Animal Welfare Party Member and site content editor Alex Lockwood challenges the Radio 5 Live DJ and journalist Nicky Campbell on his response to hearing this morning that chickens are sociable, intelligent creatures. Members views are their own, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Animal Welfare Party.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

‘Don’t tell me that! I’ll never go to Nando’s again,’ said Nicky Campbell, Radio 5 Live DJ and animal lover this morning at around 7.56am. It was in response to an item on the Radio 5 breakfast show when the director of Omlet, the company behind the backyard hen house, the eglu, and now a hi-vis jacket for chickens crossing the road, was asked if chickens provide any companionship as pets.

‘You’re doing the chicken a disservice,’ said Johannes Paul, the director of Omlet. ‘Chickens are great companions, they’re sociable, they come to the sound of your voice, they…’

‘Don’t say that!’ shouted Nicky. He then actually went ‘La La La La La…’ so as not to hear anything else the Omlet director said about the intelligence, sociability and sentient behaviour of the chicken.

It was half tongue in cheek, but there it was. The too-common response to the knowledge of cruelty and injustice towards animals: I don’t want to know. La la la la la. Rather than listen, and face the terrible knowledge of who, not what, these nonhuman animals are, and what we do to them, it’s so much easier to maintain the dissociation.

It’s a strange one for Nicky Campbell. On his Twitter account, he calls himself an animal lover and re-tweets the stories of animal abuse from other Twitter followers.

If you are an animal lover, Nicky, I’d like to challenge you to think about the chicken in the way you think about your dog or cat. Just for five minutes. Think about the reasons not to eat chickens. Can you do it?

For many it can take strength of will to overcome all those obstacles to knowing–and feeling–what happens to the animals that are consumed for food and products. It is difficult, for so many reasons, but we as humans are good at cognitive dissonance.

To begin to face the truth about nonhuman animals, particularly those used for food, is to acknowledge your role in their ill treatment and abuse, before turning to a plant-based diet. That can be an emotionally traumatic process.

But small steps. As Johannes Paul pointed out, chickens are now in the top 10 pets kept in the UK. They are kept for companionship as well as by those people who want to harvest their eggs, often as a way to bypass the cruelty inherent in the egg industry. That means more people are living with chickens and seeing their personalities and having to face the reality of eating chicken, perhaps the most hard-done by of all the farmed animals we as a human species consume.

So, Nicky, I see you are an animal lover – on only the first page of your Twitter feed you talk passionately about elephants, foxes, dogs, cats, tigers, orangutans… But what about chickens? Maybe you might stop visiting chicken restaurants when you think about each chicken as an individual with a personality, who would come running to the sound of your voice, even if you were singing ‘la la la’.

UPDATE 10am: Nicky replies: “I was, perhaps clumsily, trying to make the point that many do NOT think it thru”. Thanks Nicky, I agree, many people do not think about the individual animal they are eating.