I usually keep three hens in the back yard. They do have individual personalties and they seem to like to be around each other.

If you've even taken a look at factory farming it's pretty awful. I wouldn't torture my birds, so I wouldn't have anyone else do it by proxy. I'm no against eating them. I just don't think it's a great idea when biological things that appear, to me, to be sentient become cogs in a machine. The meat industry isn't exactly inviting folks in to see how food is produced.

I won't get into how I arrived at this conclusion here but I have come to the conclusion that physical suffering is pretty much biological in nature. It sucks and is pretty much the same for anything that experiences it if you can talk or not. We'd freak out if people were treating dogs the way they treat chickens. Micheal Vick was comparatively nice to his dogs.

Wait until International Be Nice to Pigs day. You'll get an earful then.

Adam