Chickens Quotes

“I dream of a better tomorrow. One where chickens can cross the road and their motives remain unquestioned.”
― Anonymous

“When some claim demarcation and “regulation”, others fancy “deregulation”, preferring foxes guarding the henhouse or chicken yards with free chickens and free foxes. Friend or foe, hen or fox, anyone can have a go. (“This far”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“He was transfixed at the sight of the lords and ladies of his realm running about like demented chickens.”
― Jonathan Stroud, The Amulet of Samarkand

“‎They are angry with me, because I know what I am." Said the little eagle. "How do you know that they are angry with you?" "Because, they despise me for wanting to soar, they only want me to peck at the dirt, looking for ants, with them. But I can't do that. I don't have chicken feet, I have eagle wings." "And what is so wrong with having eagle wings and no chicken feet?" Asked the old owl. "I'm not sure, that's what I'm trying to find out." "They hate you because you know that you are an eagle and they want you to think you are a chicken so that you will peck at the ground looking for ants and worms, so that you will never know that you are an eagle and always think yourself a chicken. Let them hate you, they will always be chickens, and you will always be an eagle. You must fly. You must soar." Said the old owl.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Shoving feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.”
― Brad Pitt

“I am a battery hen. I live in a cage so small I cannot stretch my wings. I am forced to stand night and day on a sloping wire mesh floor that painfully cuts into my feet. The cage walls tear my feathers, forming blood blisters that never heal. The air is so full of ammonia that my lungs hurt and my eyes burn and I think I am going blind. As soon as I was born, a man grabbed me and sheared off part of my beak with a hot iron, and my little brothers were thrown into trash bags as useless alive.

My mind is alert and my body is sensitive and I should have been richly feathered. In nature or even a farmyard I would have had sociable, cleansing dust baths with my flock mates, a need so strong that I perform 'vacuum' dust bathing on the wire floor of my cage. Free, I would have ranged my ancestral jungles and fields with my mates, devouring plants, earthworms, and insects from sunrise to dusk. I would have exercised my body and expressed my nature, and I would have given, and received, pleasure as a whole being. I am only a year old, but I am already a 'spent hen.' Humans, I wish I were dead, and soon I will be dead. Look for pieces of my wounded flesh wherever chicken pies and soups are sold.”
― Karen Davis

“Horses frighten me as much as chickens do,’ he said.

‘That is too bad, because lack of communication with horses has impeded human progress,’ said Abrenuncio. ‘If we ever broke down the barriers, we could produce the centaur.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“People don't know how chickens can turn on you, but they can -- just like mad dogs.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“Thus far, our responsibility for how we treat chickens and allow them to be treated in our culture is dismissed with blistering rhetoric designed to silence objection: “How the hell can you compare the feelings of a hen with those of a human being?” One answer is, by looking at her. It does not take special insight or credentials to see that a hen confined in a battery cage is suffering, or to imagine what her feelings must be compared with those of a hen ranging outside in the grass and sunlight. We are told that we humans are capable of knowing just about anything that we want to know—except, ironically, what it feels like to be one of our victims. We are told we are being “emotional” if we care about a chicken and grieve over a chicken’s plight. However, it is not “emotion” that is really under attack, but the vicarious emotions of pity, sympathy, compassion, sorrow, and indignity on behalf of the victim, a fellow creature—emotions that undermine business as usual. By contrast, such “manly” emotions as patriotism, pride, conquest, and mastery are encouraged.”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

“If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.”
― Grandma Moses

“...that's the business model. How quickly can they be made to grow, how tightly can they be packed, how much or little can they eat, how sick can they get without dying. This isn't animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating... Why doesn't a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it? It's easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it... How riveting wold the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“Alvin smiled back, and kissed her. "People talk about fools counting chickens before they hatch. That's nothing. We name them.”
― Orson Scott Card, Alvin Journeyman

“More laying hens are slaughtered in the United States than cattle or pigs. Commercial laying hens are not bred for their flesh, but when their economic utility is over the still-young birds are trucked to the slaughterhouse and turned into meat products. In the process they are treated even more brutally than meat-type chickens because of their low market value. Their bones are very fragile from lack of exercise and from calcium depletion for heavy egg production, causing fragments to stick to the flesh during processing. The starvation practice known as forced molting results in beaded ribs that break easily at the slaughterhouse. Removal of food for several days before the hens are loaded onto the truck weakens their bones even more.

Currently, the U.S. egg industry and the American Veterinary Medical Association oppose humane slaughter legislation for laying hens on the basis that their low economic value does not justify the cost of 'humane slaughter' technology. The industry created the inhumane conditions that are invoked to rationalize further unaccountability and cruelty.”
― Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry

“...a tight hard little woman humorless as a chicken.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Mr. False! No, don't start grabbing the chickens! Better off farmer with no chickens than a load of chickens with no farmer! Anyway, they'll probably float, or fly, or something!”
― Terry Pratchett, Snuff

“She kept her ears permanently tuned to the chicken voices outside, so knew immediately when a coyote had crept into the yard, and barreled screaming for the front door before the rest of us had a clue. (I don't know about the coyote, but I nearly needed CPR.) These hens owed their lives and eggs to Lily, there was no question.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

“Nancy taught two hens to help her sort flowers to make leis. She set them down by a basket of three colors of plastic flowers. One hen quickly pulled out all the red flowers, and another the white ones, leaving the pink flowers in the basket.”
― Karen Pryor, Lads Before the Wind: Diary of a Dolphin Trainer

“Sprout looked through the wide-open door,
focusing on the world outside. It had been a while
since she’d had an appetite. She had no desire to
lay another egg. Her heart emptied of feeling
every time the farmer’s wife took her eggs. The
pride she felt when she laid one was replaced by
sadness. She was exhausted after a full year of
this. She couldn’t so much as touch her own eggs,
not even with the tip of her foot. And she didn’t
know what happened to them after the farmer’s
wife carried them in her basket out of the coop.”
― Sun-mi Hwang, The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly

“Fly low and feed with the chickens or soar high and dance with the eagles.”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“A wild chicken is a dead chicken.”
― Peter Ortblad

“Well, speaking of supper, let's get it underway," she proposed. "Is there any meat in the house?"

"There's plenty of chickens in the chicken house out back," Sam responded. "I'll get Aaron to help me, and we'll kill a couple of roosters."

"Oh, my!" exclaimed Margaret. "Well, that will be fresh chicken, for sure!”
― Sarah Brazytis, The House on Harmony Street

“My grandpa lived in the First District area of Dixie County, FL. Near where State Road 349 and County Road 351 meet. I spent a lot of time there as a kid. Roaming over unplanted fields. Tossing maypops against the side of a sun-bleached barn. Chickens roamed freely over his land. Mornings began with a hunt to find eggs for breakfast. Every day was Easter back then. With sand and snakes.”
― Damon Thomas, Some Books Are Not For Sale

“Let 2022 be the year that the tiger comes to visit you and scares away all the chickens that you have been keeping.
Happy New Year!”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“She shaded in more of the tornado, a little fiercely, then turned back a few pages and let herself be pulled into the world of Carleen, the least popular chicken in her high school, pecked down by plumper hens and scorned by cocky roosters.
Carleen's story wasn't hers. Amanda had been quite well liked in high school---mostly because she stayed resolutely in the middle of the road, dressing like everyone else, doing the things everyone else did. Amanda had made those choices thanks to Mae, who had already made all the mistakes. Unlike Mae, Amanda did exactly what was expected of her and not anything more. She was a good girl.
Carleen was not a good girl. She was the dark chicken of her small town, pulling the other chicks in with her schemes and plans when they were young, then finding herself alone as a teenage chicken with a lot to prove and only her mysterious telekinetic powers, powers the others in the flock didn't share, to do it with. Carleen had been thoroughly rejected and cruelly humiliated by her peers, and would continue to be until she allowed the forces within her to burst free---at prom, of course, in homage to Carrie, one of Amanda's favorite books---and annihilate the chickens around her in a rampage of oil and flames.
Carleen, Amanda thought, would end her prom night with a fried chicken dinner.”
― K.J. Dell'Antonia, The Chicken Sisters

“I hop ya come back alive!" Lucy cried. "Gee, little sis, what a cheery thought," Brownie said with an eye roll.”
― Rachel

“Not all people called a chicken have chicken brains.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Suppose some organism, let’s just say a chicken, hatched from an abandoned nest; there were no other eggs in that nest, so it couldn’t see its fellow chicken siblings, and since the nest was abandoned, the chicken couldn’t see its mother. There were no other chickens surrounding it. There were also no reflective surfaces in the area, so the chicken couldn’t see what it looked like and a few moments later, it became blind, so it could not look down at its feet or see its own feathers. Because of these factors, the chicken didn’t know that it was a chicken. Is it possible for the chicken to realize that it is a chicken? If so, what circumstances could lead the chicken to realize that it is a chicken, or is akin to any groups of chickens it may encounter?”
― Lucy Carter, The Reformation

“Racism, xenophobia and racial segregation never disappeared. These things went underground and are now being applied by companies like Google, Amazon and many others. It is not a coincidence that despite the equalization of opportunities that the internet provides, the resources of the world keep going to the same 2 countries and you keep buying information from people that live in those same 2 countries and being exposed only to products of those same 2 countries. The opportunities are not the same for everyone because they are being monopolized and controlled. The excuse of always, your security, is being used to bomb nations and also steal all of your rights, including the right to privacy and to the same opportunities. When there are threats against those nations by some who want to annihilate them, they also make you believe that this is something horrible, while making you believe that the opposite is justified. And like dumb rats in a lab experiment, the population keeps pressing the same buttons until they die in absolute misery and ignorance, fighting each other and never seeing the real enemy. Work harder, they say! The least thing they need is for you to notice these differences. They then put some Indian as the CEO or Prime Minister of one of these companies or nations to gaslight you and make you think that you are crazy, and that the opportunities exist and that they are liberal. And when your warn the dumb chickens that they are heading to the slaughterhouse, the dumb chickens, in love with their captivity and their corn, say that you are the crazy one.”
― Dan Desmarques

“A wolf is wearing a collar with a six-foot metal chain. Ten feet away, there is a chicken pen with chickens inside. The wolf manages to kill all the chickens. How?”
― R.P. Jones, Chrysalis

“The musicality makes this book soar, balancing rhymes with sounds that chickens would make while bringing imaginative fun to the barnyard. A perfect pick to illustrate the fun of reading for the very young." Kirkus Review”
― Mary Jo Huff