Radical Vegans Are Trying to Change Your Diet
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A few hens lay on the ground, unmoving, ill or dead. Many were injured, with festering sores on their feet. Some bled from their posteriors—they were likely suffering from a prolapsed cloaca, a painful, potentially fatal condition often caused by repeated egg-laying. Others looked dirty and ragged, though chickens, given a choice in the matter, tend to be fastidious. Everything, everywhere in this farm for “free-range” chickens was covered in excrement. The industrial hangar was so enormous, filled with so many clone-birds, that I felt like I was staring into an infinity mirror.
It was a moonless night not long ago in Northern California. With me were Alicia Santurio and Lewis Bernier, two activists from an animal-rights group called Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE. We had met a few hours earlier in a supermarket parking lot, where I wrote a lawyer’s phone number on my ankle and slipped my cellphone into a Faraday bag, which blocks wireless signals. The three of us got into a car; its driver stubbed out a cigarette and drove us to an unlit lane amid acres of paddocks and fields.
“From here, we’re going to walk single file, no lights,” Bernier said. “If we see anyone or hear anyone, we’re going to get down and lie on the ground.”
We hiked silently across dark farmland, shimmying through a series of barbed-wire and electric fences. A tense half hour later, we passed a red lagoon filled with feces and chemical runoff, and arrived at a set of industrial hangars, home to tens of thousands of birds laying eggs for high-end foods stores in the region. These birds were supposed to have access to fresh air and open space. But the open spaces available to them—wire lean-tos with a few tiny doors cut into the side of the hangar—were free of feathers and feces, meaning the birds were not using them.
The lights turned on in the hangar next to us, illuminating thousands of hens. “The fact that lights are being turned on at this time of night—they’re never getting a full sleep cycle,” Bernier explained in a whisper. Waking them up tricks their bodies into laying more eggs. We put on sterile coveralls and booties and went inside.
This is chicken farming in America, but what I was in was not a farm, not really. It was an industrial operation for delivering animal parts as cheaply and efficiently as
