"It is strange to view your childhood favourite film and realise you’ve become the villain."
I think it’s fair to say that the most important thing to me in life is living in accordance with my values. That’s why I’m part of a worker-owned co-op, and it’s also a reason why I’m a vegetarian.
That hasn’t always been the case, and in fact for the first 37 years of my life, despite animal ethics being part of my undergraduate degree in Philosophy, I happily ate meat. A nagging feeling had been gnawing away at me, though, and an article about the way that chickens are treated before being killed for our consumption tipped me over the edge. I haven’t eaten meat since October 2017.
This article is about someone who, aged 15, re-watched the film Chicken Run and realised that they were on the side of the baddies. I’m not on some kind of mission to make everyone vegetarian or vegan—I’ll leave that up to your conscience—but, rather, I’d encourage you to think about Mahatma Gandhi famous line: “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”
Suddenly I saw Chicken Run for what it really was: a battle between the workers (chickens) and the business owner (Mrs Tweedy). The hardworking hens lay eggs day and night and see no rewards from the profit of their work, only to be degraded even further when Mrs Tweedy sees that they could be more profitable in their death by feeding the people of Britain’s insatiable appetite for pies.
It was Mrs Tweedy’s husband who inspired my actual moral reckoning. Despite his main role as a dim-witted sidekick, Mr Tweedy recognises the chickens are intelligent and organised enough to plan a revolt. Rewatching the film, I saw myself in his shoes: someone with the knowledge of animals’ value and intelligence but without the guts to do anything about it.
It is strange to view your childhood favourite film and realise you’ve become the villain. For all that I was supportive of these fictional claymation chickens in their escape from a cruel gravy-filled fate, in real life I was feeding into the values of the Tweedys in my guilty consumption of pies. Watching such clearcut hero/villain films, you usually want to identify with the hero and their struggle, and Aardman did such a good job depicting the lead hen Ginger that I knew I would never eat a chicken – or any animal – again.
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Last year, the film was revived in the Netflix sequel Dawn of the Nugget, a film so powerful that its director, Sam Fell, stopped eating chicken nuggets. Despite my initial wariness after key voice characters were recast, the sequel won me over and validated my dietary decision. Highlighting the horrors of meat production, Mrs Tweedy tries to turn all the chickens on her farm into chicken nuggets, revealing the heartlessness that comes from viewing living beings solely as sources for human consumption.
Source: The Guardian
Image: Film Filosopher