What Is Karen Davis 'Thinking Like A Chicken'

What qualities make our life worth value? This question usually arises in any discussion regarding animal ethics. It is impossible to answer this question, however, because no one other then God will definitively even know the exact qualities that make our lives valuable. All we can do is guess what parts of us give us higher value over other creatures that inhabit our planet. So we let our perceptions and pre-conceived notions about animals dictate how we treat them. Everyone consciously or subconsciously ranks living creatures and attributes value to them. The way we often do this is we set ourselves as a benchmark. Then we compare ourselves to them and look for similarities. The more similar they are to us the more value the must have.
Right? The flaw in this philosophy other than the fact that we have no clue if this is a correct way to assess a living being’s value is that as we learn more about animals and other living creatures, we learn that our previous connived notions about them are in fact untrue. We commonly call people unintelligent pigs even though we now know that pigs are smarter than dogs. We have made the bald eagle our countries national bird because we assumed that something so majestic must be honorable denizen of the sky when bald eagles are in actuality scavengers and bullies. We are scared to swim in the ocean due to our fear of sharks when cows kill more people annually. These preconceived notions have allowed us to bypass our guilt as we abuse, jail, and kill innocent creatures because we have assessed their value to be insignificant.
How we treat animals, however, has much more to say about who we are as a species, rather than it has to say about our furry neighbors. And it is time to look into the mirror and see if we are proud of what is looking back at us.
This topic of preconceived notions dictating how we treat animals is the theme of Karen Davis's “Thinking Like a Chicken.” One of the many interesting sub-topics of animal ethics addressed in this paper is the topic of domestication. If we created and formed domesticated animals through selective breeding do they deserve rights? Karen Davis and I would argue that they do (Davise, 1995). This is a case however when our preconceived notions about animals are right. Domesticated animals in our absence would die. They are no longer adapted to their local environment; they are adapted to the specific commodity we bred them for. So in many ways, they are our own creation. But who owns life? Not us and not amount of genetic engineering will ever change that. And even if we do own their life how is it not a sin to treat them so cruelly. In her paper, Karen Davis gives specific
examples of factory farming and how chickens are treated more lick raw materials rather than living beings. One of the most powerful and horrific passages in “Thinking Like a Chicken” is when Karen describes a chicken she met named Viva. Karen depicts the first time she met Viva saying “She was stumbling around over by the feed cylinder on the far side where the low shelf piled with junk makes everything dark. A shaft of sunlight had caught her, but by the time I was able to get inside she had scrunched herself deep in the far corner underneath the shelf against the wall. She shrank as I reached in to gather her up and lift her out of there. I held her in my lap stroking her feathers and looked at her. She was small and looked as if she had never been in the sun. Her feathers and legs and beak were brown stained with dirt and feces and dust. Her eyes were as lusterless as the rest of her, and her feet and legs were deformed. I let her go and she hobbled back to the corner where she must have spent the summer, coming out only to eat and drink. She had managed to escape being trampled to death in this overcrowded confinement shed, unlike the chicken I had found some weeks earlier stretched out and pounded into the dirt” (Davise, 1995). Nothing deserves to be treated like that. For a chicken in a factory farming life is nothing but a punishment, a constant hell that begins when they are born and only ends when they die. We as a society chose to look the other way, however, ignoring their suffering. Choosing to believe the paper-thin argument that because we captured them from the wild and breed them for one purpose that we can subject them to any forms of cruelty we want. No reasonable person would want to treat bald eagles like this but because of our societal perception of them we justify our cruelty. One of the reasons Karen Davis believes we have this moral blind spot is because we see domesticated animals as unnatural or “ecologically out of tune” as she puts it. Because they are so “denatured and void of autonomy” our morals do not to apply to them (Davise, 1995). But where do we draw the line? Almost every know species's evolutionary history has been influenced by humans. Not to mention our evolutionary history has been influenced by many other species. Does that give other animals the right to treat us cruelly? The answer is no. And we need to stop making excuses to justify our deplorable actions.
There is no question that domesticated animals are the most poorly treated sentient beings on our planet.
That being said wild animals that are captured for zoos are in desperate need of our empathy as well. I personally growing up have had a somewhat positive view of zoos. As I got older and learned more about them my option of them has drastically changed. In our age of smartphones and laptops, we are in desperate need of a positive influence to get kids interested in animals and the natural world. Growing up I always believed that zoo’s played a big role in this. This changed however after I read “Thought To Exist In the Wild” By Derek Johnson. Derek Johnson systematically tears apart the argument that zoos are educational when he equates zoos to pornography; they are just a superficial representation of the real thing. The whole idea of keeping animals in an enclosure teaches children that animals are inferior beings in need of our support. Which leads to believe that it is ok to treat them cruelly. Children do not even have the desired learning outcomes that we would expect. Derrick Johnson points out that when you go to a zoo you don’t see any awe or wonder. You just see children making faces at the animals and poking on the glass (Jensen, 2007). Anyone who has spent a reasonable amount of time at a zoo would have a hard time arguing with him. If children are not even learning more about animals the only reason we have zoos is purely for entertainment. Now some people
would argue that life for an animal in a zoo is not that bad. Derrek Johnson challenges these people to spend a month in an enclosure and then see if they still would be in favor of zoos (Jensen, 2007). I know I would not want to spend a month in an enclosure. Nor would anyone I know. So this raises the question, if we would not be comfortable putting another human being in an enclosure why would we be ok with putting a wild animal in one? We justify it not because we have had a strong role in their evolutionary history like with domesticated animals but because they are so dissimilar from us. We know that our lives have value, so if something is different than us it must have less value. This argument is based solely on the desire to ignore our morality. We do not know if animals have the same natural inclination to covet freedom. But we can watch them and observe the parallels between them and us. Dereck Johnson vividly describes this palpable desire for freedom when he sees the “grizzly bear still paces rectangles in a cage in a zoo. An elephant still sways hour after endless hour, chained to a concrete door. A wolf still strides inside an electrified fence. A giraffe still stands in a cell too small for her to break into a run” (Jensen, 2007). We all know the truth. However, we allow the excuse that they are so wildly different from us to believe that their happiness does not matter and they do not feel like we feel.
Being different does not mean you have a shred of lees value than anything else. We seem to forget this even among our own species. In Major Johnson’s Poem “Pest,” He describes the disturbing reality of what it is like to be unjustly profiled by the police. The poem is titled “Pest” because that is how the police view him. They see his life as having no value. Now animal rights and rights for minorities are two completely unrelated ethical topics, however, there is a lot we can learn about how we treat animals from Major Johnson’s poem. The officer, for whatever reason whether it is his parents, his community, or just his own perception of African Americans made a value judgment about Major Johnson. Somewhere along the line he decided that his life has more value then this black child that he suspects of having drugs. And he uses this as an excuse to be cruel. This logic is very similar to the logic we use to justify torturing chickens for their entire life and the logic we use to justify taking away wild animal’s freedom. Major Johnson when describing the police officer “for he was an entomologist in a former lifetime & knew the many song structures of cicadas, bush crickets & fruit flies”(Johnson). He is so set in his ways he thinks he knows black people and is certain that they are all drug dealers. This is similar to how many people view animals. They are certain that animals have to value other than human consumption. And they characterize animal sympathizers as tree hugging vegan PETA activists that are just a bunch of ill logical radicals. When in fact, it is tremendously hard to convince yourself that we are the only sentient beings of value in the world if you ever care to think about it. No one knows or will ever know how similar or dissimilar we truly are with animals. But why does it matter? How does being different corresponding to having less value? It does not. We have been telling ourselves a lie that because we are different we can cruel. At the end of the day, we have to remember though that there is nothing we can invent, travel too, or become that will ever change the fact that we are animals ourselves. We are the only species that makes excuses to be cruel and apathetic to suffering. As I said before how we treat animals has a lot more to say about us then it does them. And if we look in the mirror long enough we might see that in the proses of making excuses to be cruel we lost all of our value.

Citations:
Davis, Karen. "Thinking Like a Chicken." Animals and Women Feminist Theoretical Explorations (1995): 192-212. Web.
Jensen, Derek. "Thought To Exist in the Wild: Awaking From The Nightmare of Zoos." The Sun (2007): 1-11. Web.
Major, Johnson “Pest”