Sarah’s Diary: Remembering

February 14, 2003

I am born. For 21 days, I was cells splitting until I was embryo and then fetus and then me, really me. Deep down inside, I waited for her voice, a sound I would identify as mother and safe. I listened for my sisters and brothers, straining with tiny, avian ears for their calls. Silence.

Imagine my surprise when I pecked and jabbed – without any maternal assistance, mind you – my way through that self-contained, chick-nourishing egg shell and no one was there! I expected great fanfare, clucking and talking, all sorts of sounds. Cheep!! Cheep!!! CHEEP! Nothing. Abandoned.

February 15, 2003

There are thousands of us here. We are a large army of tiny birds. I imagine there are tens of thousands of us, yellow and fluffy with down, and we are loud! Some of us call for mothers, still ever hopeful. Some of us are calling to each other, asking what it’s like over there in laundry basket #250.

I’m not talking, though. I’m pretty certain those two-legged giants are not good, not mother, not sister, not father, not brother. Foe. Enemy. They are grabbing us up by the hundreds and throwing us onto conveyor belts. This cannot be good.

March 1, 2003

In my time, it’s been awhile. I don’t know about your time. I was right, the two-legged giants are no good. Talking about what happened on that conveyor belt is still hard. I can still feel the blade slicing into my beak, still feel my precious, beautiful, long beak cut, chopped, gone.

And my brothers. Their cries echo in my head. I hope it was quick, really, really quick. I was not sure what that metal device was, why it groaned, why those blades, dull and deadly, circled endlessly. It was for them. My brothers. All gone. Before I could really fathom the horror of it, I found myself dangling next to my sisters, hanging by my beak. It hurt but not as much as that blade.

April 2, 2003

My beak still hurts…well, what is left of it. Eating is hard and some days, well, I just don’t eat, it hurts too much. I want to preen so badly, to wipe cleansing oil from the top of my feather all the way to the bottom, cleaning it, spiffing it up. But the fire in my mouth hasn’t quite subsided.

I want my mom.

April 15, 2003

I thought it could not get worse. I was wrong. I’m in some sort of cage. There are eight of us here. I try talking to the others, but they are quiet.

Above us is another cage and below is another. There must be hundreds of cages, maybe thousands! I’m not sure, I can barely squeeze my head through the bars to see. There are no windows.

The floor hurts. It’s all wire and metal and jabbing pain into my feet. I have shit on my back, courtesy of the birds in the cage above ours.

June 15, 2003

Something has changed. It’s light a lot. But I know it’s not real light. I mean I have never seen the real light, but my mind knows it’s out there. My body, though, it does not know. It adjusts to this light and now I’m laying eggs.

All of us in The Cage are trying to rescue our eggs. I have built a nest out of air for the past, I don’t know how long, and nothing happens. I need a nest and I need to make it perfect for my eggs. I try to make a nest out of my cage-mates, crawling atop them and nestling down. But they will have none of it. They peck and I peck and I so desperately want to be somewhere else.

October 12, 2003

When will it end? The eggs keep coming, nearly every day. I can’t make a nest and I can’t keep my eggs and I don’t want to be making any more – they roll down the cage and off they go. Sometimes I see a two-legged giant walk through the rows of cages but most days it’s just the sound of the other birds and the conveyor belts and the squawks and screams of the dying.

At night…or when the two-legged giants finally shut the lights off, I try to perch. I know it’s what I’m supposed to do, be up, up, up away from bad things. I can’t, though. Nothing in this cage allows for perching.

January 1, 2004

They starve us. I am so hungry. But I’m not producing eggs, which is a blessing in some strange way.

One of my cage-mates hung herself. Not on purpose. She stuck her head through the top bars and never left.

She is still warm.

February 14, 2004

I am a year old. I feel older. The light is back on and stays on longer every day. At least they are feeding us more. I’m laying eggs again but I’ve given up on trying to save them. I don’t even watch them roll away, I pretend it’s not happening.

My cage-mate’s hung body is still there, smack in the middle of the cage…no longer warm. And smelling badly. Sometimes the two-legged giants miss the dead ones, sometimes they rip dessicated bodies from cage wire and leave them on the ground. Mostly they don’t do anything.

Another cage mate has been dust-bathing aimlessly. She fluffs herself up, shakes her body and flips imaginary particles of dirt onto her body. Sometimes, I do the same. It’s a sham. Pointless. But I do it.

What else is there?

May 2, 2004

I can cross the cage in three steps. If I’m really adventurous, one big leap. It’s hard to leap, though. I keep hitting my head on the cage. Plus there’s still the dead one and the others who constantly get in my way. I pecked one and she cried and I felt bad – why can’t she run away? Why can’t I? This isn’t normal. I don’t care, though. I’ve been keeping a good eye on the bird across the way. Well, one of them anyways. I like to change which one each day. I’m trying to send her messages. Maybe if I peck against the bar, she’ll understand.

June 1, 2004

Sanity is slipping away. I have given up on trying to rid myself of all the poop from the birds above us. I don’t dust-bathe or fake it. I don’t try to nest. Or perch. Or even peck at my sisters. I give up.

August 15, 2004

Air! I smell it. Not stale, dank, ammonia-laden air but real air. Something’s going on. I don’t think it’s good. There is a lot of screaming from the other end of the building. I see and hear two-legged giants as they rip birds from cages. As they get closer, I see some grab birds so hard, so roughly that a wing breaks clean off. I back into the cage. I will not watch that. Maybe if I hide behind the dead one, they won’t see or touch me.

There are other two-legged giants approaching from the opposite end. They move slower. They don’t grab birds by the legs or wings. But they move so slowly.

The slow ones are at the front of our cage. They make sounds but I don’t know what they say, it’s all foreign and scary and overwhelming. And then I am in warm hands. I struggle and peck and then give up. My legs hurt, my body hurts, I’ve never exerted them so much.

I am in another cage. It’s spacious and I can reach the back in 15 whole steps – practically a marathon!

They cut off my nails. Oh. This feels nice. They had curled and curled. I was trying to grow them into the cage below me, but I failed. I like short nails. It makes walking all that much easier.

October 1, 2004

There are hundreds of us here. I cannot even tell you how much space I have. It’s too much. I hide and clump with my sisters because the expanse of this enclosure is like an ever-expanding desert. Maybe even a mirage – if I run, will I meet metal wires?

These giants are different. They feed us a lot of different food. They come at night to un-clump us, to help us understand that we can have our own space. It’s a novel concept. A scary one.

February 14, 2005

I am two! And, get this, I have finally mastered the perch! Since I never exercised much my muscles had atrophied. When I first came to this strange place, I would barely run, let alone jump up to a perch. But now I am Queen of the Perch. There are are perches even higher up – my goal is the top!

There are also roosters here. And they are big and handsome (not all of them) and beautiful because they are alive. There’s one who is my brother’s age, the one I never knew. I preen him sometimes and he brings me grapes. I have so many choices, so many options. Sometimes I run across the pasture just because I can. Other times, I stretch out and soak up the rays of the sun – THE SUN! I didn’t know it existed!! It’s a glorious thing, this sun. Warm and bright. I love it. I can dust-bathe now and oh, there are these most amazing nestboxes just for us hens. For awhile, I kept laying an egg on the ground, because that’s all I knew. But now, now I can fluff up and yell at the two-legged giants and peck them too! They don’t even mind. More importantly, I can nest, really nest.

I don’t think I need to keep writing any more. My life is so full. It’s not empty anymore. I’ll remember it all, but from now on, I’m living free.

—

This is Sarah. She turns seven this February 14th. She is one of 2,000 hens we were legally permitted to pull from a small, 160,000 egg-laying hen operation. I know this diary is horribly anthropomorphic. I pulled Sarah out of that cage. For hours, I breathed what they breathed, saw and smelled their world. It was horrifying. I have tried, for years, to fathom what it must have been like for them from birth to grisly death. I can’t. And this mock-diary does not do justice to the millions of hens and millions of male chicks who are used and discarded for eggs. For something we don’t need.

Chickens cannot write. They do not have a human language. But they can talk – they have words that mean something. Those clucks and coos and squeaks are not just sounds. So while I am committing a serious “animal science” taboo, I can’t bring myself to care. Sarah deserves a voice. They all do. There are 450 million hens, mostly in cages, producing 70+ BILLION eggs for Americans. There are 250 million male chicks who are killed the day they are born. It’s wrong, oh so very wrong.

They deserve better.

This February 14th, make Sarah’s birthday a meaningful one – go vegan.