“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.”

“What would I have done if my coya had been captured or killed? My mate, Sharone. The other half of everything I am. What would I have done?”

“I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace; and it better fits my blood to be disdained of all than to fashion a carriage to rob love from any: in this, though I cannot be said to be a flattering honest man, it must not be denied but I am a plain-dealing villain. I am trusted with a muzzle and enfranchised with a clog; therefore I have decreed not to sing in my cage. If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking: in the meantime, let me be that I am, and seek not to alter me.”

“I have had much experience with the unclean and uncivilized in the recent past. Shall I tell you what I discovered? I am not the state of my feet. I am not the dirt on my hands or the hygiene of my private parts. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to pray at any time since my arrest. But I did pray, because I am not these things. In the end, I am not even myself. I am a string of bones speaking the word God.”

“They turn the water off, so I live without water,they build walls higher, so I live without treetops,they paint the windows black, so I live without sunshine,they lock my cage, so I live without going anywhere,they take each last tear I have, I live without tears,...they take my heart and rip it open, I live without heart,they take my life and crush it, so I live without a future,they say I am beastly and fiendish, so I have no friends,they stop up each hope, so I have no passage out of hell,they give me pain, so I live with pain,they give me hate, so I live with my hate,they have changed me, and I am not the same man,they give me no shower, so I live with my smell,they separate me from my brothers, so I live without brothers,who understands me when I say this is beautiful?who understands me when I say I have found other freedoms?I cannot fly or make something appear in my hand,I cannot make the heavens open or the earth tremble,I can live with myself, and I am amazed at myself, my love, my beauty,I am taken by my failures, astounded by my fears,I am stubborn and childish,in the midst of this wreckage of life they incurred,I practice being myself,and I have found parts of myself never dreamed of by me,they were goaded out from under rocks in my heartwhen the walls were built higher,when the water was turned off and the windows painted black.I followed these signslike an old tracker and followed the tracks deep into myselffollowed the blood-spotted path,deeper into dangerous regions, and found so many parts of myself,who taught me water is not everything,and gave me new eyes to see through walls,and when they spoke, sunlight came out of their mouths,and I was laughing at me with them,we laughed like children and made pacts to always be loyal,who understands me when I say this is beautiful?”

“Though I myself am an atheist, I openly profess religion in the sense just mentioned, that is, a nature religion. I hate the idealism that wrenches man out of nature; I am not ashamed of my dependency on nature; I openly confess that the workings of nature affect not only my surface, my skin, my body, but also my core, my innermost being, that the air I breathe in bright weather has a salutary effect not only on my lungs but also on my mind, that the light of the sun illumines not only my eyes but also my spirit and my heart. And I do not, like a Christian, believe that such dependency is contrary to my true being or hope to be delivered from it. I know further that I am a finite moral being, that I shall one day cease to be. But I find this very natural and am therefore perfectly reconciled to the thought.”