#stop normalizing exploitation

[oca-rinn-a]

Unfortunately just discovered a bird slaughtering facility in my neighborhood.

I was on a walk and, as a person who loves birds, was excited to hear bird sounds very close. It sounded vaguely gull-ish, so I looked up, but within a split second realized with horror that three feet in front of me on the sidewalk sat about ten crates cruelly overstuffed with live birds. Turkeys, chickens, and ducks. They couldn't move in the crates.

The turkeys had no room for any position other than laying. The crate squashing them down and together, it was the turkeys I heard, as they reacted to someone approaching. Black eyes of young turkeys, wondering what was next for them. Think of them, please, when you see their carcasses labeled with kind words in a grocery store this Thanksgiving season. Nothing kind happens to them. At no point in their life do they get to have quality time with any friends or family. It's the cruelest marketing there is.

Their crate was stacked atop two more crates stuffed with chickens. As small as the chickens were in comparison to the turkeys, there were so many packed in together that they could not turn around, and the crate was so shallow that their leg joint could only reach a maximum angle of 30 degrees. They were restless, and they were the majority. The other three stacks of crates were almost all chickens, the one exception being a crate of ducks.

The ducks were the liveliest. They seemed angriest, their crate second from the top of the stack, sandwiched between two crates of chickens. The ducks' long necks were forced into a dipped position. They communicated and tried their best to find egress. They don't want to be here, and they have never had a say in what happens to them. They want water and grass and there's only plastic and concrete and their own excrement.

A chicken in a crate in the middle of the stack relieves themselves, the excrement splashing forcefully onto the chickens in crates beside and below.

None of these birds can move. They have no options. There is no room, they are in literal cages. I don't know when they were delivered to the door of the slaughterhouse, and I don't know how much longer they will have to suffer there, smashed and aching and covered in shit. Impossibly confused about their situation.

I honestly hope, for their sakes, that they're dead by now. For their sakes and for my own peace, I hope they're dead, and I hope you think about them.