I watched, carefully. The dark, gritty looking conveyor belt lurched forward steadily; not a single bird left its betraying shelter. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of them, and they were all hopping mad; all clucking incessantly, as if screeching punishingly at me in revenge for the ultimate demise looming not ten feet away from them. Feathers rushed past my nose, which caught a faint yet concentrated dose of a familiar stench: manure and moldy straw plastered to cold, wiry talons. The cloudy, polluted metal sheen of the beast in front of me swallowed them, and all the while its numerous coal-black teeth flickered unnaturally, pulling in the terrified fowls. Gagging, I imagined the different tastes crossing the tongue of one such unfortunate individual suffering the consumption of live poultry. I could only go so far, in order to avoid vomiting, as to taste the dirt-encrusted feathers, along with a myriad of white cheddar porcelain beaks, before pushing the concept of eating live, not-yet-plucked game from my thoughts entirely.
But more prominently than any other flavor I could conjure in my head, I savored their misery. Not due to any sick pleasure attributed to my attitude towards the emotion, but the unspoken fascination I held in my prey. One must feel some sense of admiration towards the abused capons, who almost without fail would exhibit unforgiving fury to their captors, in addition to their relentless zeal in their attempts at waddling off to freedom; failures they may be.
I wouldn’t want to pretend I feel a chicken’s pain as it dies in this supposed evolution in the barbaric efficiency of discriminatory slaughter, though my mind wandered, and before I was able to protest this unthinkable concept, I began to contemplate each sensation, from the beginning: anger, preceding uncontrollable fear, which must, in turn, induces nervous shaking. The shaking is obviously only furthered by the impossibly lethal stranglehold of the electric charge, as the muscles in all sects of my fragile interior contract violently, seeming to be escaping the confining skin holding them in place.
Before I know it, my head jerks up in an effort to defy sleep. I hadn’t noticed myself nodding off into my own deepening thought. Nearly all of the victims had passed through the window, undoubtedly sent to their eventual death. Soon it would be time for me to retrieve the next batch. Unable to help my sympathetic self-loathing for the task ahead, I suppose I was a criminal in their eyes. I stood up; I walked over and began to pluck more fowls from their confining cage.