A chicken comes to a boy on a farm for a hug on the boy’s request. It’s a silent request but it is there nonetheless and the chicken responds positively and as you can see they hug each other. And when you see this you think of the 9 billion chickens killed annually in the USA and the almost 1 billion chickens killed annually in the UK. And the way they most of them live their lives in crappy sheds being henpecked, being fed in a way which makes them weak so they can’t stand up. Essentially abused.
The whole factory farming thing is ghastly. Their lives are miserable it seems to me and yet here it is evident that chickens are sentient beings with apparently emotions unless you want to cynically state that this is just a form of training and there’s nothing going on in the chicken’s head. I don’t believe that. Something is going on in this bird’s head and its friendship. It is an interspecies friendship, as I call it. It happens an awful lot between species of enormously different size and ostensibly differences in intelligence but they are all the same in one respect: they respond to companionship if they are not entirely solitary animals.
