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1 week ago
18
By the age of 15, I was already torn between my love of animals and the deliciousness of a 99p McDonald’s Mayo Chicken. As a child I was a fussy eater, with meat and carbs being the mainstays, but as I got older I found it harder to justify eating meat. A lifelong animal lover and one of those annoying people who jokes about their “connection to animals”, I never missed an opportunity to pet a neighbourhood dog or say hello to a group of cows in a field.
So, going into my teenage years, I knew that eating meat was not really compatible with my way of thinking. But like most I found it easy enough to put those concerns to one side when I was scoffing a Greggs steak bake. Until at 15 I got the nudge I needed to take the leap into vegetarianism.
It came in the unlikely form of an animated film aimed at five- to 10-year-olds: Chicken Run. I have always had a special attachment to the Aardman animation, centred on a group of chickens’ desperate attempt to escape the farm where the evil owner Mrs Tweedy is planning to turn them all into pies. The film was released the year I was born and is regularly quoted in my family home thanks to its wholesome humour and charming characters: Ginger, the savvy political strategist; Bunty, the strong-willed mother hen; and my personal favourite, Babs, the salt-of-the-earth hen who is always knitting. “I don’t want to be a pie,” she cries at one point, “I don’t even like gravy.”
But at the age of 15 my attitude towards what I had previously viewed as an endearingly silly comedy suddenly changed. When I sat down to rewatch the childhood classic, my niggling doubts about my meat-eating habits became impossible to ignore. 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.
I can’t pretend that it was the only factor in my dietary decision. I had been learning about battery-farmed hens at school and feeling increasingly aware that my animal-loving tendencies were not compatible with my meat-eating habits. But it was Chicken Run that was the final straw.
I cut out all meat immediately, a shock to my entirely carnivorous family. Although we shared a love for Chicken Run, no one followed my lead. It was hard to explain to people at the time: even just 10 years ago vegetarian alternatives were limited, and I was lucky that my parents were supportive. I never really confessed the role of these fictional chickens in my decision, prioritising environmental concerns and a love for real-life animals in my explanations. To this day, when people ask me why I don’t eat meat, I feel people are willing me to say it’s a healthy lifestyle choice rather than a question of morality.
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.
This year marks my 10-year anniversary of becoming a vegetarian and 25 years since Chicken Run’s release. I have seen the film every year since, watching with pride knowing that I’m on the side of the hens, plasticine or otherwise.
