And there was Henry Spira with his huge campaign against Frank Perdue. He had these wonderful ads with Frank Perdue with a great big long Pinocchio nose because he’s such a liar about everything, and he joined us in our effort to get Frank Perdue off the Board of Regents. I was learning through Henry Spira and through my reading what is now a known fact: The animal movement was spending 95% of its total resources on 5% of all abused animals.

That the 95% were farmed animals. And that the expenditure, the real money and channeling of energy and activism needed to be on farmed animals because their numbers dwarf all other animals combined, even though other animals combined are in the millions or hundreds of millions. Farmed animals are in the billions and billions. And of those farmed animals, chickens represent 95%.

Then my husband and I moved into a place where the landlady was raising about a hundred chickens for meat every year, so she could keep her agricultural status, for the tax breaks, and that’s where I met Viva the chicken in 1985. The other chickens had been taken away and there I discovered her about three days later, left alone by herself, and so I held her in my arms and took her into the kitchen and showed her to Alan and named her Viva, because she survived. We made her very, very comfortable in the kitchen, and we would set her outside cause she was a baby and she wanted to do things, but she was just genetically crippled.

I’ve written about her and her whole story is on our website. And I didn’t really know much about chickens. I was learning about them, but when I met Viva and saw her plight and just saw how attentive she was and how affectionate, plus I had done so much reading about how horribly chickens are treated in factory farming. I knew where the rest of my life lay. I knew it lay in starting an organization that would focus on the plight of chickens, turkeys, ducks, and domesticated fowl. And so in October of 1990, I formally incorporated United Poultry Concerns, a national non-profit organization.

On focusing on chickens: When I started United Poultry Concerns in 1990, chickens were not receiving much attention. People in the movement actually told me at that time, “If you’re going to start an organization that’s going to focus on a particular animal, why would you start with chickens? You’re never going to get anybody to care about chickens.” And I thought, “Well this is ridiculous and appalling.” If we in our animal advocacy capacity have already decided that nobody’s ever going to care about chickens, it’s going to be a lot harder to get people to care about chickens. And so you have to challenge that. That’s what it means to be an advocate. You don’t just say, “Oh, well, you’re right.” People said, “Do pigs instead. At least you have a chance. The pig’s a mammal.” Again, I’d already looked at the situation. You’re talking about billions and billions of birds who are invisible. And I know in my own work as president of United Poultry Concerns, through our dedicated, persistent advocacy, we have gotten people to care about chickens and turkeys. We have gotten people to care who told me they’d never thought about chickens. And we have changed so many people through all of our publications, through the speaking I do, through our videos, and just through the impassioned and yet fact-filled information that we make available to people. We combine fact, empathy, and analysis. Those are the three prongs of the work of United Poultry Concerns. Plus we have our sanctuary.

We want people to visit our website. People will see all the things we are doing, the campaigns that we have against cruelty to chickens in classroom experiments and projects, cockfighting, and of course the biggest issue is the treatment of the birds in agribusiness. And all farming. We promote a vegan diet. We have an essay you can click on at the top of our home page, “Why Go Vegan?” We are a 100% vegan organization. We want people to view these birds and other animals as fellow creatures.

On humane farming: There’s no way there can ever be humane farming of animals because no form of slavery has ever been humane. And animal farming is the epitome of a slave system, and we know how bad human slaves were treated. We can’t lie to ourselves with the idea that somehow nonhuman animal slaves are going to be treated better by their masters than human slaves were treated, and we know that they were treated abominably. We try to present the message that chickens, turkeys and ducks and farmed animals, these are beings that have the same love of life that we have, the same capacity for joy, the same interest in raising their young and exploring the world, and in expressing the potentials of their nature. There is all this marvelous, marvelous food out there that doesn’t cause any animal to be tortured and suffer and die for it.