Burkhard Bilger
speaker
670 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Jul
Burkhard Bilger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, I do love those kind of deep dives.
Um, I mean, you know, Joseph Mitchell, my favorite New Yorker writer from the 30s, 40s, 50s, he, um...
He sometimes wouldn't get to the nut graph, to the main point of the article for 3,000 or 4,000 words.
He would be setting the scene, introducing you, and it wouldn't be until pretty deep in before you really knew what you were going to read about.
Why not?
Yeah, yeah.
I think the New Yorker would still publish that piece.
I think part of the reason was, as you remember, part of the point of that piece was, we have this aversion to cockfighting, this revulsion.
As a culture, we've decided this is not okay.
Where did that come from?
I think it came from...
early i mean you know there was there was some real terrible things in 19th century like women wearing whole birds on their heads you know the whole species of beautiful birds were decimated and the animal rights movement came out of that or the conservation i mean there was a lot of really important work that got done to to kind of stop the cruelty but what but you know what we got instead was you know industrial meat production you know and and you look at
Part of what I was trying to say was, look, we have these urban values now where we are revolted by cockfighting, you know, and we think of it as cruel.
But when you look at the life of a chicken, right, would you rather be a fighting cock that has its own
beautiful cage that gets literally massaged every day, that gets the best feed, that gets exercise equipment in his cage, and that lives a year or two years and goes out fighting?
Or would you rather be a factory chicken that gets six weeks and then gets bottled onto a conveyor belt, hung from a running chain, zapped with a bolt of lightning and had its throat cut by a rotary saw?
I mean, which life is a better life?
And yet,
And as urbanites, as modern Americans, we've gotten used to being blind to the, you know, shrink-wrapped chicken, looks abstract, sitting in our supermarket.
But oh boy, you show someone killing a chicken, or you think about someone watching a chicken fighting, and that's appalling to us.
Showing 461–480 of 670 · page 24 of 34
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