BOOKS: Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs & The Great House of Birds

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1997:

Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs:
An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry
by Karen Davis
Book Publishing Company, Box 99, Summertown, TN 38483),
1996. 175 pages, referenced and indexed. $12.95 paperback.

The Great House of Birds:
Classic Writings About Birds
edited by John Hay
Sierra Club Books (85 2nd St., San Francisco, CA 94105), 1996.
306 pages, hardcover, $24.00.

Next time you gobble down an egg or a chicken nugget, if you
ever do, consider the birds: housed in overcrowded and dangerous “factory”
barns, their beaks cut off, their wings clipped, overfed, underexcersized,
never seeing the light of the sun, from hatching to slaughter.
While people are chastized for their misuse of antibiotics, which
apparently has encouraged the evolution of untreatable SuperBugs, very
little is said about antibiotic overdosing of chickens, and other food animals.

In order to live and grow in terribly crowded conditions, chickens
are routinely dosed with antibiotics, which saturates their meat and eggs,
and encourages the evolution of resistant deadly bacteria.
Karen Davis covers all this and much more in Prisoned Chickens
Poisoned Eggs, in straightforward reportorial style. If you still eat chicken,
you’ll stop looking at buffalo wings with salivating expectation.
The Great House of Birds, on the other hand, is a motley collection
of poetry and supposedly lyrical prose on how birds are the muses of
mankind. It is about the pretty birds, the wild and high-flying ones; it
seems that chickens need not apply. The exotic birds are for our souls, the
chicken apparently just for our stomachs. Reverence for the esthetically
pleasing and disdain for the commonplace are dangerous sentiments to promote.
–-Pamela Kemp