This weekend in Vancouver, Canada, Taylor Swift will take the stage and receive the adoring gaze of 160,000 ticket holders each willing to pay a half month’s rent to be in her presence. Very Pope-like. Being an empathetic soul, I wondered what it would be like to be standing there on stage being devoured by those who love you. Then I realized, I HAD been such a recipient of unquestioned love from a large audience. It happened in Central America while I was working alongside the Peace Corps volunteers where I was the “Chicken wrangler” for a large food security project. I would manage the shavings, water, food, cleaning and yes, ultimately the butchering, of about 900 hens. All hens. I was the only XY chromosome in the barn and occasionally, I was literally- hen-pecked but largely, I strutted around like the king of my domain. The hens did not really respect me though; to them I was mostly an extension of their true love- the food hopper.
An open-raised meat chicken’s life is a good and carefree one with abundant food, water, scratch, protection, heat, cooling and companionship, however, it is short. We got the gals up to maturity, barely, then it was heads off at the tender age of 12-weeks. Basically they were in the hormonal throes of puberty when life ran out. For efficiency reasons one doesn’t want to convert chicken feed to ovaries, fat and heaven forbid, egg laying in a meat chicken. We were teaching the very poor rural people how to improve their protein intake in ways that were affordable.
