Kali, one of the Georgia girls, died. It was so fast. She seemed fine on Thursday. But Friday morning at breakfast something was clearly wrong. She didn’t want to eat and seemed a bit stunned. I brought her inside and put her in a kennel. About an hour later maybe she layed a normal looking egg. I was grateful and thought she would be ok. I scheduled an appointment to have her implanted at the first available vet appointment and hoped she’d be ok over the following couple days before we could get in. But over the next couple hours she seemed to be crashing. I gave her anti -inflammatories and antibiotics, and the vet told me to bring her in the following morning. I left her in her kennel to rest while I cleaned coops. When I went to check on her maybe an hour later, she was gone. She had prolapsed sometime in between when I checked her last and when I found her dead. I hate that word. Dead. I hate to say it. I’m still in shock really. I will send her body to the state lab on Monday for necropsy but I’m certain it was an egg that killed her.
And no, that’s not natural. Nothing about Kali’s body was natural. Humans have manipulated the bodies of chickens for so long in so many ways, and we like to tell ourselves these absolute fictions about nature…. But nothing about the modern chicken or egg laying is natural anymore.
Sweet sweet Kali-ma. She was still so young, not yet three. I felt like her life was still just beginning. I wanted her to have so many more happy days. And then I find myself doing what I always do when any of these very special Cornish Cross babies die, I evaluate their life by reference to a standard that shouldn’t even exist, the way that most of them live and die. 70 billion chickens just like Kali are slaughtered every year globally, 9 billion in the US alone. They’re killed at 6 to 8 weeks old, never even given any chance at life at all, let alone a good life. In their short time on earth, all they know is the stench of the putrid, dark shed where they spend their entire lives except for the terrifying and brutal trip to slaughter and slaughter itself.
Kali was one of the Georgia tornado survivors. When she first got here she was encrusted in the filth that she had been living in for a week before rescuers got to her. She had lacerations all over her body. And she was sassy. She’s named after the fierce Hindu goddess Kali who she reminded me of when she first got here. But within weeks, she softened, and over the past two years she’s just been the sweetest little girl. She got along with all of her sisters. She was slower than them though. There was a long time when they slept in one coop and then they spent their days in a separate yard. I walked them back and forth morning and night. The walk in between the coops was always a race, and Kali was always the last. Sometimes she got a little lost on the way. And she was more shy than her sisters. I believe she did have a happy life these last couple of years here, and I’m grateful she had that opportunity, grateful she didn’t die the brutal death that the vast majority of her kind do, grateful she had an opportunity to be loved, to dust bathe and sunbathe and peck at the ground looking for tiny insects, to have cheek rubs and blueberries.
It makes no sense that people who consider themselves animal lovers support the absolute torture of innocent sweet baby animals. It makes no sense that we as a society has concluded that dogs and cats deserve to be treated humanely but equally sentient animals like Kali don’t.
Despite having escaped the factory farm, animal agriculture killed her. It was built into her body. Kali had a second chance and was living a beautiful life, but the violence was bred into her body itself, manipulated by humans to have more meat on their bodies for us to eat, to lay more eggs for us to eat.
My heart aches, but I know there is no time to stop and mourn. The only way to honor Kali is to get back to work doing all we can do to end the brutal system that killed her, that is killing right now, the most violent, profane, and purely evil industry on earth. I’m so sorry Kali. #endanimalagriculture
