I'll Miss Karen Davis As One Of My Favorite People And Favorite Activists Of All Time
Karen Davis passed away recently after selflessly dedicating an enormous
portion of her life towards bettering existence for countless others.
UNPARALLELED SUFFERING
NOV 16
Karen Davis was the Founder and President of United Poultry Concerns, an
organization that educates and advocates for respectful and compassionate
attitudes and behavior towards domesticated birds. Although Karen’s focus
was on domestic birds at home with her bird sanctuary in Virginia and afar
wherever birds were being abused and killed by humans, she has always been a
fierce and unremittingly dedicated advocate for all animals who’ve fallen
prey to human domination, ignorance, and ill will. Karen passed away on
November 4, 2023 at her home and sanctuary in Machipongo, Virginia at the
age of 79.
The last time I saw Karen in person we discussed death and how we were both
looking forward to the time when that would come for us. Although we each
lived with purpose and could find moments of joy, we were daily repulsed by
the fact that so many individual beings are willfully restricted via human
choices from experiencing any degree of joy at all throughout their entire
duration of existence. When I heard that Karen died I was sad that this
world was now without such an amazing and unique human, but I was happy for
Karen to finally get her ending and to know that she was aware that she
lived a long and full life that left behind an incredible legacy of
beautifully articulated, truthful, thought-provoking, consistently
compassionate, and still relevant books, articles, podcasts, videos,
speeches, and more.
I’d like for this article to highlight some of her amazing writing. She
spoke on behalf of the animals with candor, passion, and brilliance. The
quotes I will share below come from the three books of hers that I have
read. All of her books can be purchased on the
United Poultry Concerns website.
I’ll be using images I’ve taken from 2015-2022 to accompany her quotes.
I’ve never been a well known photographer, but I’m grateful that Karen was
aware of my work and that we were able to collaborate on a bunch of projects
before her passing. We shared a lot of perspectives in common and both had a
mutual love for the other person’s work.
Several months before Karen’s passing I released a video called
True Sanctuary with Karen Davis.
Until our interview I had never heard anyone discuss the philosophical and
practical meaning of a sanctuary in such a lengthy, profound, and inspiring
way. I was delighted to have Karen’s participation for my video project and
I’m thrilled she got to see and share this video before she became decrepit.
The video made her very happy and if I remember correctly she described it
to me in an email as “perfect,” which she deserved much of the credit for
since it was her words that made the video so remarkable. You can watch the
video below.
All of the quotes below come from Karen Davis.
“…the largest class of innocent victims on earth.”
Over 50 chickens (previously used for egg laying) with slit
throats killed and “processed” by two people at the
choose-your-own and kill-your-own animals slaughterhouse called
Jeffries Chicken Farm in Inver Grove Heights, MN. What had the
birds ever done to deserve so much disregard and destruction?
“...the human manufacture of animal suffering is so pervasive that many
people find it hard even to regard the slaughter of animals as a form of
violence.”
A young boy who assisted in slaughtering this chicken for the
Kaporos ritual in Queens, NY holds them upside down as they
bleed to death. A fascinated and smiling young girl standing
just feet away, protected with plastic gloves and a modified
trash bag over her clothing, looks over as the violated life
drains from this innocent bird. The chicken had been thrown into
one of the upside down orange street cones, but jumped out while
experiencing severe pain.
“Since virtually everything that is done to farmed animals is in some degree
cruel, painful, injurious, and degrading, the only way animal farming can
proceed is by placing the entire enterprise beyond the law, shielded in a
false jargon of ‘humane treatment’ and ‘animal welfare.’”
Animal Welfare Approved Mary’s Free-Range Chickens stacked in
metal crates on a flatbed transport truck outside of a poultry
slaughterhouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Every truck delivering live
chickens for the purpose of killing them will contain chickens
who are injured, dying, and dead - whether the birds are coming
from a place with meaningless labels like “Free Range” and
“Animal Welfare Approved” or not.
“No federal laws protect chickens in the United States, and state
anti-cruelty laws typically exempt farming practices that would be illegal
if the animals were companion dogs and cats. Birds are excluded from the
Animal Welfare Act and from the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act.”
Fully intact chickens (some recently dead and some still alive)
in a rendering trailer on top of piles of body parts of
thousands of other chickens from earlier in the day. All these
chickens were from industrial egg farms. This facility in
Butterfield, MN has also been shown by the Humane Society of the
United States to allow hundreds of birds to be boiled alive in a
scalding tank each day and PETA has exposed them for allowing
thousands of birds to freeze to death while still crammed in the
truck crates. The facility has faced no legal or financial
consequences.
“...animals are forced to conform to human constructions that are alien and
inimical to animals, whereby they sustain a genocidal assault on their
identity.”
Cornish Cross chickens, the breed used for their flesh, lined up
in front of each of their exploiters at a county fair poultry
judging show in Texas. As you can see, the chickens aren’t
restrained by any tools or equipment, but they are inherently
restrained by their enormously overgrown bodies that are only
approximately 42 days old. Their young and developing limbs
can’t nearly support the weight of their freakishly large
overgrown baby bodies.
“There is no clear evidence that the sight of suffering evokes sympathy or
protest in the majority of people, and the first shock of seeing suffering
can wear off. Even if it doesn't, people can choose not to look."
A chicken tossed off of a roof in the freezing winter cold in
Ridgeland, Wisconsin over a huge crowd of enablers at the annual
Pioneer Days event. Whoever catches each chicken can do anything
they want with them. Many of the chickens suffer from frostbite
and lose their feet or some other essential part of their body.
“The animals are dominated by humans. Their food is chosen, their social,
familial, and physical environment is controlled, their reproductive organs
and activities are manipulated, and the length of their lives is determined
by humans. They can be abused at will based on economic ‘necessity.’”
Animals are viewed as a means to an end for us. Humans
prioritize their own lives, feelings, and interests over others,
no matter how trivial and easily avoidable the harm being done
to others is. What most people care about above all is the cost,
convenience, texture, and taste of what they purchase and ingest
- not the ethics of what they choose to ingest. A man in this
Canadian grocery store looks over at the roasted ducks with
their heads still attached, but their organs and guts removed.
The way the ducks hang are not too far different than how they
hang when they are shackled at the killing center before they
lose their lives.
“…look at the faces and eyes of the animals and observe their body language.
Notice their voices. The idea that human beings cannot logically recognize
suffering in a chicken, or draw meaningful conclusions about how a human
being would react to the conditions under which a caged hen lives, is
ridiculous. There is a basis for empathy and understanding in the fact of
human evolutionary continuity with other creatures that enables us to
recognize and infer, in those creatures, experiences similar to our own. The
fact that animals are forcibly confined in environments that reflect human
nature, not theirs, means that they are suffering much more than we know in
ways that we cannot fathom. If they preferred to be packed together without
contact with the world outside, then we would not need intensive physical
confinement facilities, and mutilations such as debeaking, since they would
voluntarily come together, live cordially, and save us money. The egg
industry thinks nothing of claiming that a mutilated bird in a cage is
‘happy,’ ‘content,’ and ‘singing,’ yet will turn around and try to
intimidate you with accusations of ‘anthropomorphism’ if you logically
insist that the bird is miserable.”
Chickens awaiting slaughter at a killing center in St. Paul, MN.
They are kept crammed with no access to food, water, or
protection from the weather. Their wide and terror-stricken eyes
are one of many behavioral indicators for how they feel.
“There are no ‘individuals,’ no drama on which to focus, only a scene of
abstract suffering. Their pain is not even minimally grasped by most
viewers, who are socialized not to perceive animals, especially ‘food’
animals, as individuals with feelings. These onlookers have no concept of
animals as sentient beings, let alone as individuals with projects of their
own of which they have been stripped, such as their own family and the
comfort it brings, which was their birthright in nature.”
Chickens being sold at a weekly “livestock” auction in Enumclaw,
Washington. People fill the bleachers and the floor and watch as
birds scream and cry out after they are pulled out of boxes and
held up obnoxiously by their fragile wings. Most people come to
the auction with an interest in purchasing animals to exploit
and kill, but some come just to hang out and pass the time.
“The fact that animals are suffering and dying for appetites that could be
satisfied in many other ways makes some, perhaps many, people uncomfortable,
though not necessary because of guilt. People get annoyed that you're
bothering them, trying to curtail their freedom and uncover a guilt that
they may not feel, or don't feel strongly enough, so that some end up
feeling ‘guilty’ because they don't feel guilty, just vexed that they're
being victimized.”
A chicken at a pop up petting zoo in Washington stares out at
the line of incoming humans, mostly parents and their children.
Instead of parents showing their kids the truth and darkness of
what happens to the chickens they and their peers are fed, which
would be highly relevant, they instead show their kids a more
well off chicken with some freedom of movement; ultimately
indoctrinating their children with a sanitized and inaccurate
view of how chickens are treated and kept.
“It has been said that if most people had direct contact with the
animals they consume, vegetarianism would soar, but history has yet to
support this hope.”
(when Karen says this I believe she means vegetarianism in the sense of
not consuming anything that humans take from animals, not just their
flesh)
Visitors at the Minnesota State Fair over at the “Hen House,” a
series of battery cages where hens spend their whole life in far
worse and filthier conditions than what is shown to the public.
The fair purposely uses less chickens per cage than there would
typically be as well as hens who are healthier and cleaner than
the norm. Even as good as they try to make it look, the chickens
still have little room to move and aren’t even able to spread
their wings or express any of their natural instincts. They
still stand on wire and have no stimulation other than the same
food pellets they eat all the time. The Hen House area tries to
promote the idea that the caged system is what’s ideal for
chickens since that’s how the majority of chickens used for
their eggs live, but in reality it’s just what’s most ideal for
exploiters and their profit motives.
“Why do we praise technology for developing substitutes for crude practices
in other areas of life while balking at its uses to eliminate
slaughterhouses, which technology can do?”
People seem to want better technology and innovative
alternatives when it comes to nearly everything except for our
use, abuse, and killing of animals. Although plant-based
products that have similar traits to their animal-based
counterparts have gained more popularity, most people still want
to continue eating “the real thing” and abstain from products
that don’t come from confinement buildings and violence.
“One morning I stood outside the Perdue plant along the
highway, and 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 dump trucks as the
driver turned the corner to bear these waste objects off to a landfill or
rendering plant somewhere."
[Talking about the Tyson and Perdue chicken slaughterhouses on route 13 near
her sanctuary]
Chicken heads, feet, and feathers on the ground in the parking
lot of a slaughterhouse in Minnesota. The slaughterhouse owner
and workers know this sight wouldn’t ruin anyones appetite so
they don’t bother doing anything about it.
“Seeing animals in industrialized settings such as factory farms encourages
the view that animals are inherently passive objects whose only role in life
is to serve the human enterprise.”
One of multiple windowless warehouse-style buildings on a single
property in Virginia full of tens of thousands of baby birds who
grow rapidly to be turned into flesh and sold at grocery stores
and restaurants. Like a sea of humans, all of these birds are
unique individuals.
“Factory-farmed chickens are alienated from their own societies. Their
species life is distorted by crowding and caging, by separation of parents
and offspring, by the huge numbers of birds crowded into vast confinement
buildings, and by the lack of natural contact with other age groups and
sexes within the species. By nature, chickens should be living in small
groups within larger flocks that spend their day actively foraging,
dustbathing, sunbathing, socializing and raising their young in a sunlit,
forested habitat.”
A caged egg farm in Oregon with numerous sheds that are longer
than a few football fields each, full of what seems like
never-ending chickens. The chickens who are able to survive will
live in these conditions for 1.5 to 2 years and then be gassed
to death onsite or hauled off to a slaughterhouse.
“The forced labor of chickens on factory farms is internalized forced labor.
Like everything else in their lives, including their lives, the work imposed
on these birds in invisible. This is because, in addition to its being
conducted inside total confinement buildings, the work has been built into
the chicken's genome with the result that the bird's body is locked in a
state of perpetual warfare with itself and with the essential nature of the
chicken as such. A former chicken farmer captures something of the cruel and
unnatural burden embedded within these birds when she writes that ‘the sign
of a good meat flock is the number of birds dying from heart attacks.’”
As chickens get closer to their slaughter age of about
42-days-old more of them begin to perish from heart attacks,
respiratory diseases, starvation and dehydration from not being
able to walk to the food and water, and more. Some chicken
exploiters teach their children how to count by counting the
dead bodies they find during their walkthroughs.
“In the most encompassing sense, factory-farmed chickens are alienated from
surrounding nature, from an external world that answers intelligibly to
their inner world. There is nothing for them to do or see or look forward
to, no voluntary actions are permitted, no joy or zest of living. They just
have to be, in an excremental void, until we kill them.”
A chicken dying on top of a pile of manure. They have nothing to
do except wait to die.
“This is the world that we have made for chickens to live in. Some people
feel threatened by the prospect that in recognizing and upholding the
dignity of other living beings, we betray our own dignity as a species. It
should rather be asked how the human species gains dignity by creating
worlds such as this for anyone to live in.”
Chickens at a small “humane” farm inside a crate before they get
pulled out to be pushed into a kill cone and have their throats
slit. The frightened and panicked chickens huddle together and
face away from the murder scene that will inevitably and
imminently involve them too.
“Farmed-animal production is and always has been based on manipulating and
controlling animals’ sex lives and reproductive organs. Their bodies are up
for grabs for farmers to do with as they please.”
A female turkey being held upside down by their young exploiter
and felt up on their breasts and other body parts by a judge at
the Austin Livestock Show turkey judging event. These birds grow
unnaturally large and would never be able to reproduce
naturally. Workers at different facilities forcibly rape male
turkeys for their semen and rape female turkeys to impregnate them.
“In my opinion, the abusiveness of the whole ordeal includes using the
defenseless bodies of animals to produce babies whose life is only or mainly
to suffer, and whose only reason for being alive is to be made dead.”
A turkey being killed on a small “humane” farm near
Thanksgiving. Their whole life was only to get to the point of
this day and then into a human’s body.
“I see the ability of chickens to bond with me and be endearingly
companionable as an extension of their ability to adapt their native
instincts to habitats and human-created environments that stimulate their
natural ability to perceive analogies and fit what they find where they
happen to be to the fulfillment of their own needs and desires.”
Karen Davis and one of her many loved and adored residents at
her United Poultry Concerns sanctuary. I visited this beautiful
sanctuary twice and this was on my first visit.
“My experience with chickens for three decades has shown me that chickens
are conscious and emotional beings with adaptable sociability and a range of
intentions and personalities. If there is one trait above all that leaps to
my mind in thinking about chickens when they are enjoying their lives and
pursuing their own interests, it is cheerfulness. Chickens are cheerful
birds, quite vocally so, and when they are dispirited and oppressed their
entire being expresses this state of affairs as well. The fact that chickens
become lethargic in continuously barren environments, instead of proving
that they are stupid or impassive by nature, shows how sensitive these birds
are to their surroundings, deprivations, and prospects. Likewise, when
chickens are happy, their sense of wellbeing resonates unmistakably.”
Karen loved being around her rescued birds and getting to see
them thrive and be protected from the cruelty of most of our
species. I think being around so much happiness helped her a lot
to continue to be so prolific throughout her career. It should
be noted that in some of the quotes above Karen mentions
“factory farming” but she was just as opposed to the smaller
places that exploited animals and eventually considered all
exploited animals used for food purposes to fit under the term
factory farming.
With deep love and admiration to the incredibly talented, dedicated, and
compassionate Karen Davis. I’ve never personally known a human ever
before who left such an incredible legacy behind.
Thank you by the way for never bringing more humans into this world and
for prioritizing your life around caring for already existing life that
was in need of advocacy, protection, and love!
-Unparalleled Suffering