A Book of Tales' Magazine showing reality like it's hardly ever seen
The New Battery Chicken
Most of us are now well in tune with the plight of the battery chicken. We know that these feathered unfortunates are kept indoors all day, that they live in confined and artificially lit spaces and that they're fed water and processed gunk from machines. We know that they're dosed up with drugs to make them more productive, and that the luckier ones (classified as 'free range') get out for just an hour a day.
Ask anybody why all of the above is so wrong and they'll tell you the obvious:
because it's wholly unnatural for a creature to live like this.
Then observe as the very person who cries foul on the purchase of a battery chicken tootles off to do their daily eight hours in an office cubicle, where they breathe machine-fed air, sit under fluorescent lighting, hit buttons on a vending machine for food and drink, are released for an hour a day for lunch (if they're lucky) and once a year go for the company flu jab to ensure outbreaks don't interfere with productivity. Our existence is now as mechanised and artificial as the poor old pullet.
Extracted from Roots to Rehabilitation by Mark Keenan, published in the Sunday Times, October 5th 2008