I hadn’t really intended on revisiting the animal rights movement’s reaction to 9/11. From Gary Yourofsky’s rantings urging people not to donate money or blood to the Red Cross to PETA’s suggestion to hinder recovery efforts after the attack, the animal rights movement’s grotesque reaction to 9/11 has been well-documented on this site.
But while doing research on another topic I ran across another item that I’d never seen that was published a few weeks after 9/11. It is a poem by animal rights activist Fran Hutcherson which takes Joan Dunayer’s view that people killed by terrorist attacks are on the same moral plane as broiler chickens. This appeared in the Sept. 26, 2001 issue of Animal Writes, an online newsletter published by Susan Roghair of Animal Rights Online.
Welcome To Our World
by Fran Hutcherson
In the aftermath of September EleventhFrom our laboratory cages, we see a huge cloud of smoke and soot fast approaching. Cover your faces, quick! Strange substances in the eyes are incredibly painful and can make you blind.
From the slaughterhouse, we hear, for the first time, what YOU sound like screaming in terror as you see others dying all around you, knowing that you are next.
From endless rows of stacked-up battery cages, we cry for those of you who remain alive inside, crushed together in tiny spaces, wondering if you will ever move freely again.
From metal gestation crates, we mourn for the young who will grow up without their mothers’ love, and for the mothers whose babies have been ripped away from them forever.
From radios and televisions, we hear you sharing your grief and pain and promising your loved ones that they will never be forgotten. We hear angry voices promising to avenge the evil and make sure it never happens again.
From every factory farm, research lab, circus truck and slaughterhouse, we hear your cries as you experience what, for us, is everyday life.
Apparently, a chicken is a boy is a victim of terrorism.
Source:
Welcome to our world. Fran Hutcherson, Animal Writes, September 26, 2001.