Individuals, not numbers.

I was reading through my animal management notes as I put them away, when something caught my eye. Previously it had just been another figure, another boring statistic to memorise on the off chance we were asked about it in the exam. It was from my notes on veterinary public health, with intent to emphasise the scale of the operations and how dire the consequences could be if disease ever gained a significant foothold at the slaughterhouse, but that's not why it had suddenly stopped me in my tracks. 800 million chickens slaughtered every year in Britain, averaging out at 10,000 per hour. This may not have seemed so shocking until I remembered something my GCSE history teacher had told me years before when studying the first world war and again when studying the holocaust. "People look at these numbers, and they think of them as numbers. But every single one of these men was an individual. 900,000 men may not seem like such a large number, but you try imagining 900,000 individuals, each with their own separate lives, personalities, and experiences." History is in the lives, deaths, and experiences of those present at the time, not in a bunch of numbers from a textbook. You can't really grasp a situation merely by looking at statistics.

Having just completed my chicken handling practicals, I knew that chickens, whilst perhaps not as self-aware or mentally complex as Tommy Atkins, did have their own personalities and their own feelings. Each chicken was an individual animal with individual experiences. But I couldn't imagine 800 million (800,000,000) anything, let alone 800 million individual beings being enslaved and slaughtered on a yearly basis. It's difficult to see that as anything but 'just a number'. It was somewhat more daunting to imagine ten thousand (10,000) chickens being killed every hour. Ten thousand individuals is somehow more conceivable, somehow more horrific, than a figure so large it has lost all meaning. To put things in perspective; consider that the Nazis exterminated only 11 million Jews, Gypsies, political prisoners and others they deemed undesirable during the existence of the Third Reich, a state which lasted over 11 years. From this it is apparent that, in order to reach the same level of efficiency as the British chicken industries, Hitler would require 800 Third Reichs functioning at the same time.

So yes, I'm angry. More than angry, in fact. If I thought I could make any difference I'd join the bloody ALF. This is one of those incredibly rare moments in which I almost wish there was a Hell, because right now I feel that every one of us deserves to burn for letting such a gargantuan barbaric industry continue its murderous business unnoticed for so long. And, if anyone ever reads this, I can almost guarantee you'll attempt to rationalise your behaviour, find some excuse, and then go get a bucket of KFC for dinner, and that's what pisses me off more than anything else.