It must be very dispiriting to be born into this world and find that you are an intensively reared hen. But maybe, if a representative of the human race explained gently to you in chicken language that human beings are the apex of creation, and chickens commodities, and that this, in a roundabout way, accounts for your breasts being so heavy your legs can’t support you, you might think to yourself, as you hang upside-down waiting to have your six-week-old throat slit by a youth on piecework listening to drum and bass on his iPod, ‘Hey, it’s been fun. Glad to have been of service.’
But if you learnt instead that your breasts, instead of nourishing a human being, will be fed to a domestic cat, you’d probably want to register a complaint somewhere. The widow next door to us, a pensioner, subsists chiefly on chips, supplemented at this time of year with Brussels sprouts, which she eats raw. Yet
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