On this day in vegan history · May 4, 2005
A Day for the Chicken
In 2005 a small animal-rights group turned a radio host's Mother's Day joke into an annual day for the world's most farmed, least noticed animal.
The facts
- Date
- May 4, every year since 2005
- Founded by
- United Poultry Concerns (founded 1990 by Karen Davis)
- Origin
- Grew out of Harry Shearer's one-time "National Respect the Chicken Day," May 14, 2000
United Poultry Concerns declared the first International Respect for Chickens Day on May 4, 2005, giving the chicken, the most farmed and least considered land animal on Earth, one day of attention a year. The idea traces back to 2000, when Le Show host Harry Shearer mused on air that chickens might not feel pain, got flooded with corrective mail from UPC's members, and responded by declaring May 14 that year, Mother's Day, "National Respect the Chicken Day" in honor of hens as devoted mothers. UPC president Karen Davis, who had founded the group in 1990, took that one-time gesture and made it permanent five years later, moving it off Mother's Day and onto its own date, May 4. The new holiday kept Shearer's warmth but widened its aim from mothering hens to the whole species, including the birds raised and killed by the billions in farming operations most people never see.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
-
International Respect for Chickens Day is a day to celebrate the dignity, beauty, and life of chickens and to protest against the bleakness of their lives in farming operations.
Karen Davis, president of United Poultry Concerns, in a UPC news release announcing the day, April 27, 2005
Source: United Poultry Concerns -
I never see an egg brought to my table but I feel penetrated with the wonderful change it would have undergone but for my gluttony; it might have been a gentle, useful hen leading her chickens with a care and vigilance which speaks shame to many women.
St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 1782, quoted by United Poultry Concerns
Source: United Poultry Concerns, Poultry Press (Summer 2000)
Why it still matters
It is a small, almost homemade holiday, but it points at something real: no other farmed animal is killed in such enormous numbers with so little public sympathy, and a day built around noticing chickens as individuals is where any of that starts to change.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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