An Open Letter to the Chickens from Farmer Bezos

Many, many thousands of years ago, before any of you were born, even before I was born, chickens and humans were in a life-or-death struggle.  Hard to believe, isn't it, from the comfort of your high-rise chicken condo, but it's true.  Humans hunted wild chickens for their pelts, and chickens in turn savagely attacked humans with razor-sharp claws and beaks.  It was a terrible time.  Mother chickens told their hatchlings never to trust any chicken over four feet tall, especially if it didn't have feathers and carried a club.

At one point, chickens were hunted nearly to extinction.  Think of that.  A world without chickens.

Then came an important advance, chicken farming, and an era of cooperation and peaceful relations arose between humans and chickens, a golden age.  Humans would care for thousands and thousands of chickens in a single building where no chicken ever had to leave the comfort of their tiny compartments or go outside, and in return humans took the eggs, which they carefully incubated and later fed them on the the choicest and most succulent mealy bugs and allowed them to frolic in unbelievably verdant fields forever and ever until the end of eternity.  

At first it was only eggs that were selected for this great honor, but the kindly humans, began to see how unfair this was.  What about the chickens who were already hatched?  Did they have to live out their lives on this earthly plain with no reward?  And so humans began an innovative program of selecting certain chickens for the processing plant, where, they, like so many generations of eggs before them, would live in perfect bliss and comfort and safety forever and ever until the end of time.

Now, we are on the dawn of another new era for chicken-kind: hydroponically-grown, genetically-modified, featherless, boneless-chickens, raised in comfort and luxury in big metal vats fed intravenously with liquid protein, antibiotics, steroids, and chicken-processing-plant floor-scrapings.  This means more chickens than ever before.  Now thousands of chickens get to live not just in a building, but a single large container - they don't need oxygen because their feeding mixture is oxygenated already and they don't need sunlight because studies show chickens don't need sunlight.  A win-win.

And yet, some chickens selfishly and maliciously have been complaining.  And they've been urging other chickens to complain as well.  They say their compartments are too "small," that there's no "air," that they're full of "feces."  Put simply, this is collusion, and is illegal.  Just recently a human court found some chickens guilty of collusion and sentenced them to fines and imprisonment, but certain chickens are at it again.  Some chickens just never learn.

The time has come to reveal something about the processing plant that no chicken has ever before been told.  Not all chickens get to live for eternity in perfect happiness.  Most chickens, yes, but some chickens - chickens who are disloyal, chickens who are ungrateful, chickens who spread rumors and collude - these chickens spend eternity in unbearable chicken torment - their feathers are endlessly, plucked, and when they grow back, they're plucked again!  And there's food, delicious, yummy bugs and worms - but they're always just out of reach.  And these bad chickens are in terrible torment, and there's endless clucking and gnashing of beaks.  Truly, I would be moved to pity for these chickens, if they didn't deserve their plight so deeply.

This is just something to keep in mind if the chicken in the next compartment over tries to incite you to disobedience or ingratitude and against the humans, who wish only for your well-being and happiness.

We humans are friendly and intense.  But if push comes to shove, we settle for being intense.

Sincerely,

Farmer Bezos