Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner

The rotisserie chicken at Costco is legend. For $5, you get a delicious bird. To eat, I mean. Not to give to the kids as beloved pet. Not to cuddle. Not to take on long walks in the park. To eat. We eat the chickens. And they are delicious. Want to know about their life before they get put on a spit?

But an animal rights group called Mercy for Animals recently sent an investigator under cover to work on a farm in Nebraska that produces millions of these chickens for Costco, and customers might lose their appetite if they saw inside a chicken barn.

“It’s dimly lit, with chicken poop all over,” said the worker, who also secretly shot video there. “It’s like a hot humid cloud of ammonia and poop mixed together.”

And if that’s not horrifying enough, these aren’t chickens as god made them, but chickens as a lab made them.

Scientists have created what are sometimes called “exploding chickens” that put on weight at a monstrous clip, about six times as fast as chickens in 1925. The journal Poultry Science once calculated that if humans grew at the same rate as these chickens, a 2-month-old baby would weigh 660 pounds.

The chickens grow enormous breasts, because that’s the meat consumers want, so the birds’ legs sometimes splay or collapse. Some topple onto their backs and then can’t get up. Others spend so much time on their bellies that they sometimes suffer angry, bloody rashes called ammonia burns; these are a poultry version of bed sores.

“They’re living on their own feces, with no fresh air and no natural light,” said Leah Garcés, the president of Mercy for Animals. “I don’t think it’s what a Costco customer expects.”

I don’t think this is what Costco customers expect either. Or think about. Or want to think about. I know I don’t. That’s why I don’t think about it and won’t the next time I eat a delicious rotisserie chicken from Costco.

Like most people, I abhor cruelty to animals. I don’t know the fiscal logistics of chicken selling, but I suspect there will be additional costs associated with giving millions of chickens more humane (note that word, not chickane, but humane) living conditions, but the human part of me projects the sense that the birds are living creatures and can feel joy and pain, and that it’s wrong to inflict needless pain on anything, even a chicken.

Torture a single chicken in your backyard, and you risk arrest. Abuse tens of millions of them? Why, that’s agribusiness.

For a long time now, it’s been clear that the raising of animals for food, for human consumption, is ugly. Whether it’s uglier than it needs to be is a fair question, and the possibility that chickens, not to mention cows, lamb and pigs, could be raised with a less suffering suggests that the business side of agriculture has become so callous, so mindlessly cruel, that it could be done without significant financial consequences with a little effort.

But then, after you’ve slaughtered your first million animals, it kinda sucks the empathy out of you. If you view critters as living, suffering entities, it’s hard to kill them en masse and then ship them off to the rotisserie ovens. At that point, can you still muster any feeling about their living conditions when their dying conditions are pretty much mandatory or they won’t be available on the supermarket shelves?

Garcés wants Costco to sign up for the “Better Chicken Commitment,” an industry promise to work toward slightly better standards for industrial agriculture. For example, each adult chicken would get at least one square foot of space, there would be some natural light and the company would avoid breeds that put on weight that the legs can’t support.

Burger King, Popeyes, Chipotle, Denny’s and some 200 other food companies have embraced the Better Chicken Commitment, but grocery chains generally have not, with the exception of Whole Foods.

Will this make the lives of chickens better? It would if chickens were people, because this is how people would feel if they lived like chickens. It would certainly seem far less cruel than what now happens in massive agribusiness chicken production facilities. What would the chickens think about it? Not being a chicken, that’s not for me to say. We have a tendency to personify creatures, to impute human thought and feelings, emotions and understanding, to animals. But they’re not us, just as we’re not them.

And not to get all nihilist about chickens, but the point of birthing and raising them isn’t to give them a happy, fulfilling life.

In one respect, Costco has shown real leadership. The most barbaric part of the chicken industry is the traditional slaughtering process, which results in some birds being boiled alive. To its credit, Costco has moved toward a far more humane approach called controlled atmosphere stunning, so that birds are stunned before being shackled to the conveyor belt that takes them to their deaths.

For anyone who has cooked lobsters, bottom-feeding crustaceans that were once considered such garbage that they were fed to prisoners rather than dipped in clarified butter, you drop them live into boiling water. In that instant before going into the pot, the otherwise docile lobsters start to flap, to flail. They seem to know the end is nigh and fight. A few minutes later, they’re bright red and delicious.

If you can’t deal with any of this, you can always go vegan, or whatever other flavor of artisanal eater you prefer. But people are carnivores, and Costco chickens are delicious and astoundingly inexpensive, so that pretty much anyone can afford and enjoy one. You know who doesn’t care?

Many birds died, and being eaten by a coyote wasn’t such a pleasant way to go, either.

Nature is cruel and has no feelings about it either way. That doesn’t make needless suffering any more palatable, but in the end, we’re going to eat the chickens anyway.