Delmarva residents don't want chicken sheds, slaughterhouses and toxic waste in their backyard. But as noted, the Delmarva Peninsula is a microcosm of a global predicament. If we don't want the chicken industry in our backyard -- and our backyard is ultimately the planet -- we must start by getting the chicken houses and slaughterhouses out of our kitchens and expand our efforts for a livable planet from there.
Epilogue
One morning I stood outside the Perdue chicken slaughter complex on Route 13 in Accomack County, Virginia. Happening to look down at my feet I saw, beaten into the dirt, hundreds of little chicken faces, small decapitated heads and impressions of previous little faces that must have toppled out of the dump trucks as the driver turned the corner to bear these waste objects off to a landfill or rendering plant somewhere.
One late February afternoon, on impulse, I swerve off Route 13 onto the road leading into the Tyson complex, pass the turnstile, and sit in my car with the windows up, gazing at the scene around back. It is an ugly, dirty, desolate sight. A truckload of chickens sits alone on the dock next to the building where the people inside will kill them, and it will not be a humane death. Apart from some scuttling rubbish and a few seagulls here and there, nothing from where I sit appears to move. The chickens appear silent and still, and no human beings are visible in this moment of understanding, for the umpteenth time, the presumption of being a witness with something to say about another soul's experience of being in hell.
Life doesn't have to be this way, nor should it be.
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