Podcast Transcript
Hope
Welcome to Episode 10 of the Hope for the Animals Podcast, sponsored by United Poultry Concerns. I’m your host, Hope Bohanec. You can find all our past episodes at Hope for the Animals podcast.org, and I welcome your feedback and comments.
On today’s podcast we have with us on the show, fearless chicken advocate and rooster rescuer extraordinaire, Justin Van Kleeck from Triangle Chicken Advocates. We’re going to get into Justin’s interview soon because we had so much to cover. But first I want to announce a very exciting upcoming event, UPCs chicken webinar. This is the first ever webinar dedicated to chickens. It’s going to be really a historic day. It’s on Saturday, September 12, 2020. If you plan to listen to this podcast after that date, the videos of each of the speakers will be available for viewing soon after, on UPC’s website, which is UPC-online.org. The videos will also be available where you can register on the Humane Hoax website, humane hoax.org. Justin Van Kleeck and I are the organizers of the webinar and we will be your hosts for that day. It is part of our Humane Hoax Project, which started with the Humane Hoax online summit in January 2019. We had another in 2020, just before the COVID craziness hit, so this will be our third webinar under this collaborative effort of the Humane Hoax Project. This time we will focus on chickens.
We have some amazing speakers joining us on September 12 for the chicken webinar. UPC’s founder and president, Karen Davis, will start us off with her presentation called “Humane Eggs and Happy Wings, the Life and Death of Chickens Farmed for Food.” Karen has decades of well researched and intimate up close knowledge of the chicken meat and egg industry, and she will share information about not only about conventional chicken farming but also about the humane hoax of cage free and free range and other humane labeled eggs and meat. The industry is brandishing these labels to make people feel better about chicken eggs and meat because activists like Karen Davis and organizations like United Poultry Concerns have exposed the industry for the horror show that it is over the last few decades. The industry, instead of actually making changes that are better for the birds, responds by shifting their rhetoric and messaging to feel-good labels, and that is the humane hoax.
Another aspect of the humane hoax is the new fad of keeping backyard chickens for eggs and for meat. Our next speaker at the chicken webinar as well as being the co-organizer is Justin Van Kleeck, who will address this with their presentation, the terrible truths of backyard chickens. Some people who have the land and money and resources recognize the problems with industrial farming or just want to try and save money. So, they’ll get into do-it-yourself backyard chicken keeping. But there are hidden horrors that happen in these backyards, not only for hens but for the countless roosters, who are unwanted because they don’t lay eggs and end up dumped on the side of roads and in the overwhelmed shelter system and, and of course on the chopping block. Justin will share their experience rescuing birds from these backyard situations, at the webinar and later in the podcast. But keeping chickens as companions can be ethical and rewarding, a rewarding relationship, if they are treated with respect and they are your friends, not just a commodity for eggs.
Our third speaker at the chicken webinar will be Mary Britton Klaus of Chicken Run Rescue. She will share the best practices for caring for companion chickens. She has been rescuing and caring for chickens for decades. Even if you don’t have chickens, it’s an interesting discussion and this may inspire you to rescue some hens or roosters. There are so many who need homes. Or, you can help with rescues and sanctuaries, or help with transport and other support. It’s great to know chickens.
Next up at the chicken webinar we will have Nora Constance Marino. She is with the Alliance to End Chickens as Kapporos. UPC is part of that Alliance. She is an attorney who has been working on the issue of Kapporos for a number of years. Kapporos is a ritual performed by a small segment of the Orthodox Jewish community where they cordon off a section of a street in a city like New York. There, to hundreds of chickens, they swing them around their head or around the heads of children. Then they give them to a butcher that’s onsite, who slits the birds’ throats and kills them right there. This all happens in September for Yom Kippur, a prominent Jewish holiday. They believe that the chicken absorbs and absolves their sins for the year that their sins are transferred to the chicken. But there are many Jewish people who disapprove this ritual and see it for the cruel practice that it is. Many Jews use money in a bag to swing, instead of a chicken, and then donate the money to charity to absolve their sins. There are cruelty-free options for this ritual. Nora has filed lawsuits trying to end this slaughter in the streets, and she will tell us all about those efforts at the chicken webinar.
We will wrap up the day with a panel of young activists on the frontlines of the movement. Our panel is called “Taking Action for Chickens, Inspiring Activists on the Front Line.” It features Rocky Schwartz, Mahika Gupta, and Julia Magnus. Each of these activists has a unique way of bringing the message of compassion for chickens to the public. We will get to hear all about their efforts and ask questions.
In addition to UPC, the chicken webinar is sponsored by Triangle Chicken Advocates. Other co-sponsors are Free From Harm, the Micro-sanctuary Resource Center and Compassionate Living. I hope you’ll join us for this historic first ever chicken webinar on September 12. It’s free and again, if you’re listening to this podcast, after that date, the videos will be available on UPC’s website, as well as humanehoax.org. So, please register for this free event at www.humanehoax.org, and I’ll put that link in the show notes. We’ll see you at the webinar.
Hope:
I want to introduce our guest for this podcast. Justin Van Kleeck has a PhD in English, and is a freelance writer, educator, and community organizer. Justin goes by the pronouns they/them. Justin spends most of their time working at the Triangle Chicken Advocate Sanctuary, which they and their partner, Roz, founded in 2014, and which inspired them to start the Microsanctuary Movement together later that year. Justin also founded and contributes to the radical vegan blog, Striving with Systems, and we of course, are co-organizing and will be co-hosting the Humane Hoax Chicken webinar that I talked about earlier. Hi Justin, great to have you.
Justin:
Hi Hope.
Hope:
I know you’re over in North Carolina and I’m in California, so we are coast to coast for this one. So I want to hear about you. When and why did you go vegan? What got you into activism and rescue work? What’s Justin’s story?
Justin:
I went vegan in 1999 when I was a sophomore in college. I went to Virginia Tech so I was in southwestern Virginia in a pretty rural area. That meant going vegan was kind of a process of finding like brown soy milk and stuff like that. It was a long time ago.
Hope:
Brown soy milk? What’s brown soy milk?
Justin:
For some reason, back in the day like the soy milk that we had in packages and containers like that was kind of a brownish color instead of the lovely white that it is now.
Hope:
I kind of I know what you’re talking about. I kind of remember that. It looked kind of like dirty milk.
Justin:
It was pretty scary looking. So, back when I was a sophomore in college, I’d always had a real affinity for animals. I even tinkered with being vegetarian when I was in middle school. Then I went vegetarian for real in high school, but the process of going vegan was really a matter of just me starting to reflect more and more on kind of like my impact on the world. When I thought about that, one of the first things that came up, of course, was how my choices were impacting non-human animals. I spent, kind a few days in a real philosophical funk, thinking about this question. I just kind of finally realized that I wasn’t comfortable with even the possibility of causing suffering to animals. So, being vegetarian was no longer enough because I knew that if I was consuming animal products that there was a likelihood that somewhere along the line, I was going to be causing harm and suffering to animals.
I didn’t even really know all the details about the dairy industry and the egg industry at that point. I didn’t really know anything about health or climate change. It was just a fundamental question of am I comfortable making choices that could potentially have direct negative impacts on non-human animals? After thinking about it really intensely for a few days, the answer I came up with was no, and then I was vegan, and I never looked back.
For a long time I was an introvert and a hermit. My veganism was very much a personal thing. I did not jump right into activism and advocacy and things like that. I pretty much just was kind of a quiet, just going to school or and getting my degrees. For a good decade or so I was also actually really the only vegan that I knew. It was largely a consequence of geographical location; I was in southwestern and central Virginia for those times and so, I didn’t meet any other vegans. For a long time my veganism was focused on just learning more and starting to understand more the bigger picture. I wasn’t really doing any advocacy or activism or things like that.
Then when I started transitioning into kind of being more active, I was living in western Virginia and I organized a screening of “Forks Over Knives,” and it was pretty amazing. It actually turned up being a big event and in the small town in western Virginia, we had almost 100 people come out to the screening. It showed me the impact that you can have if you try to work in the community to do organizing and get the information out.
It was the beginning of me starting to branch out from being a quiet, personal vegan, an introverted hermit living in alone in my house to do community organizing. So as far as the rescue work and the connection of veganism to rescue, that really got started when I met my partner Roz. Roz had been doing cat and dog rescue for a number of years before we met. Unlike a lot of partners who begrudgingly deal with their partner doing cat and dog rescue, I very quickly got into being a participant and actively involved in it.
I think for me one of the key moments was when we are rescued a 16-year-old husky with dementia and who was mostly blind and mostly deaf. She had been dumped at a shelter, and we adopted her. We knew it was a hospice situation going into it. For me, I hadn’t really had to deal with death very much before that. I had been living alone with plants and you know plants die but it doesn’t really seem to shake your world up too much. So we knew going into it that it was going to be a hospice situation that she wasn’t going to be around for very long. You know, she was with us for a little bit over, almost two years actually, and then that last like six months or so like she was in a wheelchair. She had condition that’s common for people with dementia called “sundowning” where she would be asleep during the day and then want to be up all night. Because she had mobility and dementia problems she couldn’t be unattended. I ended up staying up with her a lot of nights to care for her and watch over her.
When she finally did pass it was devastating. It was my first experience with losing someone who was that close to me. But it also showed me that the fears that I had had about caregiving and the fears that I’d had about having responsibility for the wellbeing of others, was something that I can handle both physically and practically but also emotionally.
Caring for her was the big moment for me where it started to make sense what the value was of doing rescue and caregiving. It showed me the impact of having compassion and wanting to give respect and dignity to non-human animals on an individual basis. What that means, both for them but also for you.
A couple of years later, we moved from Virginia down to North Carolina and bought a property with more acreage in the woods. We were continuing to be involved in cat and dog rescue work. Then we started to notice that there were also farmed animals showing up in shelters. So, when we saw that, that’s when we start to wonder who was helping them? That’s really where things took off for the both of us, and for me especially, when it comes to making veganism, not only about my choices and what I put into my body but also seeing veganism in the context of the rights and liberation of other beings.
Hope:
There was a really sweet story about the husky. It made me think that there is often that question of plants feeling pain. A great response is, how is it different when your house plant dies, or when your pet dies when your dog or cat dies? That’s a really telling distinction there between the two. I do want to hear more about your rescue work. Now you moved to North Carolina and you started Triangle Chicken Advocate Sanctuary. Where are you located in North Carolina? What do you do? How many animals do you have? Tell us about your sanctuary work.
Justin:
We’re in the central area of North Carolina. For people who are interested in geography, we’re just outside of Chapel Hill, which is in the central triangle region of North Carolina.
Hope:
And that’s where the name comes from, correct?
Justin:
Yes, exactly. No, we don’t we don’t just like geometric shapes. It’s based on the fact that we’re located in the triangle in North Carolina. So, the triangle aspect of our name really emphasizes our focus, which is to help local animals who come into shelters or are being dumped in the woods. We don’t try to participate in huge rescues of animals who were in industrial scale farms where they have, you know, tens of thousands of animals. Those opportunities are pretty few and far between.
But we constantly saw farmed animals coming into local shelters and there really wasn’t anybody who was focusing on helping them. That’s really where we got started with Triangle Chicken Advocates, when we saw farmed animals in local shelters and so we wanting to try to step up and do something to help them.
The way that we got into chickens was as follows: Originally what we had done in the past was , would be to see an animal in a shelter and then reach out to vegan sanctuaries. We’d focus in our region and see if they could take them and then work on getting the animal out of the shelter into the sanctuary. In February of 2014, we rescued two hens from a local shelter and thanks to a snowstorm, they spent more time with us than we had originally anticipated. We fell just madly in love with them. It was really fascinating because we had talked a little bit about rescuing chickens one day and now that we had three acres out in the country. We had space where we can one day have some rescue chickens, but we didn’t have any concrete plans for it because we didn’t think of ourselves like as a sanctuary for farmed animals. We just thought of ourselves as like a couple of vegans with with a lot with cats and dogs, and who were trying to like help out farm animals.
So is that there was a disconnect between the whole concept of sanctuary and who we were, what we were doing. When the two hens whom we named Clementine and Almondine came to be with us, we set them up in our basement. We fell in love with them and realized like we wanted them to be part of our family. Now we could do it and we have the space. That was where we started to rethink like what it means to be a sanctuary, and to think about ways in which we can use the space that we had to create a sanctuary for animals rather than just like relying on other like large sanctuaries to do all that intake and caregiving. For us like to really like see them as family members and being, and our being able to like care for them, where we were not some future time after we won the lottery. So, this is when we started to transition away from being just a couple of vegans with cats and dogs to starting to be an actual sanctuary.
Hope:
You and your partner coined the term microsanctuary and started the Microsanctuary Movement, which now is has expanded across the country. So, what is a microsanctuary exactly, and what role do you see it playing in both the larger scale animal sanctuaries and in the vegan movement?
Justin:
When we started to think about what we were doing at our at our home, which was quickly turning into turning into a sanctuary and to an organization, we thought about the concept sanctuary, in terms of models that existed at the time like Woodstock, Farm Sanctuary, Animal Place, places that were very large, and had hundreds of animals hundreds of acres, and took in lots of donations and had staffs and things like that. That was the model for what a sanctuary was to us and so we really didn’t feel like that was at all what we were doing.
That’s why we started to think about ourselves as a microsanctuary because it was just the two of us. We were on three acres rather than 300 acres, or even 30 acres, and we were focusing kind of on doing like a small-scale thing. It just being the two of us, the same way that like you know you would rescue cats or dogs and make them part of your family. That’s the way we approached doing the rescue and caregiving work, not as like getting a board and a staff, raising millions of dollars, and getting tee-shirts and stuff like that.
The central concept of microsanctuaries is about vegans doing what they can to provide homes and caregiving to farmed animals and other exploited animals who are not typically seen as companions for the rest of their lives in ways that we would consider normal for cats and dogs, but what most people may not consider normal for chickens or rats. It challenges the speciesist notion that dogs and cats are family, but chickens, rats, pigs, and sheep, and other animals are somehow other, that they’re not they’re not family members, even if we don’t eat them. We don’t have a real relationship with them, we don’t really know a whole lot about them. We know that they live on farms and that’s not good, and we don’t that, but we don’t know who they are as individuals.
So, the way that I see micro sanctuaries as being really important, is that it is about like taking a collective approach to the problem of exploited animals who need care and homes, but it’s also about starting to understand and represent the individuality of these fairly unknown individuals to the rest of the public, and that that includes the vegan community.
Before we rescued Clementine and Almandine, we had very little experience with chickens. We had no clue who they were. I had been vegan for 15 years at that point, but I didn’t know who chickens were as individuals. When we got into doing the rescue of these farm animals and we connected with chickens, it completely changed my understanding of who I was as a vegan. I think that that’s something that people don’t recognize about the value of doing rescue and caregiving is one, like not only are you doing something really important in changing the life of an individual animal who, you know, needs help, but you’re also really changing yourself.
It really brings home the whole purpose of why we go vegan, which is to seek equality, justice, and liberation for individuals who are exploited for no other reason other than laws and culture say that we can do it. When I started to see myself as a vegan in the framework of the experiences of these individuals who we had the opportunity and the good fortune to come to know, it made me see differently what being vegan meant. It wasn’t so much about like my personal choices and stuff but it was more about recognizing that by being vegan, being actively engaged in caregiving and rescue for individuals in need, it was a matter of helping to achieve liberation from exploitation for everybody. I feel like it definitely both individualized my understanding of veganism in the sense that I could understand what my choices and what my actions are, the consequences that those had on individuals, and who these individuals were that would be experiencing those consequences. But it also put it into the bigger picture of recognizing that the effort for liberation needs to happen on a collective framework and be a collective effort. The more people that we have engaged in doing this sort of thing provides opportunities for more people to provide homes but also provides opportunity for more people to expand their understanding of empathy for these species who typically are just tucked away into farms and we really don’t know much or anything about them.
Hope:
You have the Microsanctuary Resource Center. Talk a little about that and what it provides. We’ll put a link to its website in the show notes.
Justin:
Yeah. When we initially started the Microsanctuary Movement, we made it into a 501c3 nonprofit so that we could do things like provide support for people. We also established a grant program to provide micro grants to individuals and to nonprofits who were engaged in creating microsanctuaries to help with little bits of support for special projects and veterinary care needs and things like that. After a few years we wanted to shift away from presenting ourselves as the Microsanctuary Movement recognizing the microsanctuary had become a movement that was its own thing and did not need us to regulate it. So, we changed the name to Microsanctuary Resource Center, so that we can focus instead on representing ourselves as a support network for people. What the Microsanctuary Resource Center does is the micro grant program, which is still a key part of it.
We’re one of the only organizations that provides small grants. You don’t have to be a 501c3 to be eligible to apply for a micro grant to help out with sanctuary expenses. In addition to that, we do a lot of one-on-one mentorship with people who are doing rescue and running microsanctuaries. We also work with other organizations to create educational resources and other forms of support to help people provide better care for the animals that they rescue.
One of the main drivers, in addition to planning to kind of help support growing the community of vegans who provide homes to non-traditional species, is to raise the level of what’s considered standard care for exploited species such as chickens or other farmed animals and because right now we’re in a situation where the medical knowledge and the standards of care for animals like farmed animals and animals who have been rescued from laboratories is pretty low. There are specialists out there who have a lot of knowledge, but they’re scattered and there isn’t a collective body of information that guides people on what are best practices, based on the needs of the animals rather than like kind of industry standards.
A big part of what we’ve been doing is trying to make this information and best practices easily accessible and shareable in the community. We’ve done a lot to raise the basic standards of care for chickens, for example, which is having a big impact. There is more and more awareness of what chickens’ needs are and kind of the experiences that they have as a result of their domestication.
Hope:
I love this concept, the Microsanctuary Movement. Why is it that we protect and love dogs and cats? It’s because they’re in our lives. We know them, we know someone who has a dog; we know someone who has a cat, even if we don’t ourselves. This is such a great idea to have farmed animals be part of our lives to. So, people get used to them and know them and get to know them and know them as individuals. It’s a really beautiful thing
Justin:
I think people downplay it a little bit but it’s a really powerful kick in the shin to these cultural ideas of speciesism that we have to see, for example, chickens be living lives that people would expect for dogs or cats to be living, and then to ask why would a chicken be inside? Like why is there a chicken sitting on your couch watching TV with you? Why does that happen because I bought chickens can only live like in fields and you start to really understand that no like these chickens are individuals who have experiences of the world that are not that different from species that we have no problem accepting as family members. It’s chipping away at these long held notions about who they are. That’s really powerful because if you start to see chickens as individuals who want to sit and watch a movie with you on the couch.
So then, how does it make any sense to kill billions of them every year for food? It doesn’t! It’s a travesty. When you see that travesty through the lens of that one individual chicken who you have a relationship with, it becomes an offense. It becomes an offense to your family, not just like something awful that’s happening in the world of bad stuff. It’s literally touching you and your family. And it’s really powerful to do that. I think microsanctuaries are really powerful in the context of that, like a personal relationship, because large sanctuaries by virtue of their their size and the resources that are involved, they end up taking place where farms typically are. A lot of times they are like old farm properties. And as you know, farms are out in the country. They’re away from the population centers to some degree, and so if you can make microsanctuaries in urban environments where they very much can bring these individuals to the people, rather than requiring the people who have resources to travel to visit a sanctuary out in the country. There’s nothing wrong with the large sanctuary model but this is an opportunity for us to make sanctuary a concept and make exploited animals a presence in places where people might not otherwise get the opportunity to interact with them. Microsanctuaries really have the power to do that, especially urban microsanctuaries.
Hope:
I want to ask you about backyard chicken keeping because it’s really on the rise now, because of the pandemic. People have been getting chicks and chickens for eggs. It’s been a growing trend for a while now with the popularity of do-it-yourselfers, DIY, and even backyard chicken slaughter and other animals slaughtered in the backyard. What do you see as problems that come with this backyard chicken craze?
Justin:
I’m really glad to have the opportunity to talk about that because, since our founding, we’ve been dealing with the victims of backyard chicken farming. I don’t like to separate backyard chicken keeping from, the larger, the egg industry or the flesh industry such as corporations like Tyson and Perdue that that we all know and hate. It’s all a spectrum.
Hope:
Just really to clarify, this is keeping chickens for their eggs, this is not a sanctuary, so microsanctuary is something different. This is when someone gets chickens for the eggs and for meat.
Justin:
Exploiting the bodies of chickens for, for menus is what I’m referring to specifically. It’s all a spectrum of exploitation, and there is a distinct separation between your neighbor with a flock of egg-laying chickens in their backyard, and a Tyson shed with thousands of chickens stuffed inside. It’s all a matter of degree, it’s not a difference, so much of like kind. There isn’t a difference in the ethical considerations that go into thinking about like what happens on an industrial farm versus what happens in your neighbor’s backyard.
But I don’t think that we’re used to seeing it that way, and vegans are guilty of perpetuating this distinction. That’s something that’s troubled me greatly since we’ve been doing this work. The idea that it is false to separate small scale operations, or backyard chicken farmers from the supposedly boogeymen of industrial farm corporations is my life’s work. I want to get people to stop making that distinction. It’s a very real and very ever present reality of the hundreds and hundreds of chickens who I’ve rescued. In the six plus years that we’ve been doing this 90 percent of these chickens come from people’s backyards. We cannot keep up with the victims who are out there just in our area from the backyard chicken craze. We’ve been doing this for years and trying to create networks for homes and we can’t keep up.
Backyard chicken raising has become more and more popular with the coronavirus. It’s become even more of an issue where people just see chickens as food and they may get chickens and consider the chickens as pets, but then continue to eat their eggs or even kill them for flesh, while believing that they’re doing something wonderful and sustainable. They believe that their chickens are leading these happy lives, but it’s really much, much more sinister situation. And that’s why I always tell people to not get caught up in looking at the aesthetics of backyard chicken keeping. Don’t just focus on the aesthetics, such as the chickens having grass to run around in, being able to dust bathe, and sitting in the sun.
Hope:
Maybe. Sometimes. Not always.
Justin:
In the ideal situation that people use to defend eating backyard eggs, the chickens are compared to pets who will lead better lives and who will be, for example, the best size possible. But what that ignores is what went into making it possible for chickens to be who they are as food producers for humans. I think the most startling fact about modern domesticated chickens is the fact that, thanks to millennia but especially in the past century or so, selective breeding, for the purposes of food production, a modern egg-laying hen of any breed, including the so called like heritage breeds, will lay 20 to 30 times as many eggs as their wild ancestors. Let me say that again, 20 to 30 times as many eggs as their wild ancestors. What that means is that by the time a hen is two years old, she has ovulated as many times as a human person reaching menopause.
Hope:
Wow.
Justin:
And so, that’s not natural. There’s no evolutionary situation in which that would naturally occur because making eggs is basically like making babies and making food for babies, and so that takes tons of nutrients and resources out of the hands body. To do that on almost a daily basis is absurd. There’s no natural situation in which that would happen because there’s no advantage to it. It’s deleterious for their health in many ways. When a hen hatches and enters the world like she has pre-programmed characteristics to domestication and selective breeding to lay that many eggs. Whether or not she’s in a in a battery cage or in a backyard, she is forced to do that and to endure that, and for her body to go through that, and they have no escape. Even when they get to our sanctuary, we can we can do interventions to help stop them from laying, but it’s not a permanent thing. Even when they get to our sanctuary if they’re still laying eggs, they still have to go through that every day, and they still face the health consequences that come from that. Industry studies have shown is that the number one cause of death for egg laying hens is reproductive problems related to egg laying. Every time that they ovulate, they run the risk of getting cancer. They run the risk of getting a number of other reproductive related diseases related to egg laying.
Because it happens so frequently, they’re constantly running the risk of dying because they’ve been forced to lay these many eggs. This is going on in your neighbor’s backyard with every single hen that they have. In addition to that chickens, like most species, hatch roughly equal numbers of male and female chicks. If your neighbor has a flock of hens in their backyard, every single one of those hens has a dead brother somewhere, and most roosters are killed as babies at hatcheries. This is true for hatcheries that provide eggs to backyard farmers and projects to backyard farmers, just as it is true for hatcheries that provide hens to Tyson farms.
Hope:
I just want to clarify too, going back to the reproductive issues, they, on, on a typical farm in commercial farming, they would be killed within just a couple years. Their egg production starts to decline, so they would go to slaughter. When you take them out of that horrible situation and rescue them and they get to live their lives out, these problems become really manifest. Then that’s when they start getting impacted, eggs and all, all kinds of issues like that, right?
Justin:
Yes. I’m glad you brought up the slaughter question. With industrial farms, there is no wiggle room from this problem. By the time the hens each reach 18 to 24 months of age, they’re sent to the rendering factory. This happens when their egg laying starts to decline. They don’t stop laying eggs; they just don’t lay as many. On backyard farms in many places, many people do the exact same thing. We see it all the time, people posting ads on Craigslist, saying they want new spring chicks so they’re getting rid of all their old two-year-old chickens. It happens all the time.
It doesn’t matter whether they’re in somebody’s backyard. When they’re seen as primarily producers of food, there’s always going be that calculus that’s happening of when it’s not worth it to keep them anymore. For a lot of people who have backyard chickens, they don’t want to keep them if they’re not laying as many eggs, because it costs, next to nothing to get a new, new influx of younger chickens in.
For us, it’s one of the most interesting things that we deal with as a sanctuary. We have a number of chickens who are the common industry breeds, such as the reds and the leghorns, but we also have a lot of the so-called backyard breeds which are a little bit more variety. But all of them, as they start to get older, they don’t stop laying eggs completely. They still potentially have reproductive problems. We have leghorn chickens who were about eight years old. We have a variety and a lot of our residents are getting up into the eight- and nine-year-old range. We’re constantly trying to race against the clock to keep them from developing problems.
One of the most interesting things that we can do as a chicken-focused sanctuary is to start to develop care protocols for aging chickens, because the industry doesn’t do that. The industry chickens don’t live past two years old. For a lot of the backyard chicken keepers, they may have hens who reach 8 years old or reach their teens. But the problem is that those chickens aren’t getting really careful medical care. They just happen to be like your 95-year-old grandmother, who smokes and eats every day. A lot some of these chickens do make it to old age without any proper medical care, but that’s not a standard. The standard is that they don’t make it past four or five years old, because that’s when they start to develop serious reproductive problems, if they’re not slaughtered at two years old.
We’re trying hard to develop protocols for caring for aging chickens, but that’s not something that backyard chicken keepers do or care about. When their chickens die from some massive reproductive problem, they just say oh well, they died from old age, they’re five years old; they’re an old chicken. But to put it in context, for a chicken to be eight years old on a backyard farm is seen as an amazing thing. But that’s not even middle aged for how long chickens should be living. Their wild ancestors, red jungle fowl could live, up to 30 years. But backyard farmers are always seeing themselves as like doing something amazing and special because they don’t have them in a shed and they’re not slaughtering them. But there are so many hidden things that happen on backyard farms because the chickens aren’t showing signs that they’re not feeling well or they’re not showing signs that they reproductive problems going on until they just die one day. Without having that medical knowledge, backyard farmers are just assuming that their chickens are happy and healthy and wonderful. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the chickens may be walking around with health problems and the owners just don’t know.
Hope:
There is also a huge difference between just having these chickens out there for their eggs and being a caring, loving friend to these animals, and being tuned in to if they are not feeling well or if they’re not in the best health. When you’re a sanctuary person you know the chickens and you can feel what is going on with them. A backyard egg producer may not tune into that at all, so as a result, the chicken suffers.
Justin:
They may they may not be willing to do the caregiving that’s necessary.
Hope:
That’s right, or pay the vet bills.
Justin:
If you bought a chicken for $5, and they get sick and they need $1,000 surgery, most farmers in their right mind aren’t going to pay that kind of money. It’s an entirely different approach and I think it’s important that even if you have neighbors or family who have chickens and they eat their eggs, but otherwise they treat them just like family members and pets. You cannot connect the consumption of this product, the entire reason that these beings exist, and the entire reason that these beings suffer so much, from your choice to take them and eat them.
You can’t draw that line between the eggs being there, so I’m going to eat them versus seeing them as chickens who suffer and die because they were bred to be egg machines or flesh machines. You cannot disconnect those two things. It’s not a benign act when somebody has backyard chickens and eats their eggs. It’s not some neutral thing. It’s actively participating in their suffering and the industry that keeps them suffering and breeds billions of them every single year for the purpose of providing food. That’s what I want people to take away. It’s a continuum, a spectrum, from the backyard, to the Tyson shed. It’s not an either or situation. They’re totally connected and so until you break away from the connection of chickens with food, you’re constantly going to be perpetuating and participating in that cycle of violence.
Hope:
A lot of people think that it’s really just hens that we’re talking about when we’re talking about the suffering in the egg industry. They just think about the hens industrial scale or backyard or whatever, but many don’t realize that roosters suffer considerably as well. So why are roosters suffering, so people can eat eggs? What’s the connection there?
Justin:
It’s a really important conversation to have. I alluded to it earlier when I brought up the fact that chickens hatch roughly equal numbers of roosters and hence, the fact that for every hen, there’s a rooster somewhere. The rooster is either dead or abandoned. A small number of them are living still, but the entire industry sees roosters as basically trash. That’s true for large corporations as much as for your neighbor’s backyard chicken operation.
The only reason that chickens are valuable to people who eat animal products is for their eggs and flesh. Roosters don’t lay eggs, so why would you want to keep them around? The hens are going to lay just as many eggs without the rooster as they will with the rooster. Roosters are just entirely a byproduct. The few who are needed to keep perpetuating baby chickens, are vastly outnumbered by the number of hens who are wanted for making eggs.
Hope:
Right. The breeders. They don’t need that many breeders to have a huge amount of chicks to hatch.
Justin:
The hatcheries and stuff are specifically producing eggs. For the purposes of making chicks to sell like they do you need roosters around to fertilize the eggs, but if you just want eggs, you don’t need a rooster. There’s no reason for you to have a rooster. A lot of times the roosters are going to want to kick your ass because you’re trying to take eggs from their hens, so one of the main reasons that that roosters are abandoned if they do make it to maturity is because they’re doing what they are supposed to do, which is to protect their hens.
What people typically see as aggression on the part of the rooster is actually the rooster doing their job. Their primary job is to protect their flock. So roosters are protectors, roosters are peacekeepers, but they’re not, they’re not killers. People completely misunderstand rooster behavior. It really centers on just that continuation of human narcissism where if the rooster isn’t giving me something that I want, the rooster is not behaving in the way I want them to, and is bothering me in my effort to get the eggs that I want, the rooster’s gone.
Without question roosters are, hands down, the most numerous farmed animals who need help. And they’re also the hardest to find homes for. We’re one of the few sanctuaries that are focused on roosters. We’ve been working really hard to develop educational resources, not only about caring for roosters and just helping people understand who roosters are, but also to do things such as showing people that roosters can live as part of a flock with other roosters.
And to do groundbreaking work to change the understanding that people have of roosters, because we know them as individuals and we see their true individuality and their true instinctual behaviors. We don’t see them through the lens of an exploitative speciesist framework. For us, we understand the way that they that they behave and the interactions that they have. Our goal is to help people understand them better in the hopes that they’ll be willing to provide homes for them. Ideally, people will just stop eating eggs because if you eat eggs, by consequence, you’re causing roosters to either be killed or to be made homeless.
Hope:
Yes, that’s such a good point. I really want to emphasize that. People don’t realize that connection, that when you’re eating eggs, you’re causing the suffering abandonment, killing, in some way of a rooster.
Justin:
That’s and again and true, no matter where that egg comes from.
Hope:
Yes.
Justin:
There is no difference in the treatment of roosters between, large corporations and small scale hatcheries and backyard farmers, because it’s just by nature roosters and hens come into the world and about equal numbers, and roosters are valueless. Nobody wants them and so what happens to them? That’s why I’ve developed my skills over the years of catching roosters in the wild because so many roosters are dumped. It seems to be a particularly American phenomenon; I don’t see it happening as much in other countries. Rooster dumping is like a pastime amongst backyard chicken keepers. Once a rooster crows, they are put in the car and driven out driven out to the country, and then thrown out into the woods.
People seem to have this notion that chickens are basically wild animals and so if you throw a rooster into the woods, they’re going to be able to find food and water, that they’ll be perfectly fine. That’s so far from the truth. Chickens are domesticated animals, and like other domesticated prey species, they cannot live in the wild without human care. There are like colonies of chickens in different places like Florida and Hawaii and places like that. But those are special cases. If you dump a rooster out into the woods, they’re not going to become a feral colony like in Florida. They’re going to be killed. You know they’re either going to die from starvation and malnutrition, or they’re going to die from a predator. One of the main sources where we rescue roosters is from people dumping them in the woods.
I cannot express how vile this behavior is in consequence of wanting to keep chickens for eggs. To take the action of putting a rooster who has grown up as part of a flock and who has relationships in a flock, to put that rooster you into your car and drive them out into the country and throw them out into the woods in a strange place where they can’t survive, it’s vile. It’s criminal. But that’s part and parcel with keeping chickens for eggs, because roosters are seen as such trash; it doesn’t matter what happens to them.
Hope:
And even people who want to keep them, often, are prevented from doing so because there are laws against keeping roosters, usually because of the crowing, which it seems so ridiculous to me. Leaf blowers and lawn mowers are so much louder and more terrible to hear than a rooster crowing. I just don’t get it. Often people dump the roosters even if they would keep them because ordinances don’t allow them in their area.
Justin:
There are only a few exceptions to this but most like cities and towns that allow chickens prohibit roosters because of the noise issue. You’re exactly right. Even if people wanted to keep a rooster who shows up in a batch of chicks that they ordered, a neighbor is going to complain and they’re going to have to get rid of them. The rooster will go to a shelter or be dumped in the woods. It’s just part of the whole speciesism that that’s attached to the chickens and then the roosters especially are just seen as an inconvenience.
Hope:
A nuisance animal.
Justin:
Exactly.
Hope:
Yes, terrible. We at UPC get so many calls and emails about roosters. It’s just endless, the people that are trying to find some place for a poor abandoned rooster. It’s terrible.
Justin:
It’s awful. Most rescues and sanctuaries are very limited in the number of roosters that they’re going to take in, and so it’s an endless problem for the roosters. It’s all because of backyard chicken keeping.
Hope:
It’s all because of eggs.
Justin:
It’s all because of eggs but then specifically, the roosters who you’re getting calls about, because of the backyard keepers.
Hope:
Yes.
Justin:
Ultimately it’s because of eggs.
Hope:
We have to stop looking at eggs as food.
Justin:
Absolutely.
Hope:
I want to switch gears a little bit. You’re going to be contributing to an anthology that I’m putting together, as a contributing writer. It is called the Humane Hoax Anthology and humane hoax, of course, is all those labels that we’re seeing, the free range cage-free organic, as well as the backyard chicken keeping that we’ve been talking about that is part of the humane hoax. I’m collecting chapters from academics and activists and authors and I’m excited that you’re contributing, Justin. I wanted to ask you why you think the humane hoax issue is important, and also what your chapter is about. Can you give us a little preview?
Justin:
Absolutely. In terms of the humane hoax as an issue, it’s entirely wrapped up in the work that we do as a sanctuary. It’s also where I’ve shifted my focus as a vegan activist and advocate, to focus on that that myth of humane animal products. I live with the victims of so-called humane animal farming. I can see it for the lie that it is because I see what happens to them. I see what would have happened to them if we had not stepped in and given them sanctuary. We like to think that these small scale farms aren’t that bad because they’re not killing billions of animals every year. For me, it’s not only a useless distinction to make, but it’s also offensive.
Why does the life of an animal who’s in a family’s backyard mean less than the life of one of billions of animals who is kept in an industrial farm? It doesn’t matter whether the animal is on one farm or the other; the fact that they’re being used and are being killed is where the ethical question lies. And so the aesthetics of where they live means nothing. The ethical question is whether or not it is okay to use and exploit them and to kill them; the answer is no. It doesn’t matter what type of farm they’re on. On a practical level, I’ve been on so many of these small scale farms and in so many backyards, that I see how atrocious these places are. That may not be apparent to people who go there and don’t know what they’re looking at. And don’t know the situations but I do and I see that these situations where animals are being killed for food are not good. They’re not there for the animals’ best interests, and they ultimately result in suffering and death.
Hope:
Can you give some specifics and maybe about an animal who you’ve rescued from one of these situations?
Justin:
My chapter is going to be about individual rescue stories and using those as lenses through which to question the notion of humane animal farming. One example is a little hen named Bibi. She was hatched and was being kept in a small alternative school. One night, a raccoon broke into the very unsafe and inadequate contraption where the hens were kept. The raccoon killed three of the hens and was in the process of killing Bibi when the woman who ran the school heard the ruckus, and ran out and scared the raccoon off. Bibi suffered some physical injuries. Her beak is still broken and is shorter than it should be because the raccoon basically bit it off. This happened in 2014, and they contacted us because Bibi was so traumatized. She would spend all day at their sliding glass door just staring into it. at night she refused to go back into the chicken tractor where the attack happened and instead would sleep in a tree. For me, when I picked Bibi up and brought her home like she was shell shocked. She just looked like she had been through a war, and she just like wouldn’t move, she would barely eat.
But the fact that she was sitting at their sliding glass door every day was so painful for me because I realized what she was doing is he was looking at her reflection. She had lost all of her sisters, all of her flock mates. She had nobody. The only thing she had left was her reflection. It just shows like how people see chickens of having no value.
Chickens are kept in these unsafe enclosures and chicken tractors, and when a predator kills them, it’s like oh well! You know, circle of life! It just happens. But you see, what it actually means for these individuals when you see what Bibi went through. She had to overcome her emotional trauma, which she did by meeting other chickens here at our sanctuary. She had to overcome the physical trauma to learn how to eat again, and to learn how to drink again with, with a maimed beak. She had to learn how to live with the consequences of that attack. For the people who had her, she was just one out of a group of chicks that they hatched whose brothers were all taken and whose sisters are now dead because of this predator attack.
She’s over eight years old, which for a leg hen is, leghorn hen is very old, but she’s rocking it. She she’s running around ever bossy, she has friends, and she loves her life. You can see the depth of her emotional experience. And the way that she wanted to live and wants to have relationships. Chickens want to be part of a group and to enjoy their lives.
You can use Bibi’s story as a telescope to think about all the billions of individuals who are out there in the farming system right now. Every single one of them is Bibi. There’s no difference. They want the same things. The only reason that that we prevent them from having that is that we use them, and we take from them. Then we kill them when it’s convenient for us is because we don’t care about them as individuals, and ultimately if you cared about individuals, you would not participate in the system that keeps them suffering in the system that puts them in people’s backyards only to die, or the system that throws baby boy chicks into macerators, the system. A system that says roosters can’t live here. They have to be thrown out into the woods where they’re going to die. That’s all one system. It’s not separate.
And so the experiences that Bibi had are the exact things that happen, and could happen to any chicken out there. The only reason that Bibi is different is because she had the opportunity to live her life at a sanctuary, rather than to be used and killed on a farm.
Hope:
Thank you for giving Bibi a second chance and giving her a home. I’m happy to hear that she’s doing well. Is there anybody else out there whose story you want to tell? Any other animals on the sanctuary there you could tell us about?
Justin:
We have a rooster here named Salem who came to us a month after Bibi. It was October 2014 when he came to our sanctuary from a shelter, and his was the typical story of being dumped right at the age when he was starting to crow. He was picked up as a stray by Animal Control and was at the shelter. He came to us as a young rooster. He was really has been one of the most important people at our sanctuary in terms of helping us to understand and see roosters in a new way. Salem has always been with other roosters ever since he came to our sanctuary. After his quarantine period, we bonded him with another young rooster named Autumn. They became two peas in a pod. They were inseparable. This was the first time that we had seen two roosters who became friends, and to have a deep important emotional connection. After Autumn passed away a year or so later, Salem continued to be part of a rooster flocks.
We’ve seen how Salem makes bonds with other roosters. Now he’s basically got a bromance going with another rooster named Eno. They are inseparable. He’s about six years old now. He is part of a flock of three roosters that includes him, Eno, and a rooster named Cassandra because we like to play around with gender names. Cassandra, Salem, and Eno are just the cutest little flock of three roosters and they’re very happy. They have this really deep relationship but especially Salem and Eno, and it’s just amazing because, as I said, Salem has never been a part of a flock with hens, but he does all the normal rooster behaviors that we associate with roosters as flock leaders. He does it for his rooster friends. You just see that they form these bonds and relationships. The nature of who a rooster really is has been very much misrepresented by society. Salem is living proof of that because he gets along wonderfully with his rooster friends, and he’s super happy. He likes to interact with us. All the things that you think roosters can’t be are what Salem is.
Hope:
We do need to wrap up but I wanted to ask how people can get in touch with you and if you had any final thoughts that you’d like to share. And you how people can support your sanctuary.
Justin:
You can find us on triangle Chicken advocates.org, or on Facebook triangle chicken advocates. That’s probably the best and easiest way to reach me. In terms of final thoughts, I would love for people to start thinking about the stuff we talked about backyard chickens and the humane hoax. I want people take seriously that notion that we have to challenge all forms of exploitation. We have to see through the kind of facade of “happy” animals to think about what it means for individuals to be part of a system that exploits and kills billions of individuals every year. That is really where I think the focus of my work always is going to be, is helping people understand these animals as individuals, and then understanding the system that victimizes them
Hope:
Thank you so much Justin. It was great talking to you. And I’m going see you soon at our chicken webinar.
Justin:
Definitely. I’m looking forward to it in September, thanks Hope.
Hope:
Thank you for listening to the Hope for the Animals podcast. As I said in the beginning of the show, Justin I will be hosting the Humane Hoax chicken webinar, the first ever webinar focused entirely on chickens. It’s sponsored by United Poultry Concerns, Triangle Chicken Advocates, Free From Harm, Compassionate Living and others. It’s coming up on Saturday September 12 2020. And if you’re hearing this podcast after that date, we will have the videos posted and available to watch soon after. To sign up for the webinar, or to view the videos, go to www. humane hoax.org. I’ll have a link in the show notes as well. We hope to see you over at the webinar soon. Thank you for your compassion, and please stand up and speak out for chickens with your actions and your dollars and live vegan.
