On Letting Chickens Strut Their Stuff

On the face of it, the lesson does not seem to come to much. "Chickens are chickens," he said. But in the context in which made his point, it struck me as a profound truth.

I was a graduate student at the time, and I was digging deep into questions about ethics and social policy. In a church bulletin I noticed that some Christian farmers were getting together to discuss the relationship between their faith and their farming practices, and I decided to listen in. It was an intriguing session. These folks-most of them Mennonite and Dutch Reformed-were serious about their religion and they wanted their deepest convictions to make a difference in the way they conducted their daily lives.

It was obvious that the chicken farmer had spent many hours working outdoors: his face was heavily tanned up to that point on his brow where his hat protected his bald head from the sun. He had a strong Dutch accent, and my guess was that he had not received much formal education. But he was in his own way quite eloquent, especially on the subject of a mass-production approach to chicken farming. "Colonel Sanders wants us to think of chickens only in terms of dollars and cents," he announced. "They are nothing but little pieces of meat to be bought and sold for food. And so we're supposed to crowd them together in small spaces and get them fat enough to be killed."