Tipsy !!

  

Tipsy is born !!

Well, for those who are a little bit confused with the starting, I would like to introduce you to the main character of the story, Tipsy. Tipsy is a chicken and to be most precise he is a broiler chick. Yellow, fluffy and small. Chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp...It’s like the hyperactive twittering of mechanical chicks. He enters the world in a hatchery under artificial light, unlike others under the warmth and protection of his mother. When he was only one day old, he is packed in a crate with thousands of others and transported to factory farms, where they will live for the next 45 days. 

At their new home, Tipsy and his other fellow friends were never allowed to step foot outside to breathe fresh air or feel the sun housed in long windless sheds with low lighting that they can barely tell if it's day or night. Tipsy is a broiler, and so he is bred to grow six times faster than his ancestors did 95 years ago because of this young chickens like him need to struggle on frey legs and suffer bone abnormalities that make walking painful sometimes. Sometimes, he even collapses under his own weight. But that's not a big problem for him, as he is happy with his life, I mean at least he is getting a chance to live !!

Now as they're growing the birds begin to experience overcrowding. On average a chicken has only about one foot of floor space. Literally, five percent of Tipsy's fellow friends already died without even making it till here !! Most of them died from cardiovascular disease caused by rapid weight gain or the severe stress of their living conditions which caused sudden death syndrome. But Tipsy was 'lucky' enough that he survived till now. 

Tipsy is now a seven-week-old young chicken. Belonging to the most adult group of chickens from the farm, Tipsy is happy that finally, he is going out of the farm. Many contracted catchers came to the farms, shove Tipsy and his fellow mates into crates and transport them to a place called slaughterhouse. The journey was not at all a good one, as Tipsy and his mates are forced to endure the journey without food and water. 

At the end of the journey, workers came and started unpacking Tipsy and his mates followed by shackling them by their legs, upside down, onto an overhead conveyor. Shackling was painful and stressful for Tipsy. 

Some of his friend's hips got dislocated, some broke their legs as they are shoved into the shackles, and some got injured while flapping in distress.

The conveyor then starts carrying them towards a shallow water bath that has been electrified. As their heads are dragged through the water, they are electrocuted and rendered unconscious.

Tipsy being cleaver lifts his head above the electrified bath and does not get stunned at all. And on the other hand, some of his fellow friends are only paralyzed by the electric current, leaving them conscious and able to feel pain.

Tipsy was lucky and was able to see and feel everything, full consciously. The conveyor then moves the unconscious chickens to an automatic cutter which was slitting their throats. Tipsy was watching his friends being slit in the cutter, where their heads were being cut and were allowed to bleed to death while shackled on the conveyor. On the other hand, his fellow mates who were just paralyzed were feeling the pain of the fast cutter getting into their neck and separating their neck from the rest of the body !!

But as we all know, Tipsy was lucky, he possibly missed the auto-cutter and was left alive, alone !! He could see the headless bodies of his fellow mates as well as the every drop of blood flowing out of their necks.  

He spotted a worker standing by with a knife to manually slit the throats of any birds who have survived, and this time again Tipsy was lucky enough to pass from the eyes of the worker !!

Finally, the conveyer was moving into a tank of scalding water. And then it was his turn. This time he couldn't save himself. His body was immersed into a tank of scalding water which was boiled to around 90-100°C to loosen his feathers. He who thought himself as lucky to pass all those 'levels of death' actually realised that he was the unluckiest one. A life which was meant to be lived for 8-10 years naturally, ends in just a few weeks only because of human needs and craves. His carcasses were sent to be fully processed to become meat for our lunch or dinner dish !! 

You might have tasted Tipsy, his legs, or even his heart. We all have done it someday. We human, the most evolved species use around 50 billion chickens for our food, that means, 50 billion Tipsy are killed annually. When we see chicken meat or eggs in the supermarket, we are seeing only the very end of an individual chicken's journey. To truly comprehend what we are eating, we need to understand the short life they lived, and the nature of the death they endured.

Tipsy was even lucky, cause what happens to some sections of animals is even worse which involves purposefully putting animals in situations that harm, use of fireworks to scare and terrorize them while others simply result from people looking the 'other way'. It doesn't just take place in the world of industrial animal culture. It is probably going on inside ones’ neighbor’s house, at an amusement venue on your city, or at a lab close to where you work. I wonder, who gave human being the right to do this to any other who's similarly struggling to live a life on this earth !! 

One of the most famous dialogues from a movie said, "with great powers, comes great responsibility" which might have been forgotten by us. Just because we've got great powers, technologies we've forgotten our responsibilities towards other animals. Being the most evolved species, there's surely something wrong fundamentally. It's time to take a step back and think about things we did wrong. Only then can we decide whether to endorse these systems or to support a kinder world for animals, by choosing not to use them for our essentials.