Keeping the chickens in the first place, of course, is seen as just as cruel. To the vegan animal activist, the only correct option is to go back in time and stop animals from becoming domesticated for use by humans. Barring that, we should simply stop "exploiting" animals for their products and meat. The whole animal-based food industry should dissolve and we should release all the animals into the wild, or something.
The problem I mainly have with veganism is that we were given dominion over animals. A strictly biblical interpretation reveals we can, actually, use animals for their resources. However, when we love and respect God and His creation, we would treat animals with respect, too. This does not mean not killing them for their meat or keeping them for their products, but doing these things with the reverence of God on the forefront of our minds.
Many of the chickens this woman rescues have missing feathers, wounds, are pale, and scared of the outside. They were raised trapped in a coop with no nighttime - chickens naturally lay more consistently with more exposure to light. Artificially encouraged to lay as much as possible and fast as possible, they are discarded long before they stop laying entirely, but merely when they are not as productive as a young hen, replaced with a new one that lays more reliably. When you make a chicken lay as nonstop as possible, they entirely stop laying, sooner. You burn them out, so to say. Chickens lose feathers because all their protein and energy goes to laying eggs. One of the ways to tell when a chicken isn't laying anymore is actually if her feathers are nice looking - it means fewer resources are going to eggs.
So this woman rescues these chickens, gets them back into shape, and sells them to people who are looking to keep chickens as pets. Her clientele are the kind of people who also think animals shouldn't be used for our benefit, and they give these chickens a "retirement".
All of these behaviors lie in the concept that they believe animals have rights and that each one of their lives is as unique and valuable as a human life. These are bastardized concepts of our broken world - we get our wires crossed and apply truths in a false way. Animals should be respected, and there is nothing innately wrong with giving a chicken a retirement, but their motivations are born out of a warped worldview. If all they were doing was offering to give chickens a retirement as opposed to using them for meat simply because they enjoyed pet chickens, there would be no fault. The fault lies in the application of thought of believing that it is wrong to use the chicken for meat or eggs in the first place.
What does it really mean to "have dominion over animals"? Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. Genesis 1:26 - As God has dominion over us, He gave us dominion over animals. In the beginning, people and animals lived in harmony, but immediately after the fall we see God Himself create clothes for his disobedient creation out of animal skins. Now, we are clearly not congruent with God, but what this display shows is that the death of animals is a result of the fall. In this broken world, animals die and are used as resources for our needs.
Even still, we did not have permission from God to actually eat animals until after the great flood. In Genesis 9:3 we see "Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything." Of course, some animals were still unclean, and yet later still when Jesus came to fulfill the law, we were given permission to eat what were formerly classified as unclean animals as well. And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) Mark 7:18-19 - Why would all these things be in the bible if we were not actually supposed to eat meat at all? We could not fathom being given permission to eat animals without the expectation that we would then eat those animals. It would make absolutely no sense for God to permit these things but then expect us to not do them. It's simply an illogical and absurd claim that should require no further attention.
Personally, I'm staunchly opposed to raising chickens locked inside, covered eternally in artificial light. I definitely don't condone the process of keeping hens like robots and not animals - but the need to do this arises from the way egg farming and selling in the large-scale is regulated. The farmer is likely operating barely above breaking even, if not merely breaking even. They must, to make a living at all, treat their hens like robots. If the hens must be treated this way to keep the farmers human family fed, then it's acceptable. That's the final truth - human lives are more valuable than animals'. But what situation is making the farmer require such robotic operation of his hens?
I am against not the farmer but the obtrusive regulations of the big government who force the people who make our food to behave certain ways to survive. Ethical animal treatment isn't profitable, not because people don't want to pay for the difference, but because the government forcibly makes it less profitable due to their regulations. Small scale operations where a farmer has perhaps a couple flocks of chickens and sells them on the roadside or to the local grocery store would be great - but the government makes it nearly impossible to get into that business.
It varies state to state, but at least I know here you can't have, say, 35 chickens and sell ten dozen eggs a week to the grocery store - the licenses and fees and government intrusion is excessive. First, you must own enough land to be permitted to have so many chickens. Secondly, you must be open to intrusive and surprise inspection and be held to a standard higher than that of a large operation. As a residential person simply looking to own chickens and sell eggs, you must submit to more regulation than a company or business that operates a chicken based business. Why? It's designed that way on purpose by bloated government regulations intentionally looking to keep small suppliers out of the way of larger operations.
You have to expand to a larger operation to be able to start making money this way - and depending on your state, you may have to bend to intense regulations to sell even one dozen a week, to any human person. It's illegal for me to sell any amount of "unregulated" eggs to any person. If I want to make $3.50 a week selling eggs I have to have a $125 license that needs to be renewed every year and subject to random and unannounced inspections of my single coop containing fewer than 10 chickens. To sell to a grocery store requires an even more expensive license subject to the same renewal fees and additional regulation and intrusion. Once you've expanded to a larger operation, you've spent so much on the whole project - superfluous fees that don't actually have anything to do with raising your chickens - that you're starting out in debt, in the negative, and to push anything close to a profit, you have to cut corners. And for whatever reason, the government lets the larger businesses cut those corners, while tiny operations cannot.
The vegan would say the solution to this is to simply stop eating animal products. No amount of keeping animals is ethical, just because they have concluded so through faulty logic. They magically improvised human attributes to chickens and now it's unethical to keep a chicken for eggs no matter how many, how much attention is paid, how well kept, or whether they will be allowed to live their entire natural lives even after they finish laying. But we see this is simply not the case - that elevation of animals to the level of a human soul is based in a biblical truth that has been warped into something nonsensical. Even removed from a biblical standard, it is nothing more than a fantasy to think humankind could simply forgo animal products entirely in a safe way. Unfortunately I've seen more than one vegan admit - either accidentally or proudly - that it does not matter to them if human lives suffer in exchange for the end of animal suffering. For the most part, vegans know it's impossible to remove animal products from our food web without people dying - but they're okay with it. Not only have they attributed human value to animals, but they've devalued human life in the process.
So the real world, non-fiction solution to animal cruelty in factory farming lies in removing the intense, intrusive government regulations so that people who keep animals can make a living and feed their families while treating their animals with respect, as reverence toward God to His creation. Five modest egg operations could easily supply a grocery store with more than enough eggs to feed a local community. Providing you have the right chicken breeds, you get about as many eggs per day as you have chickens, and if you're operating intentionally to sell eggs, you've surely done your research. The problem has nothing to do with the inability for such a system to exist, the problem is in the intrusive regulations of government. Surely, people say, government regulations are good because they keep people safe. This is naive, as these regulations are not designed to keep people safe, but exist mostly as a result of lobbyists for factory farm conglomerates attempting to keep competition out of their way. Indeed, why else would small operations be subject to harsher regulations than large operations? What is good enough for the chickens living in an enormous egg bunker with 20,000 other chickens is surely good enough for 35 chickens in a modest coop in someone's backyard. It's illogical to propose otherwise - they are the same animal. Varying regulations based on operation size is arbitrary and not based in science, fact, or logic - and especially not in the interest of the animals.
I'll take a couple more moments to address another veganism argument. First, we see the "animals are valuable and should be respected for having souls" juxtaposed to "animals can eat meat because they are unthinking and acting on instinct and don't have a choice" argument. This is even further juxtaposed toward the idea that we could feed our dogs vegan diets (as they are omnivores and "can thrive" on vegan diets). Some vegans would of course say they shouldn't be keeping the dogs as pets at all, while PETA goes around killing as many pets as possible including abducting and euthanizing them.
It should be obvious that these stances are all unable to stand next to one another. The idea is that, as advanced humans who can make choices, we should make the choice not to eat animals. Animals can't make that choice, and so a fox killing an outdoor cat is just nature and the fox is at no moral failure for doing so. It shouldn't take a lot of thinking to conclude that, perhaps, this places the animal on a lower pedestal as far as consideration toward containing a human-congruent soul. This does not forgo respect toward them, but continuing to keep them on the same level of respect requirements as humans would be an illogical conclusion of these stances. And yet they continue to believe both of these things at once.
If dogs can be fed vegan diets opposed to their natural inclinations to eat meat, that would violate the dogs' instincts. So by doing this, I would contest you aren't respecting the natural order of the dogs' behavior. You are forcing a choice on them, your own human-led decisions made with your advanced human brain you already established is capable of making choices while animals' brains aren't. Of course the dog will eat whatever you give it, it's hungry. When I was younger once I put a bunch of vegetables in my dogs' food bowls because I thought they were hungry. They were so excited to see that I put food in their bowls - and they dove in only to stop short, smell everything, and walk away.
Dogs may be biologically omnivores but that doesn't mean they actively eat vegetables. They crave meaty protein, and can merely digest and process non-meat to their advantage as a survival benefit. We all know cats require a strict protein diet and could never be forced by a vegan owner to eat a vegan diet and not suffer immensely for it, but vegans see the omnivore and go rogue, feeding their dogs processed protein feed disguised as being meat flavored by additives and act like their dog is a vegan. Honestly it's nuts.
It's possible to be cruel to animals, and I would contest the main problems here are overbearing governments and humans without reverence for their Creator. Of course, regulations for the safety of consumers are not intrinsically immoral, but many of these are actually money grabs by the government in disguise of "consumer protections". Why should the license to sell one dozen eggs a week cost the same as the one to sell five hundred dozen a week? Why create a roadblock like this? Why make it require renewal every year, for the same initial price? It's just a money grab to the detriment of communities as a whole, which would surely benefit from small scale egg operations providing food to them.
They could have easily made the license not only not require money to be renewed, but free in the first place and only require an inspection - surely a negligible cost to the government, truly only for "consumer safety", for the good of the local community who now has a new source of food. The license fee doesn't help them make money toward insuring small scale agriculture is regulated properly, it does nothing but stops you from starting up entirely unless you have enough money to put in at the get go to make sure you make more money than you're going to spend on regulations and licensing - and make enough money that the additional daily effort you will have to put in to satisfy the intrusive, heightened regulations is worth it.
The fee of $125 is so much for someone looking to sell a dozen or two per week that they wouldn't break even for nine months of selling one dozen a week at $3.50/doz, resulting in a profit of $42 at the end of the year, with the same overbearing regulations as someone making ~$680 a year profit selling give or take four dozen a week (which is still pitiful, if we're honest). Some people do want to keep just a few chickens - two or three chickens will make just short of two dozen a week. Assuming you keep some and sell the remaining dozen a week for profit, the only real option to you in light of the government overhead is to simply eat way more eggs a week, as the effort required to sell that extra dozen "legally" is absurd. Now a potential customer who would love your eggs from loved and nurtured chickens they could stop by and personally watch frolic in your backyard is resigned to mystery eggs from the grocery store. The only winner is the sustainment of the factory farm conglomerates and the government that profits from them.
So, if we are honest, vegans are part of the problem of animals being mistreated because they mask the true problem and provide the incorrect solution as loudly as possible. People with the right solutions are smeared as animal haters by the vegans (keeping animals at all is wrong!) and seen as suspicious and entitled by regulation-lovers (the outrageous fees and upkeep is for our safety!) while the government continues to dictate how we can make, eat, and buy our food. The key to the alleviation of animal suffering is fewer factory farms and an increase in small operations that make it easier to treat the animals like living creatures, but the system is set up specifically to avoid that result. This obvious reality is drowned out by a sea of ideological and impossible cries for the total and complete "liberation" of "animal slaves", making it even more difficult to acknowledge that it is actually bad for animals to suffer without being dismissed out of hand by people tired of loud and obnoxious vegans.
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