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Violence isn't so cool for the chicken
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Published: November 7, 2009
Recently, after paying good money to watch a movie, I walked out after 45 minutes. The film was just one sequence after another of brutal killing. No plot — just violent killing. People who write movies that sensationalize killing should have to experience what they believe to be "entertainment."
They should go to their grandmother's house and kill chickens.
When I was young we would go to Grandmamma's farm about once a month. She insisted on cooking fresh chicken, and everyone in the family —aunts, uncles, cousins and others — would help butcher a number of birds.
Grandmamma could not stand to buy those chickens in a store. She said that store-bought chickens were raised in buildings — they never saw the sun, were fed machined food and were never happy or care-free. She said you could taste the unhappiness in commercial chickens and she just wouldn't think of putting that type of chicken in her Sears and Roebuck pots.
She raised her own birds, and they got to scratch for bugs, eat grasshoppers, run from the dogs, sleep in a dry coop with other chickens, stretch their wings, cluck nonsense and thus became well-rounded birds. She said it all made for great taste.
The family would meet at her house on a designated Saturday and sit around a big pot of coffee and biscuits. The adults would joke, laugh and catch up on the latest gossip. Then we got started.
My job was whatever any adult told me to do, which usually involved getting in the chicken pen and culling a bird away from the others. I would drive it to a corner of the pen, where I'd catch the bird by its feet. With the chicken upside down flapping its wings, I'd carry it to whoever was holding an ax. They always stood by an old tree stump in the back yard. Then I'd go back for another.
The adult would hold the bird by the legs, lower the chicken until its head was on the block and then with one hand bring the ax down quickly. One minute the chicken sees life upside down — interesting — maybe thinks about how this will be one heck of a great story to tell the others back at the coop tonight and— thwack! The chicken never thinks again.
I was just a foot soldier in the organization doing what I was told, following orders. Sometimes I was the one with the ax and prayed I would not miss. I would feel the bird go limp and I would be sad and relieved. There is a seriousness you experience when you hold something that was alive and kicking just a second ago and now it's dead. You can almost hear the life go out of it. You wished there was another way.
Whenever the first chicken was killed, the laughter of the adults stopped and their talk became low in short monotone bursts. They went about their jobs boiling water, sharpening knives and filling sacks with feathers. They became efficient so this business could end quickly. To take life was a serious matter. You didn't kid around — this wasn't entertainment.
So if people who wrote movies had to participate in that type of a Saturday with chickens, entertainment would change. Movies would be more about blues skies, laughter, heroes and funny stories. Hollywood would have to hire people who could talk in complete sentences. An axe would not be a clothing accessory.
I'd probably sit through the whole thing and buy the extra large mega bag of popcorn!
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