What Does It Mean to Be Alive?

He is warm, fragile and oh so very much alive. His tiny heart beats furiously against my palm. Yet in this moment, he is not a statistic, a unit of production or an inconvenient consequence of a chicken hatching project.

He is someone.

And therein lies a question we humans have become remarkably adept at avoiding.

Is life simply a beating heart, a growing body and the passing of time? Or is it also the freedom to explore, form friendships, make choices and experience the world according to one’s own nature?

For countless animals farmed for food and fibre, the answers have already been decided. Not by them.

But by us.

We determine their purpose, shape their bodies to meet our demands and decide when their lives will end. We measure their worth in kilograms, efficiency and market value.

Yet none of those calculations can account for the beating heart in my hand.

Nor tell us who that heart beats for.

Much of our conversation about farmed animals centres on welfare rather than wellbeing. On making their lives more comfortable, rather than asking what those lives might mean to the individuals living them.

More space, better housing, pain relief and less intensive systems are welcomed as progress.

And rightly so, when they genuinely reduce suffering.

But reducing suffering is not the same as enabling a life to flourish.

Nor does making a life more comfortable necessarily give us the moral right to determine when it must end.

Perhaps this is the distinction we most need to confront: the difference between caring for an animal because their life matters to them and caring for an animal because their body matters to us.

The two are not necessarily the same.

I wonder how differently we might see farmed animals if, before asking what they can provide for us, we first asked what the world might mean to them.

What does sunshine mean to a chicken who has never felt it? What does freedom mean to one who has never had room to spread their wings?

And what becomes of us because we never asked?

I look down at Chirpa.

He peeks back at me and blinks.

He knows nothing of the arguments we construct to justify our choices. Nor does he need to.

His life does not require a human purpose to possess meaning.

He is not waiting for me to decide whether his life matters.

He is already living it.

And perhaps the question we should be asking is not what his life is worth to us.

But who gave us the right to decide what it is worth to him?