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Thinking Like a Chicken




'Thinking like a chicken' an idea examined by Karen Davis in her PHD




Viva was not only strong willed and alert; she was expressive and responsive. One of the most touching things about her was her voice. She would always talk to me with her frail "peep" which never got any louder and seemed to come from somewhere in the center of her body which pulsed her tail at precisely the same time........It seemed, however, fair to ask what chance there could ever be of protecting the chickens of the world if their only defenders viewed their plight as less than a "high priority"......Not only men but women and animal protectionists exhibit a culturally-conditioned indifference toward, and prejudice against, creatures whose lives appear too slavishly, too boringly, too stupidly female, too "cowlike." Moreover, we regard conscious logical reasoning as the only valid sort of "mind.".....Amid the darkness of my knowledge of the horrible experiences inscribed within billions of chickens by our species, they are the peace and the light.....I think to myself listening to the trumpet blasts and iron oratory of environmentalism, how could the soft voice of Viva ever hope to be heard?......The ethical result is moral abandonment of beings whose sufferings and other experiences are inconsequential compared to the "big realm.".....I raise questions concerning our moral obligations to genetically altered and weaker creatures, especially those debilitated by our activities, pointing out, moreover, that domesticated chickens have been shown to retain their ancestral repertoire of behaviors, which undermines the prima facie assumption that they have been rendered docile and servile through breeding for specific traits.




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