Domestic chickens have essentially been split into two separate groups. The skinny “frugal” breeds don’t put much flesh on their bones, and their metabolism is devoted to pushing out an egg every day. But at least they are mobile — or would be if they didn’t spend their short, disposable lives in laying cages. The other group comprises the heavy meat-producing breeds with huge breasts and names like Color-Pac or Cobb 500 Slow-Feathering Females. These are genetically selected to grow from a weight of about 40 grams to 2.5 kilograms in only six weeks. They remind me of garden vegetables that must be harvested before they become overripe, lest they rot. Many of these factory birds develop gait problems, waddling around top-heavy. Slaughter must come as a relief; if it is delayed, some birds develop a water-retaining condition called ascites, which is a symptom of heart failure.

I have been raising laying hens on our farm for the past few years. Two of them turned three this year and still manage to produce an egg every day or two. Once their laying days are over, we sometimes turn them into slow food, such as poule bouillie, which involves a few hours of slow boiling in the oven or on the stove, then a short broil for crispier flesh. (It’s also slow because you need a few days to get your mind around the fact that you are going to kill.) That is the kind of chicken my kids will agree to eat. They remember the taste for months afterward.

Unlike my love-starved collie, chickens aren’t demanding or particularly needy, and it wouldn’t occur to them to monopolize my attention. A balanced diet, water, a few nests for the eggs, and a place up high to roost at night is all they require, but they don’t mind if I hang around long enough to say a few nice words. Introducing new birds among them has to be supervised and managed gradually, or else there can be fights. (Commercial operations deal with this problem by slicing off the sharp point of the beak.) This year in Canada, few chickens will be sitting outside in the morning sun, feeling the cool summer rains, or taking dust baths — the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has recommended that all poultry be kept under house arrest because of the threat of avian flu.

I’ve tried to make up for this with extras from the kitchen and garden, and with more hay and straw pour leur faire plaisir (as my son says when he digs up earthworms from the garden to give them). My hens have overcome their fear and general dislike of animals bigger than themselves, and one of them sometimes stands still to let me stroke her just above the tail feathers. It’s the same way I stroke my cats. And like the cats, my hens look me right in the eye when I give them the chance.

In the vast numbers of the industrial food chain, chickens, cows, and pigs don’t get the chance to look us in the eye. This detachment hardens us to the periodic culls that such conditions help create. How easily we dispose of our “food animals,” either for economic reasons or out of our sometimes unreasonable fears of animal-spread disease.

For instance, in 2001, foot-and-mouth disease swooped in and knocked the wind out of agriculture in the United Kingdom, resulting in massive culls that were the result of exposure — or potential exposure — to the virus. The numbers climbed quickly into the hundreds of thousands, and there wasn’t enough space to bury or burn the mounting piles of corpses. Some farmers committed suicide in response to this final assault on a way of life already being crushed by industrialized farming. In the end, more than four million sheep, cattle, and pigs were culled, though by September 2001, only 2,030 cases of fmd — a disease usually only fatal to young animals — had been confirmed.

I don’t think this was merely a preventive cull that went awry. I don’t even think it was panic. While I don’t want to minimize the severity and pain of fmd lesions or the importance of keeping domestic herds free of contagious disease (in the same way I do not shrug at mad cow disease, anthrax, avian flu, tuberculosis, or E. coli), I feel the strongest factors that pushed for such a draconian cull were trade and disease status issues (the UK wanted to regain its fmd-free status as quickly as possible) — and our collective emotional and practical detachment from the species involved.

In other words, the conditions and pressures experienced by our “food animals” have direct consequences for how we deal with epidemics and threats of epidemics. These circumstances not only encourage the spread of disease, they also provide an excuse for us to disengage from the animals and to gaze upon herds and flocks with distaste or indifference. We care for our cats and dogs with increasing devotion and tenderness, but the way we currently go about turning cows and chickens into human food demonstrates that our empathy with animals only goes so far.