HEADLESS CHICKENS

Mick Hume recalls his experiences

as a student chicken-killer in the days before animal rights were invented

THE supervisor told three of us summer- job students to empty a shed. 'What should we do with the chickens presently occupy- ing it?' we asked him. 'Kill them,' he said. `All 200?"Yes."How?"With your hands.' `OK,' we said, 'makes a change from milk- ing sheep and shovelling in the cowshed.'

They dressed us up in Captain Birds Eye outfits — huge green waterproof hats and coats. Then one of the bikers who worked on the farm took us into the shed and showed us, with some relish, how to kill a chicken by jerking its neck. Then he left us to it, and went off to eat a sandwich with his bare hands.

The science of chicken-killing turned out to be a little more complex than his expert dispatch of the first bird had suggested. If you didn't twist hard enough, the chicken didn't die, so when you threw it on the twitching pile it jumped up and ran around looking at you sideways with a badly cricked neck. If you twisted too hard, you discovered what the sou'westers were for. The head came off in your hand and the body turned into a handy-sized chicken pistol, spraying blood from its burst neck.

After ten minutes the shed was a blur of feathers, dust, dirt and blood. Hysteria set in, the three of us cackling like hens and shooting each other with the spray from headless chickens in a real-life zap zone. Meanwhile, oblivious of their fate, the remaining cannibalistic birds tucked into a last meal of chicken-in-sawdust.

This happened exactly 20 summers ago, before anybody had heard of BSE/CJD or animal rights. The welfare of farm animals didn't seem nearly so important as it does to many now, when Home Counties youths appear to equate chicken-farming with genocide (after all, Himmler started off as a chicken-farmer, right?). Back in 1980, however, we were concerned only with the welfare of hard-up students trying to raise funds for a trip around the Cyclades.

The contrast between then and now was brought home to me by a recent BBC news item about 'health and welfare problems in the UK poultry industry'. It revealed the concerns of 'animal-welfare experts' that `the distress of chickens in the UK is being under-reported and is not being taken as seriously as it should'. One of the symp- toms of chicken distress that they are con- cerned about is 'a tendency to sudden death', which might once have been thought rather to go with the territory in the broiler business.

When such surreal reports can make national news, it is clear that the distress of chickens and other farm animals is being taken very seriously indeed. The EU has just ruled that in future hens must be kept in 'enriched cages' incorporating strictly defined 'welfare features', and the British government has demanded higher stan- dards for 'welfare at slaughter'. While the welfare culture takes hold down on the farm, the demand for still more animal rights remains one of the most popular causes among the young.

Back on another planet, in the summer of 1980, we followed orders and did all sorts of unpleasant things to animals for money. It was no ordinary farm; they don't kill 200 chickens unless the man from KFC say yes. This was a Ministry of Agriculture experi- mental establishment, where (whisper it) they tested animal drugs and treatments. The locals called it darkly 'The Research', and the place was awash with scabies-ridden chickens, sheep with impotence-inducing diseases (somehow the students always got to clean them out), and caged badgers with tuberculosis (another of today's favourite animal martyrs). And we hated them all, like a washer-up hates greasy plates.

Farms are not for the faint-hearted. The `Come back, when I said take a seat.,.' briefest of careers in animal welfare was enough to cure me and my fellow soft Sur- rey students of any sentimentality towards our charges. The filthy chickens were the worst, but the rest were not far behind. Even baby billy-goats look less than cute to the man with the broom and shovel. One morning, I found a furry packet amid a kid's droppings. It was the goat's scrotum, which had dropped off as a result of having an elastic band wrapped around it at birth. I took my trophy into the canteen to show the farmhands. They were not impressed: the bikers all had one on their key-rings.

The horniest-handed farmhands believed that these animals were lower forms of life, with neither a spark of wit nor any more ability to exercise 'rights' than the gateposts they scratched themselves on. That attitude was the product not of cruel prejudice, or `speciesist' philosophy, but of practical expe- rience. By far the most impressive animals on that farm were the bulls: magnificent creatures, yet so dim that the artificial inseminators could tell us to get them 'excit- ed' by standing a rusty water-tank or gawky student in their vicinity.

The only time the livestock fought back was when two sheep seemed to conspire to nudge me into the pool of filthy dip. It burnt my throat and eyes and made me smell so badly that weeks later, when I took my hard-earned cash to the islands, Greek goatherds were still giving me knowing looks. But I kicked both of the shaggy brutes afterwards. The sheep, that is.

Perhaps my views on animal welfare were literally poisoned by that experience: one of the many farmyard scares of recent times is that organophosphates in sheep- dip can cause brain damage in humans. Or perhaps my dark afternoon in the chicken shed desensitised me for life. (Gordon Liddy, the Watergate hard man, says that he worked on a chicken farm to teach him- self to kill without feeling.) But I think something more important has changed in the past 20 years.

It seems to me that the higher esteem in which animals are held today is really the flipside of society's lower opinion of humanity and human endeavour, especial- ly when it involves us interfering with the new/old god, Nature, as farmers must. As the gap between the public standing of man and beast has narrowed, animals arc idiotically endowed with rights that arc really the preserve of people; and humans are treated more like incapable animals, who must either be penned in or petted for our own good.

Twenty years on, and still short of sum- mer-holiday money, I wonder if being told to commit crimes against poultry in a sou'wester would now be considered an infringement of my fundamental human rights. And is there a time limit for compen- sation claims? After all, I could be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder — to this day, I can't look at a chicken sandwich without getting a crick in my neck.