Poultry Slam 1995

I'm Julie Showalter. I grew up on a turkey farm in southwest Missouri. "The night 3,000 turkeys died." The day before the night that 3,000 turkeys died, we moved 13,000 turkeys to the range.

我是Julie Showalter。我在密苏里州西南部的一个火鸡农场长大。“3000只火鸡死亡的那天晚上。”在3000只火鸡死去的前一天，我们把13000只火鸡搬到了牧场。

This requires some explanation. Turkeys spend their first 16 weeks in a heated brooder house. When they are 16 weeks old, they are put outside to range in fenced enclosures.

Daddy decided we would herd them to the range. It looked simple enough. We made a temporary chute of wire fencing that ran from the double-end doors of the brooder house 50 yards to the pen. We would get behind the turkeys in the brooder house, shout, wave old shirts and gunny sacks at them, and they would run out the doors, through the chute, into the pen.

And that's the way it worked in the first brooder house. The first turkeys hesitated at the door, walked out cautiously, then moved through the chute and dispersed. The rest followed. It took about an hour. Daddy was pleased. "Let's work straight through," he said. "We'll be done by 10:00." By the time the turkeys have been in a brooder house for 16 weeks, the air is filled with ammonia, feather particles, and dust. The stench is overwhelming. After an hour in the brooder house, your lungs hurt for a day.

You can contract disabling lung diseases from working only a week in a poultry house. Tiny barbed pieces of feather dig into the tissue of your lung and never let go. But we didn't know that then.

在家禽饲养场工作一周，你就可能患上致残性肺病。细小的有刺的羽毛会刺进你的肺组织，永远不会松开。但我们当时并不知道。

We moved the temporary fence to the doors of the second brooder house. When we threw open the doors at the end of the second house, it was 9:00 in the morning. The sun streamed in the open doors on turkeys that had never seen direct sunlight.

The one thing you can count on with turkeys is that you never know how they are going to react. I've seen turkeys clamber against a fence trying to get into a range fire. I've seen them rush toward a screaming child, trying to kill it. And I've seen them run from a screaming child, spooked and terrified.

These turkeys didn't want to go into the sun. As we pushed from behind, they compacted. It was like an old adventure movie where the walls are closing in. But there was no wall at the end, only a patch of sunlight which turkeys would not touch.

We yelled louder, waved our cloths, kicked at the ones in the rear. Finally, Daddy walked through the solid carpet of turkeys to break the logjam at the front. He stood at the edge of the sunlight, lifting the turkeys three or four at a time with his feet, stirring them with this legs, forcing them into the sun.

我们喊得更大声，挥舞着衣服，踢向后面的人。最后，爸爸穿过火鸡铺成的坚实地毯，打破了前面的僵局。他站在阳光的边缘，用脚一次举起三四只火鸡，用腿搅动它们，把它们推到阳光下。

Suddenly, they broke free. As stubbornly as they had refused to go into the light, they now rushed toward it. They ran in a panic, piling on top of each other, knocking down the temporary fence. By the time Daddy could get the doors closed, at least 1,000 turkeys had escaped and were running free on the farm, onto our neighbor's farm, into the road.

We didn't own the turkeys. We raised them for a company that owned the hatchery, the feed mill, the fleet of trucks that delivered and loaded the turkeys, the processing plant. We got a portion of the profits, if there were profits.

With 1,000 turkeys gone, there would be no profits on this flock. 16 weeks of Daddy working 14-hour days, of my sisters and me working alongside him any time we weren't in school, all for no pay. And if we weren't paid for this flock, we would have no cash coming in until the next flock was raised.

It took us eight hours to round up the escaped turkeys, four of us trying to track down 1,000 birds that had the whole world in which to hide and run from us. The sun beat down, and the air was thick and humid. We stopped once for water, and my sister, Billie, the youngest of us, just 11, vomited from the cold water hitting her stomach after hours of sun, heat, and dehydration.

As she lay on the ground, shaking and holding her stomach, I hated her for being the one too sick to continue. But even she was not too sick. We all went on. She got an extra five minutes to rest, but we all went on.

You may be asking right now how my father could be so cruel, how he could work young girls like that? Or you may think that I'm exaggerating, that self-pity has magnified our distress. I tell you, this is no exaggeration. And I tell you, my father had no choice. Or that any choice he had was so far in the past that there was no unraveling it. Years later, when we were grown, we caught a glimpse of his guilt, his bitterness over what he had done to us. "I couldn't afford n------," he told my sister Billie. "So I had daughters." At 6 o'clock, we rebuilt the chute. We opened the doors, and the 6,000 remaining turkeys, the sun now low in the sky behind them, walked through to the pen. We cleaned up. We ate supper. And we went to bed. That's the day we had before the night 3,000 turkeys died.

At midnight, Mother woke us up. "We have to get to the pen. Daddy needs us." We had been too exhausted to hear the storm. We ran out in the driving rain. Flashes of lightning showed Daddy picking up turkeys and throwing them, one after the other.

午夜时分，妈妈把我们叫醒了。“我们必须去围栏。爸爸需要我们。”我们太累了，听不到暴风雨的声音。我们冒着瓢泼大雨跑了出去。闪电一闪，爸爸一只接一只地捡起火鸡扔了出去。

When people learn I grew up on a turkey farm, they invariably ask, "Is it true? Are they really so stupid that they open their mouths in the rain, look up at the sky, and drown?" The answer is yes, some of them do that. They are that stupid. But that's not how 3,000 die in one night.

当人们得知我在火鸡农场长大时，他们总是会问：“这是真的吗？他们真的如此愚蠢，以至于在雨中张嘴，仰望天空，然后淹死吗？”答案是肯定的，其中一些人这样做。他们真傻。但这不是一个晚上3000人死亡的原因。

They die because they are scared, and they huddle together in their fear. They climb on top of each other, trying to get close, to find protection in the mass of bodies. And they suffocate.

他们因为害怕而死亡，他们在恐惧中蜷缩在一起。他们爬上彼此的顶部，试图靠近，在大量的尸体中寻找保护。他们窒息了。

We called it piling. It wasn't unusual for a loud noise to cause a pile in the brooder house. If there wasn't someone to pull them off each other, 50 could die because someone slammed a door.

我们称之为打桩。一声巨响在育雏房里引起一堆乱堆，这并不罕见。如果没有人把他们拉开，50人可能会因为有人摔门而死亡。

But this was worse than any pile we'd seen, turkeys who'd never spent a night outdoors panicked by thunder, lightning, and rain in sheets. All we could do is pull them out of the pile and throw them away from it. They would run back, still seeking the comfort of the group.

但这比我们见过的任何一堆火鸡都要糟糕，从来没有在户外呆过一晚的火鸡被雷声、闪电和床单上的雨吓坏了。我们所能做的就是把它们从堆里拉出来，扔掉。他们会跑回去，仍然在寻求群体的安慰。

After a while standing in mud, grabbing soaked turkeys, throwing them, grabbing more, you don't know if the ones you are throwing are dead or alive. You don't care. Maybe we saved some.

在泥里站了一会儿，抓着浸泡过的火鸡，扔了它们，又抓了更多，你不知道你扔的火鸡是死是活。你不在乎。也许我们节省了一些。

The next day, the sky was cloudless, and the sun bore down on us again. We picked up dead turkeys, throwing them onto the back of a flatbed truck. Daddy drove the truck into a field far from the house. He poured gasoline on them and struck a match. They burned for days.

第二天，天空万里无云，太阳再次向我们袭来。我们捡起死火鸡，把它们扔到一辆平板卡车的后面。爸爸把卡车开到离房子很远的田地里。他把汽油倒在他们身上，划了一根火柴。他们燃烧了好几天。

Luis Rodriguez: This is Luis Rodriguez. And I'm going to read my poem, "The Rooster Who Thought it Was a Dog." Echo Park mornings came on the wings of a rooster's gnawing squawk. This noise, unfortunately, also brought in the afternoon, evenings, and most hours of the day. The rooster had no sense of time, nor any desire to commit to one. He'd cock-a-doodle whenever he had the notion.

路易斯·罗德里格斯：这是路易斯·罗德里格斯。我要读我的诗，《以为是狗的公鸡》。回声公园的早晨伴随着公鸡啃咬的叫声。不幸的是，这种噪音也带来了下午、晚上和一天中的大部分时间。公鸡没有时间感，也没有任何承诺的欲望。他一有这个想法就乱涂乱画。

For late sleepers, day sleepers, or your plain, ordinary, run of the mill night sleepers, annoyance had this rooster's beak. It was enough to drive one crazy. Often, I open my back window that faced the alley just across from the backyard where the rooster made his home. "Shut up, or I'll blow your stinking brains out," I'd yell. Great communication technique.

对于晚睡者、昼睡者，或者你们普通、普通、普通的夜睡者来说，这只公鸡的喙是烦人的。这足以让人发疯。我经常打开背窗，背窗对着后院对面的小巷，公鸡就是在那里安家的。“闭嘴，否则我会把你的臭脑袋炸了，”我会大叫。很棒的沟通技巧。

It worked on the brats next door, but the rooster never flinched. With calm aplomb, it continued to squawk. For one thing, the rooster never gave out a bona fide cock-a-doodle. It sort of shouted it out.