Animal Chain Atrocities

Having recently read a book of startling facts associated with the manufacture of this country's meat supply, as well as its frozen meat export market, purging was the only remedy for depression. Ques

Animal Chain Atrocities

No longer a bucolic photo op
bedecking a cover of Life magazine

Free grazing
pastoral images
now but bewildered enslavement

Animal commodities
factory farms and feedlots
CAFO habitats raising
sixty billion a year for dinner tables

Chickens

Hi-Tech slaughter
football fields long
alethic poor
four walled ovens of another kind
debeaked and toe-chopped fowl
jammed in cages
made to stand in
assembly-line putrefaction

Wing stretching impossible
starvation strategy amok
lights off
long darkened days
lights on
long trickery days
springtime in winter
maximized egg laying
appeasing breakfast-insatiables

Cattle

Newborn calves
early prep
castrated within hours
crunched in miserable confinement

Brown and white fur for acres
a canvas of massacre
a sea of cattle
mooing for survival
moving mass
no escape
no Blue Grama Grass
Buffalo Grass off prairie
Yesterday's folklore

Then...

Three months before execution
feed dumped in highway-like divider troughs
grain fattening
ears implanted
anabolic steroids

Day of reckoning

Strong herded forward
weak cattle forklifted to their feet
into the slaughter chute all
hoisted upside down
eyes staring wild at blood drenched killing floors
fully conscious
skinned alive
legs cut off
while sport and laughter
fill the air

With stunning devices
electric pods
any not working used to hit
pried open mouths
more prods electrifying

Next stop

Happy meal pleasures

Hardly the American myth
cowboys herding cattle on the plains
for today
big dumb gentle beasts
chewing what cud they have
know not their horrible fate
becoming tomorrow night's
rib-eye steak in the making

Pigs and hogs

No Orwell's Animal Farm here
these pigs
with three-year-old-child-intelligence
used to thirty miles a day travel to
graze
root
interact with natural environments
live their highly social and active nature
are today
but tormented boars
castrated to barrow identity
jammed in small pens
no light
no mud
no straw
panicking
trampling each other
bloody fights
infections rampant
death prolonged
slaughterhouse waiting

Survivors

Pulled upon sharp hooks dangling
from overhead conveyer belts
bolt bullets shot in heads
bringing death
sliced-open bellies
rush of blood and entrails
all witnessed by live pigs
hanging from their own hooks
waiting their turn to become
sausage for pizza
holiday hams
shame for the conscious

Even arid winds of desert
pity the suffocating innocent
beneath airless breath of
Government
Industry
Media
eroding Nature's senses
promoting profits over compassion
technology over natural food
confusion over honesty

Yes

They live
these beasts
only minor rungs removed from us
incurring unnecessary suffering
for human-kind entitlement

Evolution's process
openly disgraced by butchery
while Man's dying conscience
remains mute

Who are the animals?