Coming Home
Posted by nzvs 27-02-2008
I don't know how they experienced their arrival at the sanctuary – that moment when the van doors opened and the light of day filled their eyes for the first time in their lives – but I know that, for one breathless moment, when we first looked at the 100 souls safely tucked inside, we didn't see the tangled mess of soiled feathers, the open sores, the broken bones, the chopped off beaks, the mocked lives. All we saw – in one breath of infinite relief and elation – was 100 souls who will go on breathing. And, for one instant, the glow of their living presence obscured everything else – the wreckage we'd made of their lives for our amusement, the despair still engulfing the 50 billion left behind, the darkness of a humanity that imposes untold misery for a taste.For one rich instant, we luxuriated in the sweetness of those 100 happy endings. Then, we embraced anew the toil of rising, standing, bearing, shouldering, suffering, nurturing 100 new beginnings.
The 100 birds who were now gazing at the open sky for the first time in their lives, were industry trash, "spent" hens rescued from a "free-range" egg facility where they had endured a lifetime of physical, social and psychological deprivation, females whose depleted bodies were no longer able to churn out eggs at the unnaturally high rate of production they had been forced to sustain all of their young lives, and were being sent to slaughter to be replaced with a new generation of victims whose bodies would be used up in a fraction of their life span and then mass killed, erased from existence, scrubbed from awareness, not a trace of their earthly existence left over, not a feather, not a song, not a child, not a dream.
Nothing in their captive lives had prepared them for freedom. Born in incubators and raised by machines in isolation from mothers, families or communities who could teach them the skills and strengths that living requires, they had no social skills that would gain them acceptance in a free bird community, no language that was comprehensible to chickens outside their gulag and, after a lifetime of systematic abuse, most had lost even the ability to nurture themselves. Yet there they were. Asked to live and be free.
For the first few minutes, they were eerily silent. No one peeped, no one one moved. They just watched us with the breath of frail creatures. Some lengthened their bare necks and peered at the sun-filled world with silent, briny eyes, blinking, looking at the great outdoors with eyes unaccustomed to daylight, open spaces, or any other sight except the bareness of the windowless shed they had been confined to since infancy. Others slumped with infinite fatigue, caving within themselves – shoulders sinking, wings dragging, heads drooping, too weak and weary to even look up. A couple were dead, their cooling bodies wilted over their still warm eggs, their feathers stirring hauntingly in the living breeze, their eyes lidded so completely that they seemed to never have existed, to never have illuminated that face, shut with such finality, as though determined to keep the horrors of the world finally, safely, irreversibly out.
Everyone remained still and silent until Chris climbed into the van and started gently lifting one by one into Michele's cupped hands. Then, in one instant, the entire group went into a blind panic. They ran to the back of the van screaming, swarming, climbing on each other's backs, trying frantically to hide or escape, huddling together for a shred of comfort, an extra millimeter of protection, an extra millisecond of existence, still attached to the mockery we'd made of their lives, still trying to save them, still hoping (for what?).
As gently as we handled them, held them, cradled them before putting them on the straw-covered ground, they still cried out in fear for their pathetic only lives. That was the only sound we heard them utter that day and for many days to come – the sound of fear, pain, despair – the tragic record of a life of torment. And, with each rebirth, with each new bird lifted from the bleakness of her past onto a free future, we felt both the giddiness of life that was released at last, finally free to become, and the weight, the call, the tug, the stab in the heart of the lives left behind, still trembling in fear, still stirring faintly with absurd, irrepressible hope.
Full article at Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary, where rescued animals are given lifelong care
