Frankenstein's Chicken: Understanding Local Opposition to Broiler Farms

My grandmother managed to go most of her life without eating chicken. When she was about nine years old she had watched her father decapitate a chicken and prepare it for Sunday lunch in the yard of the family’s apple orchard near Harcourt, in central Victoria. The experience proved a repulsive one. The recollection of the axed head, the sound of feathers being plucked, the puckered skin, and the scaly claw-like feet, made the roast chicken lunch that resulted from the exercise wholly unappetizing. My grandmother ate it grimly, grudgingly, and only as a result of some force being applied. The experience put her, with a characteristic stubbornness, off chicken for life and for 80 years she pointedly avoided eating anything infested with chicken. Hospitalized for a stroke in her late ’80s, when the nurses had put chicken in her soup and she hadn’t complained, something was clearly wrong. She passed away shortly afterwards.