An ecofeminist philosophy of impairment as ability

Through a focus on farmed female nonhuman animals, the paper contributes to critical feminist philosophy by framing ability as also an oppressive concept and practice with the potential for profound violence for the ostensibly abled body. A social-capitalist model of ability undertakes at least three types of politics for feminist and animal CDS philosophy: (1) it frames impairment as also causing the harms of ability, where ideas of the “natural” and “normal” abled body serve as oppressive mechanisms; (2) it examines such abling impairment, or impairment that amplifies or accelerates existing ability through selective breeding, as a singular exploitation experienced by farmed animals for patriarchal capitalism; and (3) it offers a potential pathway in addressing the tensions that emerge between liberatory human and liberatory animal philosophy in calling a farmed animal disabled. This latter concern has posed conceptual challenges to the possibility of alliances between disability and animal rights movements.

Disability rights movements, and CDS scholarship have distinguished disability from impairment. Impairment is a value-neutral term that describes bodily features, while “‘disability’ … refer(s) to the disabling barriers of prejudice, discrimination, and social exclusion” imposed on persons with impairment (Morris Reference Morris2001, 2). Disability stigmatizes or pathologizes neurobiological diversity as “defective,” “abnormal,” or “unnatural,” disregarding the myriad ways in which humans live, move, and exist in the world (Clare Reference Clare2017; Taylor Reference Taylor2017; Wendell Reference Wendell2001). CDS politics challenges the often-automatic equation of impairment with pain and suffering, which suggests a state of pitifulness or abjection of the impaired person, and/or reinforces ableist fears and stigmas around impairment (Clare Reference Clare2017). CDS argues therefore for a social construction of disability that locates disability in society rather than the body (Clare Reference Clare2017; Wendell Reference Wendell2001), in other words, rightly locating the responsibility for the social oppressions of disability in a closed-minded society that is unwilling to accommodate impairment.

Feminist CDS has critically extended and complicated several of these concerns, pointing out that even impairment, particularly in the female reproductive body, is not value-neutral. Tremain (Reference Tremain2006, 36) explains impairment as “a relatively recent medico-juridical category that operates in the service of normalization” of how a body is deemed impaired—and therefore controllable/governable. The governance of women's sexuality, reproduction, and reproductive choice have been central to the formation and securitization of the nation-state and the market (Bracke Reference Bracke2017). In the case of the female reproductive body, genetic science and reproductive technologies define “the naturalization and materialization” of foetal/prenatal impairment in utero, for instance (Tremain Reference Tremain2006), playing a pervasive and invasive role in even determining and naming what is reproductive impairment at all, leading to “commodification [and] differential valuation of foetal life” (Mills Reference Mills, Prozorov and Rentea2016, 289).

Crucially, this knowledge and capacity shapes health, state, and market policies, through “medico-juridical” definitions of “normal” and “natural” about the female reproductive body (Tremain Reference Tremain2006). As Eli Clare (Reference Clare2017, 173) writes, “The standards called normal—sometimes in tandem with natural—are promoted as averages. They are posed as the most common and best states of being for body-minds.” These standards are not scientific conclusions but shaped by social subjectivities and limitations. In Medical entanglements, feminist scientist Kristina Gupta (Reference Gupta2020, 21) argues that the institutionalization of a malfunctioning, abnormal, diseased, or impaired human body more broadly is in fact solidified through a set of “sexist, racist, heterosexist, classist, and ableist norms” (Gupta Reference Gupta2020, 28).

To Gupta's list, it is important to add speciesist norms that also determine ideas of what is natural—or indeed, abled—about female reproduction. If patriarchy is a “kind of transnational biopower invested in controlling women's bodies” (Takeshita Reference Takeshita2012, 24), then it metastasizes into perhaps its most extractive and violent form as what I have previously called “Anthropatriarchy, or a meta-patriarchal ordering of society constructed around human gendered exploitation of nonhuman animals [that] is essential to sustain all animal agriculture” (Narayanan Reference Narayanan2019, 198). Adams reminds us that the violence of patriarchy “has been inscribed through species inequality as well as human inequality” (Adams Reference Adams, Donovan and Adams2007, 202, emphasis added). As I have reflected before, “Anthropatriarchy extends beyond patriarchy in the total ownership of living animal bodies as resources; their reproductive systems, germplasm and ovum, labor, familial relationships, and their genetic material itself are human property.” (Narayanan Reference Narayanan2019, 198).

What does such a pervasive scale of control of the female nonhuman reproductive body, to the extent of intentionally impairing its functions to serve consumption and capitalism, mean for the politics of disability? Disability in hens as other human and nonhuman animals, may certainly accompany aging, environmental factors, and inherited ancestral genetics (Wendell Reference Wendell1989) (though this is rarely the case for farmed animals who are slaughtered as infants, and not usually allowed to experience the impairments of age). However, what of impairment that is willfully introduced into the farmed body? Is the impairment experienced by the genomically altered hen, cow, or pig a “disability”? Recounting her observation of chickens crammed into a truck headed for slaughter, critical disability and animal studies scholar Sunaura Taylor (Reference Taylor2017, 21) writes, “the hens were virtually all disabled.” Taylor then asks (2017, 22, 38), “what does it mean to say that an animal is disabled … [and] what does it mean to speak of a healthy/normal chicken … when they are bred to be disabled?”

Taylor's troubling question points to the tension in naming an animal into whom impairment has been bred—arguably an act of injustice—as disabled, thus re-associating disability with negative connotations. How can bred impairment be conceptualized, and the injustices associated with farmed animal impairment properly addressed, without strengthening the narratives of “defect” or “abnormality” that sustain human oppressions? As Clare (Reference Clare2017, 56) asks: “how do we witness, name, and resist the injustices that reshape and damage all kinds of body-minds—plant and animal, organic and inorganic, nonhuman and human—while not equating disability with injustice?”

Disability, as Taylor (Reference Taylor2017) notes, is not only a social construction but also, a human construction. In the case of farmed animals, the consequences of the pervasive modification of their body parts and functions through selective breeding—often by impairing them altogether—is best understood not necessarily through a social model of disability, but a socio-capitalist model of ability. Ability best describes how impairment is not made hyper-visible as in the case of humans, but is fact rendered hyper-invisible. Impairment is disappeared altogether, by being ignored or not noted as impairment and rather, normalized as biological ability.

The bred condition of hyper-fertility in hens, then, speaks directly to feminist concerns about “biopower's normalizing strategies” to define and control what constitutes impairment (Tremain Reference Tremain2006, 53), but equally importantly, also imply what is not impairment. Their unceasing, almost year-round fertility and ovulation has become such a naturalised facet of egg production that the notion that this is in fact specifically a manipulated impairment of chicken ovaries and oviduct becomes bewildering. In fact, chicken reproduction is a phenomenon of such totalizing control that, regardless of the site or scale of the egg farm—battery, free-range, or suburban backyard—it is the relentlessly hyper-ovulating body of the modern hen itself that is the site of the oppressions of ability.

Impairment, when neglected as such, and rather, actively and intentionally exploited instead as ability or naturalized as able-bodied, also functions as oppression and violence. If disability as oppression takes no account of impairments and excludes impaired persons from mainstream society and economy (Morris Reference Morris2001), ability as oppression also takes no account of impairments but includes them into the mainstream for profit and exploitation. Impairment shapes the pathologization of disability for humans, and the normalization of ability for farmed animals. Ability too then, can be seen as located in (human) society and economies, rather than in farmed bodies.

Their resultant vulnerability, suffering, and fatal risks are not recognized as ethically or politically relevant. Women, for instance, suffer more when the pain and suffering of impairment is ignored (Wendell Reference Wendell2001). In the case of farmed animals, “the only crucible of vulnerability to pain and suffering, as policymakers perceive, is the slaughterhouse,” though birds, who compose the most numerous of all farmed species, are excluded from even this consideration (Somers and Soldatic Reference Somers, Soldatic, Jenkins, Montford and Taylor2020, 41). However, as Jones writes (2016, 558), “A pain-centric model of disability does three things: centralizes lived experiences of pain, demands both medical intervention and disability accommodations for that pain, and critiques both medicine and accommodations through the insights of social-constructionist approaches.” Highlighting the pain that farmed females routinely experience for the human consumption of their “feminized protein” is core to clarifying a socio-capitalist model of ability that addresses the nature and consequences of animal exploitation at the genomic level. This is rarely addressed in animal welfare or even rights discourses, the focus usually being on the treatment of such individuals already born, rather than breeding them to be so in the first place.

Selective breeding for eggs: reproductive control and the hyper-ovulating hen

Chickens are the most numerous farmed land animal: approximately 65 billion chickens are raised and slaughtered each year for meat and about 80 million metric tonnes of eggs (Lawal et al. Reference Lawal2020). This human demand for cheap feminized protein operates as a naturalized interdependence of life under capitalism, through the large-scale and highly contested subsidization of animal agriculture (Silbergeld Reference Silbergeld2016). The sheer mundanity with which “eggs” pervade human lives obscures the singular lives of these sentient beings bred as commodities, and their ecological histories and formerly sovereign states of being “wild.”

The domesticated chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) is a descendent of the Red Jungle Fowl (Gallus gallus spadiceus), the “main ancestral species” (Lawal et al. Reference Lawal2020, 1), who were domesticated and interbred over hundreds of years with “both RJF subspecies and other jungle fowl species” in South and Southeast Asia (Wang et al. Reference Wang, Thakur and Peng2020). The selective breeding of chickens over the years has led to four major types of chicken breeds for production, i.e., “egg-type, game, meat-type and Bantam … represent[ing the] major evolutionary branches of chickens” (Moiseyeva et al. Reference Moiseyeva, Romanov, Nikiforov, Sevastyanova and Semyenova2003, 403). The Red Jungle Fowl is “now highly endangered in its true wild form” (Pitt et al. Reference Pitt, Gillingham, Maltby and Stewart2016).

Egg production has particularly driven the logics of chicken breeding in the last 50 years (Tixier-Boichard Reference Tixier-Boichard2020, 2), which seeks to amplify “a variety of traits associated with egg production” (Bain et al. Reference Bain, Nys and Dunn2016, 330). The trait of the wild Red Jungle Fowl who ovulated on consecutive days in spring and laid in “clutches” became amenable to the making of the super-ovulating domesticated hen. The reproductive system of a female bird composes the ovary and the oviduct (Jacob Reference Jacobn.d. A). Ovulation occurs when an ovum is released from the ovary into the oviduct upon maturation, where the albumen and eggshell are formed (Jacob Reference Jacobn.d. A). Jacob writes, “The total time a hen's body takes to transform a yolk into a fully developed egg and lay that egg is about 25 to 26 hours.” A hen lays in clutches or “group of eggs laid by a hen on consecutive days” (Jacob Reference Jacobn.d. A). This natural trait of daily ovulation in short and limited seasonal timeframes would be subject to accelerated rates so as to make their reproductive systems almost incessantly fertile, throughout the year.

Studies on the wild Red Jungle Fowl across Nepal, India, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos where they are native, note that the hens laid eggs in the dry weather (Collias and Saichuae Reference Collias and Saichuae1967), where it was likely that one hen might lay for a few days, and then rest for a period (Jacob Reference Jacobn.d. A). The historical accounts of chicken scientists record that indigenous hens in Bengal, India, laid about 40 eggs a year (Haodon Reference Haodon1945). If the eggs were fertilized by a rooster, an act that occurs before the hen lays, then it would take approximately three weeks for the chicks to hatch (Jacob Reference Jacobn.d. A).

This capacity of a bird to lay in clutches was amplified through selective breeding of the hybrid “egg” hen whose “clutch” now composes about 250–300 eggs. The modern hen typically ovulates at least once a day, and some 300 times a year, a rate of ovulation that exceeds historic avian ovulation by approximately 3000 percent. In “egg” chickens, Bain et al. (2016, 332) write, “the biological limit of one egg per day for example has virtually been achieved at peak production.”

Selective breeding for eggs manipulates hens’ reproductive systems to ovulate earlier, and lay heavier eggs, forcing abnormally large eggs from their cloaca every day. As Alabi (Reference Alabi2019, 36) writes, “Ability of egg-type chickens to start laying earlier in life is a desirable trait that commercial poultry farmers always look forward to achieving.” Selective breeding also seeks to ensure that the eggs weigh at least 60 grams, “maintaining egg weight at or around this level for as long as possible,” eventually increasing individual egg weight to 65.5 grams when the hen is 50 weeks old (Bain et al. Reference Bain, Nys and Dunn2016, 332). In sum: the number, weight, and size of the hen's ova have exponentially increased.

Responding to these harms that chickens experience due to selective breeding can itself become a way of marketing the eggs as meeting ethical standards, making “animal bodies into ethical biocapital” (Twine Reference Twine2010, 146). Breeding scientists suggest that better feed may address some problems (Bain et al. Reference Bain, Nys and Dunn2016). Breeding companies are also exploring the development of the “long life layer,” where the hen will be allowed—or endure?—another 30 weeks of “long life,” to lay more eggs. Bain et al. (Reference Bain, Nys and Dunn2016, 330) write, “The ‘long life’ layer, which will be capable of producing 500 eggs in a laying cycle of 100 weeks, is … on the horizon.” However, even the dubious possibility of an extended lifespan—which also means the extension of multiple sufferings—can only be feasible if the quality of eggs laid by these “long-lifers,” and the albumen quality is maintained (Bain et al. Reference Bain, Nys and Dunn2016). The response of genomic science is not to question selective breeding, but to do it differently (Twine Reference Twine2010), i.e., in a manner that does not lead to a loss of egg production.

Thus it appears possible to extract more eggs from hens. Selection criteria determine the limits of selective breeding, or in other words, the limits of their impaired reproductive systems, determined by the quality of eggs, and the laying life of the hen, ostensibly a nod at animal welfare. Tixier-Boichard (Reference Tixier-Boichard2020, 2) writes, “In theory, selection may reach a plateau when all favourable alleles [variations of particular genes, and only so many variations of a gene are possible for a fixed population] have reached fixation. Yet, current data for poultry show that the selection response can still take place after 50 generations or more …” In other words, selective breeding is not just a scientific but also a subjective decision. Breeding can be intensified by changing the set of criteria deemed acceptable, including modifying or removing animal welfare standards that impede production. As Tixier-Boichard (Reference Tixier-Boichard2020, 2) writes, “Biological limits induced by extreme performance can be by-passed by adapting the breeding programme, introducing new selection criteria, changing the management or developing remedial technologies.”

And so the moment passes where the hen, who is at the heart of selective breeding, might be considered for more than her (re)production potentials. Nonetheless, some of these hens radically disrupt the patriarchal imaginary that sees them as egg commodities, when they find themselves liberated from normalized sites of violence and exploitation in farms, into vegan rescue homes, in spaces of care with humans. New ways of knowing and knowledge-making about the hen emerge when “knowledge practices [become] forms of intimacy” (Wiegman Reference Wiegman2010, 83). The suffering of hens as egg producers generates an ethical, political, and medical accounting that prioritizes the hen subject, rather than the egg commodity.

Chronic egg-laying as chronic and/or fatal reproductive/gynecological impairment

We grieved immensely for Rhea's death, mourning that she had so little time to experience freedom after having lived her life as a battery hen. Inexperienced at that stage with chicken care, we took Rhea's death as an individual case, not yet properly knowing to associate chicken health with the egg-laying. Already at the time of Rhea's decline, there were brewing issues in our other chickens that we were yet to recognize as significant. We would lose two more hens to “repro” issues (as experienced fellow chicken rescuers would refer to them), before we finally learned that it would be a matter of time before our other hens potentially developed reproductive issues directly due to the fact that they were laying so prolifically, including but not limited to: ovarian cancers, cloacal prolapse (when the inner tissues of the cloaca collapse out), egg yolk peritonitis (colloquially known as “internal laying”), dystocia (inability to expel eggs, or egg binding), impacted oviduct, and neoplasia (abnormal growth of cells which could be malignant or benign). There could be other indirect, prolonged, and also fatal suffering due to hyper-laying, including severe feather pecking and cannibalism due to stress, even in suburban or urban backyard farms (Jacob Reference Jacobn.d. B). These deaths would eventually give some insight into the possible causes for Rhea's death.

At an estimated eight months of age at the time, Rani, for instance, laid regularly, but her eggshells felt noticeably thin, despite us supplementing their feed with every nutritional variety that we could think of—her own eggs and eggshells, kale, broccoli and spinach for calcium, cashews, hazelnuts and walnuts, seeds, and seashell grains. Avian veterinarian Sharman Hoppes (2015) writes, “Usually, these birds are chronic egg layers, and calcium deficiency (resulting in misshapen or soft-shelled eggs) is a factor.”

Thin or misshapen eggs, such as those laid by Rhea, are common reasons for egg farms to send hens—including indeed Rhea—to the slaughterhouse from where she had been rescued. The high rate of egg-laying causes calcium deficiency, resulting in the spontaneous bone breakage of young hens (Bain et al. Reference Bain, Nys and Dunn2016). While eggshells are treated as garbage by human consumers, they are crucial to constituting the egg commodity. Thin-shelled eggs cannot be transported for sale as they “do not fit well into a typical egg carton or are more likely to break during transport” (Jacob Reference Jacobn.d. A). Hens are thus “replaced,” i.e., slaughtered, at 72 weeks (Bain et al. Reference Bain, Nys and Dunn2016, 331).

We were unaware that calcium deficiency due to chronic egg-laying was placing Rani at rapid risk of peritonitis or internal-laying like Lila, or dystocia. Dystocia can lead to an impacted oviduct, which can become filled with albumen and eggs with soft or misshapen shells that stick to the oviduct wall and congeal (Hoppes 2015). “Clinical signs are depression, anorexia, distended abdomen, and possibly dyspnea [difficulty in breathing]” (Hoppes 2015), signs that Rhea had demonstrated towards the end. Hens are also the only nonhuman animal who “spontaneously develops ovarian cancer with a high prevalence” due to their introduced capacity to “ovulate prolifically” (Johnson and Giles Reference Johnson and Giles2013: 432). ISA Brown and Leghorn hens, who are prolifically used in global commercial laying, have “the highest mortality rate” (Alabi Reference Alabi2019, 36), as compared to subspecies of chickens who ovulate less.

These realities of the pain and suffering of egg-laying hens are generally absent from feminist resistance, social justice outrage, anti-violence, and anti-capitalism narratives. Chickens in particular are almost so fully objectified, and excluded from moral consideration that, as chicken ethologist Lori Marino (2017) notes, most people are surprised to register them as even birds. As the world's most numerous species, this is hardly due to unfamiliarity with them; rather, the geographies where chickens are found—farms and slaughterhouses—and their use as consumable objects “interacts with perceptions of their intelligence.” As Marino (Reference Marino2017, 127) writes, “Unlike many other birds, chickens are categorized as a commodity, devoid of authenticity as a real animal with an evolutionary history and phylogenetic context.” Chickens experience advanced emotions including boredom, happiness and frustration, “demonstrate self-control” (thereby potentially demonstrating self-awareness), and even exhibit basic arithmetic proficiency; Marino concludes (2017, 141) that chicken are “behaviorally sophisticated, discriminating among individuals, exhibiting Machiavellian-like social interactions, and learning socially in complex ways that are similar to humans.” Indeed, their physiological experience of pain, together with their rich emotional worlds, create their suffering, when they are treated utterly as commodities.

We would soon learn in a visceral way that chickens might also suffer psychological trauma, often manifested through variations in their consumption of food. Despite the profusion of high-calorific items like banana oats, fresh corn, and boiled sweet potato, Rani's keel bone along her breast would remain as sharp as a knife. Later when we implanted the chickens, we would be shocked at the immediate drop in the volume of food they ate while finally gaining weight. While hormones from the contraception might contribute to the weight gain, hyper-laying chickens, we learnt, could not gain weight. Avian ovulation is calorie-intensive, energy-burning labour. As Walzem and Chen (Reference Walzem and Chen2014, 199) write, “ovulation is the first step in the energy-intensive process of egg formation.” It is virtually unknown or unrecognized that “egg-laying” chickens exist in a constant state of metabolic hunger and remain under-weight as a result of chronic laying.

Miller loved food—or we thought she did—more than the others. We did not know that chickens—like humans—might eat to self-soothe. Hens routinely suffer “abnormal nervousness and hysteria” (a misogynistic deployment of the terms used to describe fertile women, and indeed, hens) caused by hormonal imbalance, and aggravated by the conditions of egg farms (Hansen Reference Hansen1976, 531), a behavior so common that it may not be noticed as a concern. Perhaps as a traumatized response to her constant hunger in the egg farm, Miller had been stress eating so indiscriminately that that she had eaten 14 metal screws, a shocking discovery we made at the vet's when she became sick. We discovered that it was common practice for builders in Melbourne to bury waste construction material into the ground at the completion of a project. However, while the other chickens had noticed but not eaten the screws, Miller who insatiably used food for comfort, had swallowed several. Despite an immediate three-hour surgery to extract the foreign material, Miller died 13 days later of a cardiac arrest.

Chronic egg-laying in birds, is in fact considered a serious medical issue even by veterinarians when a bird lays “repeated clutches or produce larger than normal clutch sizes, regardless of the presence of a mate or appropriate breeding season” (Clinical Veterinary Advisor 2013). The Clinical Veterinary Advisor (2013) elaborates, “Chronic egg laying birds are often predisposed to the development or occurrence of egg binding, egg yolk coelomitis, salpingitis, metritis, nutritional depletion, and osteoporosis.” Arthritis, chronic pain, fatigue, and inflammation are generally common symptoms of chronic illness (Jones Reference Jones2016). The hens’ spontaneous bone breakages due to calcium deficiency, their constant metabolic hunger, and even their mental distress and anxiety that becomes apparent in contrast to their calm after they are placed on contraception, can justify describing the modern hen as being afflicted by “chronic illness.” As Wendell writes, conditions can be considered chronic when

Specifically, it is possible to think of chickens’ incessant egg-laying as a gynecological impairment. Feminists argue that endometriosis must be considered a chronic gynecological disability, given the abdominal, pelvic, and vaginal pain associated with the condition (Jones Reference Jones2016). It would not be a stretch to consider that hyper-ovulation with the potential for associated cloacal swelling and pain, such as what Sultam experienced, or what might have been Lila's abdominal pain from internal laying, can also be considered a chronic gynecological or reproductive issue. After Lila's death, we would wonder if her quiet, timid nature might have been actually due to chronic abdominal pain.

After losing three chickens in quick succession, we looked urgently for better ways of caring for the remaining hens. Our vets and experienced members of an international vegan group for liberated chickens produced the same solution—contraceptive implants for the hens, which would produce a length of seasonal infertility when they would not ovulate at all. Vets suggest an implant when a chicken presents with reproductive trouble, due to the high cost of implantation—approximately AUD$300 per implant per chicken, which might last between three and eight months, and a hen might need two to three implants annually. However, the chicken rescue community advocates, where possible and affordable, implanting even supposedly “healthy” chickens, because they view hyper-ovulation itself as a reproductive issue. Chicken sanctuaries, notes Rosenfeld (Reference Rosenfeld2021, 11) can be “anti-natalist”; they “pull different threads from naturecultures to reorient chickens’ presents and futures: they make claims about health and healthy chickens that consider their present biological lives and how these are intertwined with hegemonic political economy.” The political economy of veterinary expenses, combined with the sheer scale of hyper-fertile hens needing rescue and medical rehabilitation can be prohibitive, though the moral uneasiness may persist that individual birds may want to reproduce (Rosenfeld Reference Rosenfeld2021). Our vets agreed that implantation is the healthiest choice for the hens, a course of life-saving treatment that also becomes profitable to veterinarians.

It is worth taking a moment to consider the radical politics of care in allowing female individuals of any farmed species to experience infertility, a routine facet of the cycle of ovulation. In being rescued from egg farms and rehomed with vegans, these specific hens might have better housing, feed, stimulating and secure environments, access to veterinary care, and above all, become de-commodified beings, but would remain shackled to the suffering of daily laying. This could only change if we managed to find a way to halt their hyper-ovulation.

We returned with our remaining chickens to the veterinarian to have them implanted with the Suprelorin contraception (Figure 2). Suprelorin contains the active ingredient deslorelin and is used in male dogs and ferrets to produce temporary, reversible infertility (European Medicines Agency 2012). In female dogs, Suprelorin stimulates oestrus and ovulation, and is used by the dog breeding industry on females who have difficulty in ovulating and conceiving (Hedberg Reference Hedberg2015). Mammalian metabolism is different to avian metabolism, and in hens Suprelorin suppresses ovulation.

Figure 2. Ruby getting a Suprelorin implant inserted into her back (© Yamini Narayanan).

Suprelorin comes as a pellet or a chip in a pre-loaded syringe with a thick needle (European Medicines Agency 2012). It is injected subcutaneously on the chickens’ backs, between their wings, or on their breast, a process akin to microchipping. Over time, the implant slowly and continuously releases low doses of deslorelin (European Medicines Agency 2012), supressing the reproductive hormonal enzymes in ovulating hens. Suprelorin comes in two sizes—4.7 mg and 9.4 mg, which can keep a chicken infertile for up to approximately six and twelve months respectively, depending on each hen's body biochemistry. The implant activates 24 to 48 hours later, and the hen ceases ovulating for a temporary period, until it wears off.

The politics of neutering animals has been of concern to feminist animal studies scholars. In the case of companion species like dogs, Srinivasan (Reference Srinivasan2013, 113) challenges neutering, seen as the gold standard for dog welfare in the West, and argues that, as invasive biophysical interventions often enacted upon healthy individuals, they can and do present harm. So too the “neutering” of chickens is not uncomplicated, particularly after the first implantation. The hen goes through a heavy moult, and might withdraw from food somewhat, possibly due to nausea. The regrowth of new feathers is painful and uncomfortable. In the initial weeks after the first implant, the hen might need supplemental care such as tube-feeding. However, after a couple of months, the difference in their body condition is breathtaking, when nutrients and calories are not diverted into egg-making. The chickens add a third to their body weight. Their feathers glisten with health. The hens become noticeably calmer, at least partly due to the hormone suppression, making their previous state of anxiety and fretfulness all the more obvious. Their infertility—and good health—became a routinized dimension of our collective lives, a radical departure from the incessant fertility that constitutes being able-bodied—and productive—for females under patriarchal egg capitalism.

Patriarchal capitalization of female hyper-reproductivity and its “cures”

A politics of disability illuminates the structures and institutions that produce disability/ies (Wendell Reference Wendell1989). A politics of ability likewise reveals the logics and structures of patriarchal farmed animal capitalism. Ideas about animals’ fertility and infertility, and the management of their reproductive capacities, are intertwined with ideas of what constitutes a good human life (Srinivasan Reference Srinivasan2013). The perception of natural nonhuman female fecundity is a ubiquitous way of promoting egg farming, when the “good life” composes egg consumption. Studies note the popular perception among the egg-consuming public, peddled by the egg industry, that “Happy chickens lay tastier [or more] eggs” (Bray and Ankeny Reference Bray and Ankeny2017), despite the real possibility that a hen who is laying “more” might be decidedly unhappy. This patriarchal-capitalist gaslighting is not dissimilar to what would be an oppressive patriarchal circulation of the idea that “Happy women menstruate more!” Fertility is core to the way farmed animals (and people who menstruate) are valued in patriarchal, capitalist societies. The incapacity to reproduce or be fertile is a stigma enough to rationalize the dehumanization of women (Akarsu and Beji Reference Akarsu and Nezihe Beji2021). In the case of a hen, the “stigma” or “defect” of infertility is enough to be punished with her slaughter.

The bred ability in farmed females to hyper-reproduce perhaps exemplifies capitalism's “fetishization of productivism, which favours the development of productive forces as an absolute, positive value” (Trujillo Reference Trujillo2021, 24). Ovulation is a biological precursor to all reproduction, making the ability to hyper-ovulate in female farmed animals a desired characteristic under capitalism. Pigs are so severely overbred to hyper-ovulate to conceive high numbers of piglets that a single startled sow in factories containing tens of thousands of pregnant pigs will immediately lead to cascading miscarriages in all of them (Blanchette Reference Blanchette2020). Embryo-transfer techniques in bovines bred for lactate (dairy) rely on magnifying the capacities of cows to hyper-ovulate so they may conceive six embryos, for instance, where they may normally produce only one (Narayanan Reference Narayanan2018).

In the case of chickens bred for eggs, control over the hen's reproductive ability at the genomic level produces eggs of a standardized size, weight, and regularity across billions of ovulating bodies. The language of sustainability is used to promote green capitalism through ideas of animal welfare, rather than challenging animal consumption per se (Twine Reference Twine2010), positioning the incessantly fertile female animal body as an infinite, renewable resource (Narayanan Reference Narayanan2016). The resultant suffering of animals is “closely tied to the logics of capitalism itself … the drive to produce and reproduce life” (Wadiwel Reference Wadiwel and Gruen2018, 87). When reproduction becomes unfeasible as a result of bodily degeneration which is often rapid in the case of selectively bred animals, those “who are deemed ‘non-productive’ or ‘productively disabled,’” are killed, regularizing and invisibilizing their introduced impairment (Somers and Soldatic Reference Somers, Soldatic, Jenkins, Montford and Taylor2020, 35–36).

Against this meta-landscape of planned, deliberate alterations to the animal body, how can we read the use of contraception to help some chickens? Is contraception a “cure” for hens’ hyper-fertility? The idea of medical interventions as “cure” is fraught for CDS scholars. The medical-industrial complex, argues Eli Clare (Reference Clare2017), is invested in pathologizing and financializing biomedical “cures” to repair constructed/contested “defects,” resulting in the eradication of impaired life itself. Clare writes (Reference Clare2017, 76), “The medical-industrial complex is unwavering in its commitment to cure's ultimate goal—ensuring that body-mind trouble no longer exists as if it had never existed in the first place.” How can we think of the loss of introduced “trouble” in farmed animals, in a manner that neither disregards the outrage and grief over biomedical eradication in the human case, but also takes seriously the extractions and consequences of the intentional manipulation of animal reproduction?

The contraception may bring medical and biological benefit to a tiny number of hens placed to receive it, but it is neither a “cure” for their naturalized hyper-fertility, nor are these small pockets of infertile hen populations insignificant. The political value of chicken contraception may be to conceptualize an ecofeminist model of naturalized ability of farmed females to be hyper reproductive. It was only after our hens were on contraception that we could fully appreciate infertility as an integral part of female life. In tangibly (re)introducing infertility as an important state of being, and a fundamental right for the female body, chicken contraception allowed a glimpse into the rich possibilities of chicken life, when a part of their everyday was not spent in anxiety and pain from daily laying. This palpable contrast presented a radical alternative to being such an intensively bred animal that the animal herself became lost through generations of selective breeding.

The use of contraception as resistance to the anthropatriarchal control of female reproduction is not straightforward. Like the IUD, the Suprelorin enacts disciplinary power on the female body and can also turn it into a “powerful entity” (Takeshita Reference Takeshita2012, 27). As a health technology, contraception is pivoted around “choice” in human politics. The question of reproductive choice, a complex “biopolitical script” even in the case of humans (Takeshita Reference Takeshita2012, 28), becomes a moot one in the case of hens, who had no choice in the genomic manipulation of their reproduction for egg farming, or in their implantation. The human makes the “choice” in both the commodification and de-commodification of their ovulation. However, contraception may enable them a measure of reproductive freedom, in attempting to recreate avian ovulation patterns of seasonal fertility and infertility as closely as possible.

Nonetheless, it is not too far a stretch to consider that chickens (and other farmed animals) make their “reproductive choice” known. Sultam's swollen red, painful cloaca due to daily laying and her shouting around laying time; the high-pitched anxiety of laying hens; their depressed eating, hunched features, eyes tight shut during times of pain are all telling us something, necessitating an ethical accounting from humans (Donovan Reference Donovan, Donovan and Adams2007) who are responsible for breeding such suffering.

These features and cries of pain can be read as chronic suffering and illness. Wendell (Reference Wendell2001, 21) writes, “Many of us with chronic illnesses are not obviously disabled; to be recognized as disabled, we have to remind people frequently of our needs and limitations.” A politics of disability and ability, for humans or non, must also be able to accommodate the realities of pain and suffering, especially when deliberately inflicted on vulnerable or exploitable subjects. As Taylor (Reference Taylor2017, 144) writes, the “denial of suffering is as problematic as an over-emphasis on suffering.” Pain politics takes seriously the realities of those suffering pain, advocates for appropriate, respectful medical interventions (Jones Reference Jones2016), and in the case of farmed female pain, challenges the violent extractions of patriarchal capitalism.

The Suprelorin, like the IUD, is not merely a technological device that transforms a fertile body into a sterile one (Takeshita Reference Takeshita2012); in chicken veterinary care, it becomes a life-saving device when female fertility is fashioned at the genomic level into a life-threatening condition. A “desire for cure is not necessarily anti-crip” (Taylor Reference Taylor2017, 141), and indeed, a desire for “cure” for inflicted female reproductive impairment might be core to anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist resistance. Women's infertility through contraception and the consequent erosion of their traditional roles is both a threat to religious and political conservatives and a pathway to their liberation (Takeshita Reference Takeshita2012). So too hens’ infertility is cause for anthropatriarchal panic. The Suprelorin subjectifies and politicizes the hen in such radical ways that the avian veterinary sector already faces challenges from the state that restrict or prohibit treatments that may de-commodify and de-capitalize hens. In the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, Suprelorin can only be used “off-label” by veterinarians as it has not been approved for use in chickens. Expensive implantation may be restricted to middle/upper-class, educated rescuers, not necessarily available to working-class rescuers, or large sanctuaries who are less likely to be able to implant the hundreds of hens they might rescue. Like women's contraception (Takeshita Reference Takeshita2012), chicken contraception is already entangled with capitalism, anthropocentrism, patriarchy, and even religious and cultural worldviews of “what”—not who—a hen is.

Such political and ethical uneasiness is crucial, for it is a reminder that chicken contraception is not the “cure” to the extractions that constitute egg farming. Rather, as Clare (Reference Clare2017, 62) reminds us, “Cure also requires dismantling racism, poverty, and environmental injustice. I let health and cure take on multiple meanings.” Cure does not imply a return to the pristine—for despite trying to renew, repair, and relearn ways of the older time, “there is no return to the past” (Clare Reference Clare2017, 60). “Cure” perhaps also involves sitting with the self-doubt that pervades the messy process of resistance and justice. Takeshita argues (Reference Takeshita2012, 168) “feminists must always feel conflicted … Feeling ambivalent, I argue, is a state of feminist consciousness that is committed to a holistic vision.” Chickens, one may imagine, want to be free from both the anthropatriarchy of enforced selective breeding, and ecofeminist resistance through contraception. In the women's movement, contraception was central in shifting the axis of power and control in the fraught history between feminists and the state over reproductive rights (Bracke Reference Bracke2017). So too, chicken contraception might allow humans to imagine the cessation of selective breeding of the egg commodity.

Ultimately, the fullest feminist resistance to the violence of patriarchal control of reproduction must include an intervention on behalf of farmed animals that asserts their own rights to reproduction, and intra-specific kinship. As Gruen writes (Reference Gruen2011, 160), “The freedom to reproduce and to care for the young is central in the development of important affiliative social skills that are necessary to build meaningful bonds with conspecifics and to enhance group stability.” Hens are devoted and fiercely protective mothers, a tragic irony considering their male chicks are gassed, drowned or burnt at birth by the egg industry, and the female infants never know their mothers at all (Davis Reference Davis2019). A fuller feminist philosophy and praxis must be based, at the least, upon a commitment to vegan-feminist politics, and more sovereign, autonomous states of being and place for domesticated animals with the freedom to form their own kinship and social relationships through reproduction, parenting, and care (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Ex-battery hens Popper and Charlie discovering a world of freedom with amazement and wonder (© Yamini Narayanan).