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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE NEW CHICKEN RUN MOVIE IS FUN — AND A DAMNING CRITIQUE OF
AMERICA’S MEAT INDUSTRY  
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Kenny Torrella
December 8, 2023
VOX
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_ The film is a critique of the factory farm industry’s deceptive
marketing to convince the public that animals are treated better than
they are; a heavy message packaged in an entertaining children’s
movie, and a radical departure from the usual. _

Chickens in cages at a commercial egg farm in the US. Edwin
Remsburg/VW Pics via Getty Images, Getty Images

 

The 2000 children’s movie Chicken Run is one of the darker and more
subversive films made for kids: The story follows a flock of lovable,
though quite miserable, chickens who conspire to escape a farm before
their impending slaughter.

Despite the grim subject matter, it’s charming and entertaining,
fully earning its 97 percent critic’s rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The
script reads like it was written by PETA, yet it was a box office hit
and remains the highest-grossing stop-motion animated movie ever made.

Next week, Netflix is releasing a sequel — Chicken Run: Dawn of the
Nugget — with the same theme but updated to reflect our increasingly
dystopian animal farming system.

This time around, instead of escaping a farm, the same chickens are
breaking into one to rescue one of their flock members (which also
happens to be the strategy of some animal rights activists).

The farm in question is Fun-Land Farms (tagline: “Where chickens
find their happy endings”), an enormous, futuristic poultry
operation in which a mad scientist has created a device that, when
worn around the chickens’ necks, makes them happy to be slaughtered.

To some of the chickens, Fun-Land looks like the idyllic pasture
depicted in the advertisement, but it’s all an illusion — a big
room painted to look like an old-timey farm. In one scene, a chicken
slams into a wall, which is painted to look like the sky — seemingly
an homage to that haunting scene in The Truman Show. When the
mind-altering devices are briefly turned off, the chickens are
horrified by their factory farm reality.

The film feels like a pointed critique of the factory farm
industry’s use of deceptive marketing to convince the public that
animals are treated far better than they really are, what’s known as
“humanewashing.” It’s a heavy message packaged in an
entertaining, if formulaic, children’s movie, and it’s a radical
departure from how animal farming is typically depicted in
children’s literature and film.

What should kids know about meat?

In the mid-2000s, author and illustrator Ruby Roth was teaching art to
elementary school kids. Roth was, and still is, a vegan, and sometimes
students would ask her about what she was eating. She looked for a
children’s book that explained her belief system and showed the
reality of animal factory farming in a way children could understand,
but she couldn’t find one, so she eventually made her own: That’s
Why We Don’t Eat Animals.

Published in 2009, the book’s depiction of animal agriculture was
pretty tame. It occasionally illustrated some standard forms of animal
cruelty — like keeping egg-laying hens in tiny cages — in a way
that is sad but not graphic. Still, the book caused an uproar.

Roth said she was accused of scaring and brainwashing children. Child
psychologists on the Today show, she recalled, discussed the supposed
danger of reading her book to kids.

“The most fascinating part of the whole outrage was that by calling
my book controversial, it seemed to me we were admitting that what we
do to animals is too scary to talk about,” Roth said. “So to me,
that said we want to be willfully ignorant and impose that ignorance
on our children.”

But kids had a very different reaction to the book, Roth said,
proposing practical solutions like buying leather-free shoes or
changing what they eat, and wildly imaginative ones, like “flying
over the nation and rescuing all the animals.”

“When you speak frankly to children, they really pay attention
because they’re used to people speaking down to them or sugarcoating
conversations,” Roth added. “I found that kids were engaged and
interested.”

It’s easy to dismiss Roth as someone who’s pushing her ideology
onto kids, but I’d argue the default message society sends kids
about animal farming is worse — in that it’s a total fabrication.
Kids love animals, yet children’s books lead them to believe that
farmed animals live happily and can freely move about. That these
animals go on to become the burgers and nuggets kids eat is virtually
never mentioned.

“Children are socialized not to identify the animal that they’re
eating,” said Anastassiya Andrianova, an associate professor of
English at North Dakota State University who researches how animal
farming is portrayed in children’s literature. “Not only is the
animal absent when they’re presented on a plate as meat, but even
the way that our language functions, it camouflages and mystifies that
link.” Pig meat is called “pork,” “bacon” and “sausage,”
while cow’s meat is “beef” and cow’s milk is just “milk.”

In reality, 99 percent of the 9.7 billion land animals raised for food
in the US every year live in brutish conditions on factory farms,
where they’re mutilated without pain relief, crammed together in
warehouses, and forced to wallow in their own waste. Many are drugged
up on antibiotics to survive these conditions, and they’ve been bred
to grow bigger, faster, and pump out more eggs and milk, all to the
detriment of their welfare.

When children are shown the reality of these conditions, some can
sense something is wrong. Mercy for Animals, a farm animal welfare
nonprofit I worked at prior to Vox, created a video in which children
are shown pictures of hens and pigs in tiny cages, a standard farming
practice. “They’re dirty and trapped,” a 4-year-old says.
“It’s not good to treat any animal like that,” says a
7-year-old.

When I was a kid, I probably would have had a similar reaction, but I
didn’t learn about any of this until I was in high school.

There’s no simple answer to the question of what age children should
be given the cold, hard facts of food production, and in how much
detail. But Roth is right that the hysteria over her book says a lot
more about adults’ discomfort with how animals become meat than
about what’s good for children.

That discomfort is sometimes described by psychologists as the “meat
paradox,” defined in a 2010 paper as the “psychological conflict
between people’s dietary preference for meat and their moral
response to animal suffering.” It shows up in the many lies we tell
ourselves, and pass down to our children, about our relationship to
animals.

One study of Australian parents, for example, found that the majority
falsely tell their children that animals are “killed carefully and
without cruelty.” Thirty to forty percent of American kids aged 4 to
7 think common animal products, like bacon, hotdogs, hamburgers,
shrimp, and even chicken nuggets, come from plants, a 2021 study
found.

As children age, their natural love for animals tends to be tamped
down. Kids are taught that “becoming an adult requires you to sort
of leave behind your attachment and fondness for animals,”
Andrianova said. The relationship morphs from one of kinship to one of
hierarchy, with humans on top. Animals are “like us, and yet
they’re separate from us in ways that we need to justify because we
need to justify using animals for labor, consumption, clothing, and
other kinds of technological means,” she added. “This paradox is
at the very core of who we are as humans.”

Not every piece of children’s media that takes place on a farm needs
to be the next Chicken Run or That’s Why We Don’t Eat Animals. But
it’s reasonable to hope that kids should be informed enough to at
least understand chicken nuggets come from chickens, to have a sense
of what turning animals into meat entails, and to have the ability to
follow their moral instincts and have some say in what they eat. The
same goes for adults. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that consumers
so easily fall for meat industry advertising that makes farms look
like the version they internalized from children’s literature.

I can already hear farm state politicians excoriating the evils of
“critical farming theory” if children’s media actually began to
reflect the reality of animal agriculture. But we might become a more
humane society if we were more honest with ourselves, and children,
about where meat comes from.

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