Factory-Farmed Hamster

Force-fed intravenously for the last four days of its eighteen-day, regimentally/existentially genocidal lives of “allegory-like” “extreme, sustained, increasing pain,” the Factory-Farmed Hamster is by-far the most common hamster in North America, with a population expected to exceed 200 billion by 2020, a number expected, henceforth, to grow at a rate of 26.4% per year, as fast-food companies expand to third-world countries. Born in darkness in a space not large enough for it to turn around without doing a kind of back-flip, the Factory-Farmed Hamster lives its next three days/nights in a mostly-unconscious haze of bone-level inflammation and intermittent paralysis, sometimes reflexively jerking forward/backward .5 to .8 inches to prevent its lower body from “crystallizing” in an advanced form of atrophy, while being force-fed every four hours a mixture of non-organic corn, metastasized fecal-matter, industrial-strength antibiotics, 4 to 9 varieties of growth hormones. The next eleven days the Factory-Farmed Hamster is force-fed pellets containing the meat/bones/tumors/fur of “fellow, deceased” Factory-Farmed Hamsters grinded—along with their “waste,” which often is scientifically  “not discernable” from their “bodies”—into paste-like matter that is “marinated” 4-8 hours in an antibiotic-hormone mixture and then dehydrated in gigantic microwaves. For the final four days of its “surreally bleak existence” (Mother Jones) the Factory-Farmed Hamster is moved into a larger pen and positioned, within rubber canopies, in a manner allowing it’s mouth, facing “upwards,” to be uncomplicatedly filled, five times a day, in a kind of “funneling action,” in which former migrant farmhands without passports, in a job with a 37% long-term survival rate (many “succumb” to various cancers after four years), “funnel” (a misnomer, as actually a “tube” is used”) a non-dehydrated form of “meat/corn paste” directly into the stomach of the Factory-Farmed Hamster, 73% of which are, scientifically, “in comas” by the morning of the fourth day. In 2010 the FDA declared it governmentally acceptable for meat labeled “grade-A” to continue to be force-fed up to 35 hours after its source is “no longer conscious,” increasing profits by 18%. In America an emerging, popular conspiracy theory is that factory-farmed meat is harmful to those who eat it; connected to or “in support of” that conspiracy, some say, is the taboo, or “feeling of shame/inauthenticity/[something],” of buying organic food, which itself is related, some say, to the vaguely embarrassing, or “offensive,” even, choice to spend more money on [anything] than “the lowest amount possible”—a feeling caused, perhaps, to some degree, by vague intuitions of “’taking part’ in ‘the conspiracy,’” along with the influence of the powerful abstraction most people ultimately convey in the form of the word “bourgeoisie,” according to one conspiracy theorist whose YouTube videos were deleted by YouTube after pressure from the FDA, who acted “in preemption,” according to a fourth-party conspiracy theorist (whose YouTube videos were also deleted but have since reappeared on Vimeo), to pressure from the meat/dairy industry.

Average weight/height (record): 4.4 lbs/4.2” (4.8 lbs/4.6”)
Average life expectancy (record): .049 years (.049 years)
Favorite book(s): doesn’t know what a “book” is
Favorite band(s): doesn’t know what a “band” is
Favorite movie(s): doesn’t know what a “movie” is
Favorite sexual position: doesn’t know what “sex” is

Hunting tips: Wearing a military-grade gas mask and a full-body-coverage suit made of space-grade polymers (to protect against deadly skin lesions and tumors, which have been known to “fly off” Factory-Farmed Hamsters, when hit by metal doors or simply when they “burst”), cut a small hole in the corner of a factory-farm shed at night. Place the Factory-Farmed Hamster in a garbage bag or shoebox, as it will not fit in a plastic baggie, taking care not to collapse from empathy-induced “intense depression” or “fear of ‘evil’ in the world,” as the Factory-Farmed Hamster will likely appear “horrifyingly grotesque” (Stephen King via Esquire), be blind, likely “crying.”

Cooking tips: Sprinkling antibiotics continuously, grind in entirety after soaking in a bowl of hydrogen peroxide for 5 to 8 hours. Boil with garlic, dehydrate, condense into pellets for fish food or “little balls” for dog or cat food. Add [anything] for bulk, grind with antibiotics, and resell to international or outsourced factory farms as “grade-A factory farm feed,” to second/third-world countries as “meal packets,” or fourth-party dog food producers as “all-natural, high-grade dog food guaranteed to give your pet’s fur a healthy sheen.”