Words by Matt Harnett

Photos by Jo-Anne McArthur, We Animals Archive

This story was originally published in Issue 3.

How do activists go about changing minds? Matt Harnett steals some chickens in pursuit of an alternative future.

TW: Some of the images in this article depict animals in traumatic conditions, and may cause distress.

Some years ago, on a bleak, rainy night, I broke into a factory farm and stole two dozen chickens.

I was with an activist group that knew a farm with a broken gate. We’d been introduced by friends of friends from university. That night, four of us slunk into one of the pitch-dark sheds that held the hens. The air outside the shed was cold and miserable, but inside it was cloying, thick and warm. It held the organic reek of thousands of tiny bodies pressed up against each other – the stink got into our clothes and forced its way down our throats, almost choking us.

These were battery hens, bred to produce as many eggs as quickly as possible. Crammed into a space the size of a cat carry cage with six or seven other birds, they quickly lost feathers and became listless; their beaks were clipped so they couldn’t peck each other from stress or boredom. After a working life of 18 months or so, they’d be too compromised to feed to humans, so instead they’d get made into pet food.

Their featherless bodies felt scaly and warm, almost reptilian, as we pulled them out of their cages. Transformed from individual birds into homogenous components of the industrial food system, their innate behaviours and chicken-ness had become irrelevant to their primary purpose: gaining weight quickly, producing eggs reliably and expiring predictably. Kept since birth in this shed, where it was either dark or lit by rows of fluorescent lights, they’d go their whole lives without seeing the sky – until their final day, when they were taken for slaughter.

My role in this misadventure was to document the conditions these unhappy creatures were living in, and, as a student journalist, publicise my findings as widely as possible. It was one thing to buy cheap cage eggs in the supermarket, less than half the price of the hippy-dippy organic free-range ones a shelf across, but it was another thing – we believed – to do this while understanding where those eggs came from. We were out to capture hearts and minds, as well as to make a difference to some tiny minority of the birds on the farm; the few lucky ones we saved would go to a rescue shelter, where they’d learn what grass and sunlight felt like, and discover things like rain and walking.

Eventually the light from our torches began waking the hens, and we had to leave as hundreds of them began calling out in the darkness. It took days to get the stink of chicken shit out of my hair.

A couple of weeks later, my article was published to the resounding indifference of the student body. Nobody likes to be told what to eat, and food choice is a profoundly personal decision, so perhaps moralising student journalists shouldn’t be surprised their exposés don’t dent demand for poached egg brunches.

Nevertheless, the decade since my ineffectual pleading has seen some surprising change in the factory farm landscape. Our food supply hasn’t become cruelty free overnight, but there has been incremental legal and cultural progress, driven largely by consumer behaviour. The rows of cage-laid eggs in supermarkets are slowly ceding shelf-space to cartons covered with ticks and accreditations.

Change is painfully, ineffectually slow, but it’s happening. What gives?

The idiom ‘life imitates art’ is perhaps taken most literally by those really hoping it’s the straightforward truth. Maybe that’s why, since the turn of the century, there has been an unprecedented glut of activist films and documentaries dealing with the treatment of animals – as if, by deliberately creating a body of culture with a certain ethical stance, this will seep out and permeate broader society. That’s why some of the best direct actions by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) take on the aesthetics of performance art: having nude celebrities photographed with the caption “We’d rather go naked than wear fur” or comparing a kennel club’s fetishisation of ‘pure’ dog breeds to the Ku Klux Klan. More than pure publicity, they’re saying something – or at least trying to.

Earthlings, narrated by Joaquin Phoenix, didn’t pull any punches in its exploration of the different ways profit can be extracted from animal bodies and corpses. From dogs and dolphins to more traditional ‘meat’ species like chickens and pigs, the 2005 sleeper hit offers a thoroughly horrifying (but gripping) look into our relationship with a range of fellow creatures.

More recently, Factory Farm attempts to make this sense of confrontation more immersive by filming 360-degree footage of working factory farms. “Regular footage of animal cruelty just feels like you are looking at a flat window, which is easy to emotionally distance yourself from,” observes Danfung Dennis, founder of the VR production company behind the 2016 film. “When viewed in virtual reality, you feel you are actually inside a factory farm in close proximity to the animals.”

It’s the footage that does the talking.

The conversation shifts in fits and starts, driven largely by consumer behaviour.

What documentaries like Factory Farm and Earthlings have in common is that, although they might be narrated, it’s the footage that does the talking. Videos of animals being flayed or crushed or mutilated don’t require explanatory footnotes or charts; we watch the pictures and recognise suffering instinctively.

This truth, long known by documentarians, is also realised by activist groups more broadly. That’s why you don’t see dry reports from animal advocacy groups making news headlines – you see hidden camera footage of animals kicked to death. While the UN releases detailed, exhaustive reports on the ways our climate is becoming irreparably damaged, these lack the visceral punch of a single picture of a starving polar bear.

Of course, it’s another thing to get people to watch this horrifying imagery – however affecting it may be. Rather than the slow burn of brutal documentaries that few of us have the stomachs for, it’s the occasional, breathtaking instances of animal cruelty that make the headlines. They can also be instrumental in spurring concrete action.

In 2011, animal rights activists in 12 Indonesian abattoirs recorded footage that revealed the brutal mistreatment of cattle; this sparked such aggressive public outcry that the Australian Government was obliged to suspend live animal exports to Indonesia for six months.

Not that this is progress in any linear sense. After the horrifying headlines have been and gone, and after the suspensions are lifted, what remains is often less like effective legislation than lip service – and without permanent, enforced legislation, history repeats itself. Australia’s exporting more live animals than ever, they’re still dying by the thousand in squalid, barbaric conditions, and attempts to change the status quo often come up frustratingly short.

Even so, the conversation shifts in fits and starts, driven largely by consumer behaviour. After years – decades – of hearing about depraved factory farming practices, of watching the evening news to see yet another whistleblower talk about industry conditions, people just aren’t buying eggs like they used to. In 2009, free-range eggs made up five percent of the market; in 2017, just eight years later, that figure had exploded to 40 percent, according to research by the Australian Egg Corporation. Today, fewer than half the eggs in supermarkets are cage laid.

The dramatic increase in ‘ethical’ consumption is helped along by iteratively better labelling laws: voluntary in 2012; mandatory in 2016; and now, finally, aligned with what most people understand ‘free range’ to actually mean – at least a square metre per bird, with regular and meaningful outside access. Cultural factors also help. The paleo diet has a lot to answer for, but a growing awareness of the importance of what we put in our bodies is a great boon to animal welfare. The proliferation of the #eatclean hashtag is a small price to pay if that’s what’s spurring more ethical consumption, even incidentally.

Or, as poultry industry consultant Greg Mills told the ABC, “there's a consequence to giving a bird a natural behaviour. I think it [should be] a personal choice. It's the consumer who gets to decide what they want to buy and they have the opportunity to do that every time they go to the supermarket.” Amoral industry-speak aside, he’s not wrong: Australians eat an average of 226 eggs per year. Many of these are presumably poached, on top of heaped avocado brunches. Getting people to eat sustainably might be an easier proposition than getting them to cut whole food groups from their diets.

Another option is to replace unethical meat not with more ethical animal products (if there are such things), but with indistinguishable products that were never part of an animal to begin with. Meat made from animal cells doesn’t require an animal to be born, suffer in confinement and die to produce a delicious mince patty. Theoretically, artificial meat would have the same taste and texture profile as anything stuck in a shed for two months, or a paddock for two years, before being slaughtered.

We’ve heard about ‘lab-grown’ meat for almost a decade now, yet, since the first cell-cultured hamburger was produced to much fanfare in 2013, artificial meat still languishes in the lab. That could be changing soon, though; a slew of organisations are racing to be first to mass-market fake meat, with estimates for expensive small runs appearing in 2021 and cheaper, more economical mass production in 2025.

You know progress is being made when US special interest groups begin lobbying to clearly define ‘traditional’ meat, as opposed to whatever we decide to call the artificial stuff. With the latest UN climate report clearly stating that we need to move away from eating meat if we want our grandkids to inherit a planet they can actually live on, all options need to be on the table (literally). Increasingly, people are starting to recognise that fact.

Ten years ago, that story I wrote about stealing chickens amounted to very little. But in the years since, I’ve come to see it as a single brick of an edifice that’s slowly growing, inching higher each year. It’s a narrative composed of news reports, documentaries, secret video footage and piecemeal legislation, and it paints a very convincing picture of the way we treat the animals we decide to turn into food. You can’t look at it and feel good about chicken nuggets. The edifice isn’t yet as high as it needs to be, but it’s getting harder to ignore.

This article was originally published in Matters Journal Issue 3, and some statistics may be outdated. Didn’t know we were a print magazine? Head to our online store to check out our print editions.

Matt Harnett has never met a chicken he didn't like. He's previously written for a number of publications, and edited at Going Down Swinging and the Pantograph Punch. He works in marketing and lives in London, but remains a committed antipode.