Free Range Chickens

I think even the most confirmed carnivores experience a little twinge of dread when they buy a package of chicken parts. There's the story of the secondhand foul-mouthed parrot its owner sticks in a freezer to punish it for constantly swearing. The owner opens the door and finds the once defiant bird shivering and defeated. "Now do you promise to stop cussing?" asks the owner, and the parrot nods his head. "I promise," he says, "but could you answer one question?" "All right," says the owner, and the parrot points one trembling wing back into the freezer. "Can you tell me what that chicken did?" 

It's a fair question, and it brings me around to why I think I have finally managed to put my finger on what it is that bothers me about the whole "free range chicken" concept. At first I wondered about it on hygienic grounds. I mean, if you live in the country for twenty minutes you'll know that chickens will eat anything they come upon: slugs, toads, free range dung. Why, I wondered, is eating such a promiscuous creature preferable to devouring one that's been closely supervised? Aren't free range chickens a little like loose women, in that the risks of catching something are considerably higher? 

But I've come to realize that isn't really it. I was at our local farmer's market this Saturday (my wife and I attend every week because we just can't resist the opportunity to pay white people top dollar for blemished vegetables), and I saw a sign touting the fine conditions in which a particular farmer's chickens are raised. 

The sign painted a picture of a vast, sun-drenched meadow in which happy roasters and fryers were free to roam: dining, napping, exercising, and delighting in one another's company. The fowl paradise the sign described is not like one of those deplorable operations in which chickens are crammed into cages and fed hormone-infused feed in conditions of misery, anonymity and squalor. 

But there's my problem. Is it really more humane to slaughter a happy chicken than a miserable one? When I buy a chicken from one of the conglomerates, aren't I merely guilty of conspiring to put an unhappy creature out of its misery, whereas when I pick up a chicken at the farmer's market I become an accomplice in wholly unjustified homicide? 

Then again, I guess the real problem is eating meat in the first place. You can't be a humane carnivore any more than you can wage a humane war. I can live with that, for all those critters out there that give us meat are real tasty, and there'd be a lot fewer of them freely ranging anywhere if moral cowards like myself didn't like to eat them now and again. 

Which brings me to another old joke. A salesman stops at a farm and notices the farmer has a pig with only three legs. "What's the story with that pig?" asks the salesman. "Oh, that pig is the best friend a man ever had," says the farmer. "Why last Sunday week my boy was almost run over by a school bus, but that pig ran up and dragged him out of harm's way. He's a great pig. He's the best pig. I love that pig." The next year the salesman returns and sees the pig's now got only two legs. "What's the story with that pig?" he asks, an d the farmer says, "Why, that pig's a hero. We had a fire in the kitchen one night, and that pig run upstairs and raised such a ruckus it woke us up, and we all run out to safety. He's a great pig. He's the best pig. I love that pig." Next year the salesman returns and now the pig's down to one front leg and is dragging himself around in a cart. So he asks about it again, and the farmer launches into a story about how one of his kids was drowning but the pig dove in and plucked him up by the collar and dragged him to shore. "He's a great pig," says the farmer. "He's the best pig. I love that pig." "You love that pig. I get that," snaps the salesman. "But why does it only have one leg?" "Oh, that," says the farmer with a shrug, "Well, you don't eat a pig like that all at once."