We would like to announce that Pickman’s Chicken Farm is now a cruelty-free chicken farm.   
 
Since our humble beginnings in 1994, Pickman’s Chicken Farm has prided itself in providing free-range, organic chicken. We’ve never used antibiotics or hormones, and no pesticides ever touch our soil or feed. Now we are pleased to add “cruelty-free” to that list. Our chickens will not only be fed well, they will be treated well. No more inhumane slaughtering. No more senseless torture or deceit. No more efforts to debase the chickens and make them feel poor.
 
We’re making improvements daily. The creaky rope bridge leading to the coop has been replaced with a ramp. In the past we would have greased the ramp to watch chickens fall on their dumb faces. Today? No grease. The pit of spikes under the bridge has been covered with a large board.
 
In the coop, the trap doors situated over a vat of acid have been nailed shut. The thin glass panel separating the chickens from our fox pen, painted over. We’ve removed the hanging chains, guillotines, and rakes hidden beneath a thin layer of brush. The live video feed from our slaughterhouse has been disabled. When the chickens leave the coop, we no longer replace their nests with big rocks painted to look like nests.
 
We’ve put an end to the pranks. No more waking the chickens with a squirt of orange juice in the eyes, apologizing for our actions, wiping their eyes clean, and then, just as they are about to fall back asleep, squirting them in the eyes again. We also stopped gluing tiny beards to their beaks.
 
The chicken feed is now free of fake chicken eyeballs and little pebbles. 
 
Chickens shall no longer be dangled from high places nor lashed to our feet prior to mashing grapes for our Pickman’s Vineyard Signature Merlot. How this new rule will affect the wine’s unique palate, we’ve yet to discover. But it’s a risk our lawyers say we must take.
 
In the old days, we used to pluck a chicken down to one feather a couple weeks before killing it, just so its chicken friends could see what a ding-dong it is. That’s over now.
 
We’ll no longer put a chicken in a maze and slaughter it as a reward for solving the maze. And no more surprise firing squads, where we’d make chickens execute another chicken by shoving a wing in the trigger hole and tickling their bellies. (We are currently researching how to kill chickens humanely, and will follow suit.)
 
The decision to become a cruelty-free chicken farm was not easy. After all, chickens are lazy, stupid creatures that naturally deserve creative sadism and excessive poking. Humiliated chickens, especially the ones covered in maple syrup and rainbow sprinkles, evoke the purest form of human laughter, and there’s no telling us different. 
 
Unfortunately, our unbridled joy at chicken hazing started to negatively affect our business, and change became our only option. There had been complaints from the parents of children who visited the farm on a class field trip, no doubt a result of our encouraging each child to find a chicken to punch in the back of the head. A few grocery stores also took up issue after a few pounds of chicken gizzards showed up black from the chickens’ forced addiction to cigarettes.
 
If only because we have to, we nevertheless embrace our new philosophy towards chicken treatment, and are proud to join an elite class of farming. If you’d like to see the Pickman’s Chicken Farm’s already substantial improvements, we invite you to stop by anytime. I recommend paying us a visit this Friday, when we’ll be firing goats out of a hydraulic cannon into a big lake.