Thich Nhat Hanh 1: Why I Now Eat Free-Range Chickens Only

trapped chickens

Nāmarūpa: Concept used in Buddhism to represent the psychosoma; the mind-body as one entity.

"Chickens are raised in large-scale modern farms where they cannot walk, run, or seek food in the soil. They are fed solely by humans. They are kept in small cages and cannot move at all. Day and night they have to stand. Imagine that you have no right to walk or to run. Imagine that you have to stay day and night in just one place. You would become mad. So the chickens become mad."*

"In order for the chickens to produce more eggs, the farmers create artificial days and nights. They use indoor lighting to create a shorter day and night so that the chickens believe that twenty-four hours have passed, and then they produce more eggs. There is allot of anger, allot of frustration, and suffering in the chickens. They express their anger and frustration by attacking he chickens next to them. They use their beaks to peck and wound each other. They cause each other to bleed, suffer, and die. That is why the farmers now cut the beaks off all the chickens, to prevent them from attacking each other out of frustration."*

"So when you eat the flesh or egg of such a chicken, you are eating (their) anger and frustration."*

*Thich Nhat Hanh (Thây). Anger. Riverhead Trade, September 2002. Reprint