Animal Writings

A bird is impaled on a cage wire, dying of thirst...immobile, feathers coming out, revealing bare skin

Rescuers gently take a mangled dead hen from a cage

Hens have open, festering sores of red and brown

Some corpses, still in the cages, are infested with bugs

The name of this depressing concentration of misery is "Ohio Fresh Eggs"

The live hen in the trash can is surrounded by dead hens

The hen is cradled softly in the rescuer's arms...for the first time in her life she experiences kindness from humans

Some hens look grotesquely half-dead

The rescued hens can finally flap their wings

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Ohio Fresh Eggs

They cannot ask for kindness
Or for mercy plead,
Yet cruel is our blindness
Which does not see their need.
World over, town or city,
God trusts us with this task:
To give our love and pity
To those who cannot ask.

—Edgar A Guest, 1881-1959