The baby birds work with a will to live
Pecking and clawing till their egg shells give

Two fuzzy chicklets then enter the world
one is a boy and the other a girl

The soft yellow fuzz that they both wear
quivers as they breathe their very first air

Their battle was living and they have won
They want to show off what they have done.

They look to the left and they look to the right
For their dear mother, but she’s not in sight

Instead there are thousands just as they
Chirping worriedly who’d been born that day

Suddenly a huge fat claw grabs the boy
and lifts him roughly like a lifeless toy

A corpulent woman then checks him out—
prodding his fuzz until there’s no doubt.

He is a male, so she breaks his neck—CRACK!
And then lops him into a death-filled sack.

Aborting chicklets is not a big deal
for they are so small and easy to kill.

Roosters don’t bring any profits in
Shareholders view losses as a sin

So our little rooster was born in vain
since he’d not increase the corporate gain.

The woman then claws the baby hen
and does what she’s done many times again.

The lady stops poking when satisfied
the chick’s a girl and can be set aside.

Natural sunlight shall be denied this chick
though the sun almost makes a chicken tick

In a crowded in-door cage she’ll grow
where she may never hear a rooster’s crow.

Her wings are cut off so she can’t flap…
she only breathes the scent of chicken crap

Her feed’s designed to maker her big and sick—
laced with antibiotic arsenic

She is debeaked so in case of a rage
she can’t hurt the others in her cage.

Her toes are chopped so they won’t grow around
the metal wires that make up her ground

And when she has grown old enough to lay,
lights are kept on twenty-three hours a day.

Artificial hormones give her some juice
so day in and day out she must produce

She will lay many months until she’s dry,
then she’ll be killed for us to roast or fry.

As we eat theses tasty birds with glee
let us not forget their misery.

A chick breaks out of a creamy round shell
to enter life in a corporate hell.

All meats found upon our dinner plates
endured similarly tormented fates.

Pigs and cows and sheep and fish
suffer before they are placed on a dish

Gone are the healthy, happy farms of old
where animals lived well till their meat was sold.

Factory farming is now the way
but it’s not only animals who pay

For by eating the products of greed and pain
we suffer ill-health or huge weight gain

We gorge ourselves full of scavenged meat
though plant foods are meant for us to eat.

Christians, Moslems, and Jews should all note
the very first diet that Moses wrote

Contained in Genesis one-twenty-nine
the foods given us by the divine

and the only foods that we really need
are tree fruits and herbs bearing seed.

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