George M Jacobs, Singapore
I don’t want my daughter to be separated at birth from me and her brothers and sisters.
I don’t want her to live in a cage with four other females in a building with thousands of other females where each does not even have enough space to spread her wings, where the air reeks of ammonia, the sun never enters, and her skin develops sores.
I don’t want Yi Mei, when her egg-laying capacity declines past economic viability, to be sent for slaughter so that humans can have chicken soup which raises their blood pressure and clogs their arteries.
I want my daughter to enjoy the natural acts that we hens all enjoy: dust bathing, roosting, mothering her chicks.
I want her to live outdoors, feeling the grass under her feet, searching for food, feeling the sun on her body, hearing the sounds we chickens use to communicate, building the bonds we chickens can share with each other and with other species, including humans.
I want Yi Mei to live for herself, to live as a chicken.
Thanks to the Singapore Book Council, George M Jacobs attended his first poetry workshop earlier in 2022, and now he's hooked for life. Poetry is such a powerful way to communicate about what matters to us. What matters to George includes we homo sapiens coexisting as harmoniously as possible with our fellow animals and fellow humans. George has many years’ experience in the overlapping (what doesn’t overlap?) spaces of education—including student centered teaching, cooperative learning, community engagement and humane education—and environmental protection, including ecolinguistics, sustainable development, and alternative protein. Among his recent books are Student Centered Cooperative Learning (Springer), Becoming a Community Engaged Educator (Springer), and Tempted by Tempeh (Marshall Cavendish).