The Chicken Run movies and how we talk to kids about factory farming, explained

The 2000 youngsters’s film Hen Run is likely one of the darker and extra subversive movies made for youths: The story follows a flock of lovable, although fairly depressing, chickens who conspire to flee a farm earlier than their impending slaughter.

Regardless of the grim material, it’s charming and entertaining, absolutely incomes its 97 % critic’s ranking on Rotten Tomatoes. The script reads prefer it was written by PETA, but it was a field workplace hit and stays the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film ever made.

Subsequent week, Netflix is releasing a sequel — Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget — with the identical theme however up to date to mirror our more and more dystopian animal farming system.

This time round, as an alternative of escaping a farm, the identical chickens are breaking into one to rescue one among their flock members (which additionally occurs to be the strategy of some animal rights activists).

The farm in query is Enjoyable-Land Farms (tagline: “The place chickens discover their completely satisfied endings”), an unlimited, futuristic poultry operation during which a mad scientist has created a tool that, when worn across the chickens’ necks, makes them completely satisfied to be slaughtered.

To a few of the chickens, Enjoyable-Land appears to be like just like the idyllic pasture depicted within the commercial, nevertheless it’s all an phantasm — an enormous room painted to appear like an old-timey farm. In a single scene, a hen slams right into a wall, which is painted to appear like the sky — seemingly an homage to that haunting scene in The Truman Present. When the mind-altering gadgets are briefly turned off, the chickens are horrified by their manufacturing facility farm actuality.

Netflix

The movie looks like a pointed critique of the manufacturing facility farm trade’s use of misleading advertising to persuade the general public that animals are handled much better than they are surely, what’s referred to as “humanewashing.” It’s a heavy message packaged in an entertaining, if formulaic, youngsters’s film, and it’s a radical departure from how animal farming is usually depicted in youngsters’s literature and movie.

What ought to children find out about meat?

Within the mid-2000s, writer and illustrator Ruby Roth was instructing artwork to elementary faculty children. Roth was, and nonetheless is, a vegan, and generally college students would ask her about what she was consuming. She regarded for a youngsters’s ebook that defined her perception system and confirmed the truth of animal manufacturing facility farming in a manner youngsters might perceive, however she couldn’t discover one, so she finally made her personal: That’s Why We Don’t Eat Animals.

Revealed in 2009, the ebook’s depiction of animal agriculture was fairly tame. It sometimes illustrated some commonplace types of animal cruelty — like keeping egg-laying hens in tiny cages — in a manner that’s unhappy however not graphic. Nonetheless, the ebook triggered an uproar.

Roth mentioned she was accused of scaring and brainwashing youngsters. Little one psychologists on the As we speak present, she recalled, mentioned the supposed hazard of studying her ebook to children.

“Essentially the most fascinating a part of the entire outrage was that by calling my ebook controversial, it appeared to me we have been admitting that what we do to animals is just too scary to speak about,” Roth mentioned. “So to me, that mentioned we need to be willfully ignorant and impose that ignorance on our youngsters.”

However children had a really completely different response to the ebook, Roth mentioned, proposing sensible options like shopping for leather-free footwear or altering what they eat, and wildly imaginative ones, like “flying over the nation and rescuing all of the animals.”

“Once you communicate frankly to youngsters, they actually concentrate as a result of they’re used to folks talking right down to them or sugarcoating conversations,” Roth added. “I discovered that children have been engaged and .”

It’s straightforward to dismiss Roth as somebody who’s pushing her ideology onto children, however I’d argue the default message society sends children about animal farming is worse — in that it’s a complete fabrication. Children love animals, but youngsters’s books lead them to believe that farmed animals dwell fortunately and may freely transfer about. That these animals go on to turn out to be the burgers and nuggets children eat is just about by no means talked about.

“Kids are socialized to not determine the animal that they’re consuming,” mentioned Anastassiya Andrianova, an affiliate professor of English at North Dakota State College who researches how animal farming is portrayed in youngsters’s literature. “Not solely is the animal absent once they’re introduced on a plate as meat, however even the way in which that our language features, it camouflages and mystifies that hyperlink.” Pig meat is named “pork,” “bacon” and “sausage,” whereas cow’s meat is “beef” and cow’s milk is simply “milk.”

In actuality, 99 percent of the 9.7 billion land animals raised for meals within the US yearly dwell in brutish circumstances on manufacturing facility farms, the place they’re mutilated with out ache reduction, crammed collectively in warehouses, and compelled to wallow in their very own waste. Many are drugged up on antibiotics to outlive these circumstances, they usually’ve been bred to develop greater, quicker, and pump out extra eggs and milk, all to the detriment of their welfare.

Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Media

Edwin Remsburg/VW Pics through Getty Pictures

When youngsters are proven the truth of those circumstances, some can sense one thing is flawed. Mercy for Animals, a farm animal welfare nonprofit I labored at previous to Vox, created a video during which youngsters are proven photos of hens and pigs in tiny cages, a regular farming follow. “They’re soiled and trapped,” a 4-year-old says. “It’s not good to deal with any animal like that,” says a 7-year-old.

After I was a child, I in all probability would have had an identical response, however I didn’t find out about any of this till I used to be in highschool.

There’s no easy reply to the query of what age youngsters needs to be given the chilly, onerous information of meals manufacturing, and in how a lot element. However Roth is correct that the hysteria over her ebook says much more about adults’ discomfort with how animals turn out to be meat than about what’s good for youngsters.

That discomfort is typically described by psychologists because the “meat paradox,” defined in a 2010 paper because the “psychological battle between folks’s dietary choice for meat and their ethical response to animal struggling.” It exhibits up within the many lies we inform ourselves, and go right down to our youngsters, about our relationship to animals.

One study of Australian mother and father, for instance, discovered that almost all falsely inform their youngsters that animals are “killed rigorously and with out cruelty.” Thirty to forty % of American children aged 4 to 7 assume frequent animal merchandise, like bacon, hotdogs, hamburgers, shrimp, and even hen nuggets, come from plants, a 2021 research discovered.

As youngsters age, their pure love for animals tends to be tamped down. Children are taught that “turning into an grownup requires you to form of depart behind your attachment and fondness for animals,” Andrianova mentioned. The connection morphs from one among kinship to one among hierarchy, with people on prime. Animals are “like us, and but they’re separate from us in ways in which we have to justify as a result of we have to justify utilizing animals for labor, consumption, clothes, and different kinds of technological means,” she added. “This paradox is on the very core of who we’re as people.”

Not every bit of kids’s media that takes place on a farm must be the following Hen Run or That’s Why We Don’t Eat Animals. However it’s cheap to hope that children needs to be knowledgeable sufficient to not less than perceive hen nuggets come from chickens, to have a way of what turning animals into meat entails, and to have the flexibility to observe their moral instincts and have some say in what they eat. The identical goes for adults. It shouldn’t come as a shock that customers so simply fall for meat industry advertising that makes farms appear like the model they internalized from youngsters’s literature.

I can already hear farm state politicians excoriating the evils of “vital farming concept” if youngsters’s media truly started to mirror the truth of animal agriculture. However we would turn out to be a extra humane society if we have been extra sincere with ourselves, and kids, about the place meat comes from.

A model of this text initially appeared within the Future Perfect publication. Sign up here!