Birdbrain

Chapter 1: Clover's Beginnings

If a hen ever tells you the best day of her life is the day she hatched, she’s lying.  Hatching day sucks.  Tell me, is struggling around in an eggshell prison for twelve hours while suffering from lack of space and oxygen deprivation supposed to be fun?

Exactly.  Hatching sucks. 

Or maybe it was because there was absolutely no one who cared if I made it out of that shell or not.  Maybe it was because I didn’t have a ton of motivation for getting out of that shell other than pure instinct.  Whatever the reason, that was the second-worst day of my life.  I can still remember the desolate feeling in that silent incubator; the endless sea of eggs.  And the chick who was banging and pecking the walls of the metal prison, desperate to get out.  Worst of all was the two chicks laying dead on the floor, who had failed to survive after their great struggle.  Needless to say, it was not a good feeling.

But it was nothing on the worst day that occurred twenty-four hours later, when two monstrous human hands barged into our incubator, which was now completely overrun by terrified, newly-hatched chicks.  Pandemonium broke out.  Chicks rushed this way, that way, and attempted to flap over each other, running anywhere but into the groping grasp of The Hand.  Of course, there were also the idiots that charged blindly into the white gloves, but the rest of us, who were not idiots, managed to avoid the Hand for a full fifteen seconds.  Once those fifteen seconds were up, we were swept in one big, clumsy motion, falling over the edge of the incubator and into the darkness... of a cardboard box.  And we were carried, as a writhing mess of cheeping fluffballs, into a very different setting.  Another Hand reached into the box and unceremoniously pulled out an unlucky chick.  

And that chick went into full panic mode.  “HELP ME!  MOMMY!  HELP!  SOMEONE SAVE ME!  HELP!!”  Obviously, none of us were in power to help, but he screamed anyway.  The human squeezed his vent (I don't know why humans are so eccentric, either) and tossed him, quite roughly, onto a moving black surface.  Another chick was pulled out and had her buttcheecks squeezed.  She was tossed onto a different moving black surface.  The Hand moved this way through all of the chicks

And guess what I did.  “HELP ME!  MOMMY!  HELP!  SOMEONE SAVE ME!  HELP!!”  came my original reply.  I squirmed and writhed and wriggled and screamed and kicked and basically did all that was in my power to get out of the iron grip of the Hand.

The Hand having an iron grip and me not having an iron beak caused me to be tossed onto the conveyor belt with all the other female chicks.

All the other female chicks.  What about the male chicks?

I looked over to the other conveyor belt.  Sure enough, about ninety percent of them were male.  We were having a grand time barging into each other and getting hit on the head by new chicks being tossed in when a blood-curdling shriek rang through the air, cutting across all of other noises.

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

One of the male chicks had just been tossed off of the conveyor belt.

Into a grinding blade.

A grinding blade.

I was speechless as I watched all of the chicks on the other conveyor belt receive the same fate.

How could the humans do this?

How could any creature, with any compassion, toss a fluffy newborn chick crying out for its mother into a grinding blade?  While fully alive and conscious?

We stood still with shock.

We were stunned.

Our undeveloped minds couldn’t take the overload of agonizing emotions.