Edith

free pressFree from Harm’s quarterlySummer 2013

edith, the gentle and loving “meat” chicken who was found in a trash bag near a live poultry market in Chicago will be remembered as one of Free from Harm’s most cherished rescues.

WHAT’S INSIDEBeyond Eggs: Why I

Keep Backyard Chickens

Why Care? In a Nutshell

A Tribute to Edith

The Milk of Human Unkindness

Where Our Donor Dollars Go

Dear Readers,

I’m so pleased to be able to bring you Free from Harm’s very first edition of Free Press! Free Press is intended to highlight some of the more noteworthy and popular articles from our website and to provide a snapshot of the diverse content coming in from our growing community of talented writers, journal-ists, photographers and artists.

Since 2009, Free from Harm has been empowering animal advocates and

informing the general public about animals used for food through our largely exclusive online content. We’ve published over 600 pages of articles and fact sheets, as well as video and image galleries. Our hope is that our very first newsletter, Free Press, will help us reach a wider audience at events, festivals, conferences and select dining establishments.

I hope you enjoy Free Press and, as always, thank you so much for your ongoing support and interest!

Sincerely,

Robert Grillo.

99% of our harm to animals is attributable to our food choices. The attitude that regards animals as simply resources is part of the same worldview that sees our environment, and even certain groups of peo-ple, as resources to be exploited. Every day we have the opportunity to live our values through our food choices. If we value kindness over violence, if we value being compassionate over causing unnecessary harm, then veganism is the only consistent expression of our values. The easiest and most effective action we can take to relieve animal suffering doesn’t require us to vote on legislation, attend protests or even write letters to the editor. We can simply vote with our forks.

The choice to leave animals off our plates has other enormous advantages:

Our health. In 2009, the American Dietetic As-sociation — the oldest and largest organization of nutrition professionals on the planet — published the findings from their 10 year meta-analysis of diet and disease, in which they concluded that a vegan diet is appropriate for people during all

stages of life, including infancy and pregnancy. At the same time, the consumption of meat, dairy and eggs is consistently linked to the leading causes of death in the U.S. and globally, with more diet-related diseases than communicable now killing humans worldwide. The fact is, we can get all of our essential nutrients from plants and fortified plant foods. And if we can live healthy lives without harming anyone, why wouldn’t we?

The environment. Animal agriculture is the single greatest human-caused source of greenhouse gases, land use, and land degradation; the number one source of freshwater pollution, and the leading driver of rainforest destruction. It is also a major cause of air

pollution, habitat loss and species extinction, and is a highly ineffi-cient use of limited natural resources. The United Nations has called for a global shift to a vegan diet as the most effective way to combat climate change, world hunger, and ecological devastation.

World hunger. Of the planet’s nearly 7 billion hu-mans, roughly 1 billion people are malnourished and 6 million children starve to death every year. Feeding half the world’s grain crop to farmed animals is not only a grossly inefficient use of protein, but requires

far more natural resources than cultivating plant foods for direct human consumption. Dependence on animal farming also imperils impoverished communities where natural resources are already scarce, and communities cannot afford to adequately feed or provide water for their animals.

Nonviolence. Social justice and equality can never be achieved in any society that systematically enslaves, exploits and kills other beings for profit and plea-sure. Violence breeds violence. As Tolstoy famously wrote, “Where there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.” By withdrawing our support from

industries that violently exploit other animals, and by making choices that reflect our belief in compassion and mercy, we restore integrity to our values.

Why Care? In a Nutshell

In may, we rescued a chicken who had been discovered in a trash bag outside of a live poultry market in Chicago. edith was a lovable, angelic, genetically-engineered “meat” bird just weeks old. Like most “broiler” birds, she had already reached adult size, but was still chirping like a baby chick. Some 9 billion birds just like edith are slaughtered as six-week-old babies in the u.S. every year. I’ll never forget edith’s very first contact with the earth. Though she had known nothing but a cage up until that moment, as soon as her feet touched the earth, she knew just what to do and enjoyed the most luxurious dust bath.

Tragically, in late June, edith died of sudden heart failure, a leading cause of death in chickens and a direct result of selective breeding for rapid growth. But in her short life, edith taught us some-thing of great value: that an animal who has known nothing but the worst cruelty at human hands is still willing to trust and care for other humans who show her kindness. When even the most betrayed and mistreated animals are wise enough to see us as individuals, the least that we can do is acknowledge that they are individuals, too.

A Tribute to Edith

A Message from the Director

Summer, 2013

free press

People often ask me why I have chickens. “Is it for the eggs?,” they ask. What this question unwittingly implies is that

there is no other value to chickens than the eggs they produce. In fact, I find people far more interested in the fancy colors and sizes of chicken eggs than about the birds who actually lay them. Isn’t that interesting? And the egg is perhaps the most powerful symbol of fertility in many cultures, including our own. But when it comes to chickens, this symbol has distracted us from something far more important.

My response to the eggs question is, “No, it’s actually the knowledge I’ve gained, and continue to gain, that has become the most valuable part of my experience in raising ad-opted chickens.” “Learning what?,” one might rightfully ask. And I respond by explaining how much I’ve learned from these birds, not just about them, but about myself. In fact, raising adopted chickens has been my pathway to becoming a very different kind of person today than I once was.

Knowledge over Eggs “A different person? In what way?” Living with chickens has forced me to question my most deep-seated assump-tions about animals raised as food commodi-ties, like chickens who represent 99% of those

animals. And I’ve concluded from my intimate, first-hand experiences with them, that their lives are far richer and more complex than I had ever imagined; from their sophisticated capacity for inter-species companionship, to their keen awareness of themselves as indi-viduals, as well as a nuanced understanding of the roles they play within a social group; to their astonishing range of emotional expression and affection; all these things and more I had never perceived or understood.

Most importantly, by finally letting go of the narrow view I inherited from our culture,

and which prevented me from see-ing them for the individuals that they truly are, I was able to become a more empathic and morally consistent human being. I saw how much chickens are like all animals, including the human ones. My mind was freed of the rigid, harmful cate-gories that we impose on animals used for food, freed of the cul-tural conditioning that teaches us to love and protect some animals, and block our concern for others.

Trust and Expectations As with any relation-ship based on mutual trust, I also learned that you don’t receive the gift of getting to know an animal’s true nature without two impor-tant factors: 1. patience (it can take time to establish mutual trust in any relationship) and 2. the removal of any expectations of getting something from them. It’s really no different than with humans relationships, is it?

Yet it’s hard for people to imagine giving back to these birds since our relationship has been based exclusively on taking from them for so long. Many people complained to me how they have been pecked at by their chickens when they have attempted to remove their chickens’ eggs. And they are offended by this. But when we try to see things from the animal’s point of view, pecking makes total sense; we’re taking away something that’s important to her. She perceives her eggs as her potential offspring. Our adopted hen Doris proves this point.

Doris: a Tenacious Desire for Motherhood Lovely Doris, pictured here, is one of FFH’s ad-opted hens. She had major surgery over two year ago to save her life. The surgery consisted of removing her oviduct and a mass of infected egg material that was blocked in her abdomen. One third of her body weight was removed during the surgery which was successful; she will never again be burdened to lay another egg. However, she never lost her desire to be a mother.

Just the other day, I saw Doris turning with her beak the egg just laid by another hen, and lying on this egg for close to an hour. She’s been doing this regularly for well over two years since the surgery. Her actions express an

expectation that the egg contains an embryo and will eventually hatch into a chick, if properly nurtured. Mother hens are known to turn their eggs in precise positions 30 times every day to ensure

the healthy birth of a chick.Breaking the Family Bond Today, despite the profound mater-nal yearning many of them experi-ence, egg-laying hens like Doris never get to raise

a family. They lay infertile eggs —

eggs from which the life potential has been genetically deleted. Chicks raised for egg-laying come from the fertile eggs of “breeding birds” exploited specifically for that purpose, and are hatched in artificial incubators. As a result, chickens are deprived of the very thing that comes most naturally to them: mother-hood. Hens have been mothers for at least as long as the earliest known fossils of ancestral chickens; fossils that date to some 50 million years ago! Our domestication of these birds, beginning around 7,000 years ago, is a mere drop in evolutionary time when compared to how long they freely roamed the natural world, free of human interference.

The Ultimate Reward While some see keep-ing backyard chickens as an opportunity for fresh eggs and a more self-reliant food source, I see it as an opportunity to give back to a spe-cies whose identity we have all but destroyed, whose most basic interests and desires we’ve relentlessly denied, and whose bodies we have manipulated into egg-laying machines. I see the experience of rehabilitating chickens not as an occasion for more “humane” or “sus-tainable” ways to continue exploiting them, but as a chance to try to heal the wounds we have needlessly inflicted on these birds over time. It’s a shift, to be sure, away from the spirit of taking and toward the spirit of giving. And the ultimate reward comes in the form of a deep companionship, and a respect and ap-preciation for these birds that can only be won when we let go of our fixation with their eggs.

If you want to keep chickens, please adopt! Shelters and school chick-hatching programs are often looking for people to adopt chickens that need homes. Call your local shelter, sanc-tuary or school.

BY ROBERTGRILLO

Beyond Eggs Why I Keep Backyard Chickens

Free from Harm’s quarterly

Doris. photo: Robert Grillo

Free Press is a quarterly publication of Free from Harm. Please send all feedback to info@freefromharm.org. Find us online at http://freefromharm.org and subscribe to our site of over 600 articles, video and photo galleries.

Free from Harm’s mission is to transform soci-ety’s attitudes about violence and oppression by leveraging the most powerful advocacy tool we have: our forks.

We betray the kindness of children ev-ery time we give them dairy products. We betray their huge, gentle hearts,

and their love and compassion for all animals. If children had any idea that baby cows are forcibly taken from their mothers; if they ever saw a cow calling frantically for her baby; if they ever saw a calf crying in a veal crate, or curling into a lonely ball to warm himself; they would be devastated. They would never choose to cause such harm to animals.

Perhaps you didn’t know that prof-itable dairy production depends upon forcing cows to become pregnant, then taking away the babies for whom the milk is intended. Or that millions of young dairy cows are slaughtered every year and turned into ground beef when their milk production declines; or that veal is a byproduct of the dairy industry. And maybe you didn’t know that it is unnatural and unnecessary

to drink the breast milk of another species, because you were taught otherwise. All dairy production depends upon exploiting the reproduc-tive processes and mothering of other animals.

The answer is not: “I know this small farm where they let the calf stay with its mother.” On the rare occasion that mothers and calves are permitted to stay together a bit longer, those calves, if they are male, are still killed for veal in a few weeks, or beef in a few months. Their young

mothers are still slaughtered at only a fraction of their natural lifespan, as are their sisters, when their milk output slows.

And all dairy cows are sexually vio-lated, their reproductive systems constantly exploited in order for humans to take their milk. Would it be acceptable to restrain and forcibly inseminate women year after year, and hook their breasts up to machines to steal their milk, as long as we let them keep their babies for a few weeks? We have no biological or nutritional need for meat or dairy products. We exploit these animals for profit and pleasure. And it is wrong to harm or kill animals for pleasure.

Please don’t make choices for your chil-dren that betray their compassion, and the lives of animals we have no need to harm.

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“The very saddest sound in all my memory was burned into my awareness at age five on my uncle’s dairy farm in Wisconsin. A cow had given birth to a beautiful male calf.… On the second day after birth, my uncle took the calf from the mother and placed him in the veal pen in the barn — only ten yards away, in plain view of his mother. The mother cow could see her infant, smell him, hear him, but could not touch him, comfort him, or nurse him. The heartrending bellows that she poured forth — minute after minute, hour after hour, for five long days — were excruciating to listen to. They are the most poignant and painful auditory memories I carry in my brain.”

— Michael Klaper, M.D.

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The Milk of Human Unkindness

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