed, and high-fived one
another. Pathetic. No sympathy, no respect.
, arguably a southern, if only marginally so, radical animal rights
organization, would abolish such obscenities. English-born Ingrid Newkirk
foundedmore than two decades ago in suburban Maryland. She has
provoked outrage on several continents with her guerrilla warfare on fur
and leather clothing—once managed to serve a dead raccoon to the
editor ofVogueat the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan—as well as on
cosmetic and medical researchers who experiment on animals, and on the
meat industries. In Newkirk had enough contributions to buy a steel-
and-glass building by the Elizabeth River in Norfolk, Virginia, and
persists onward in battle.
Meanwhile, the industrialized chicken has also signified one more hor-
ror for the landscape. That is the fouling of water. Once upon a time, ani-
mals were assumed essential to conservationist agriculture. Before that,
shifting culture in places with a low population may have repaired farm-
ing’s degradation by the long fallow, or simple neglect. But when farmers
began to stay in one place and tried to make crop fields permanent, appli-
cations of animal manure were central to maintenance. Exogenous com-
mercial fertilizers—especially guano in the mid-nineteenth century—cer-