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    From time to time, whenever a highly pathogenic virus was haunting the stalls, he would think back on the carcass bins of yore — during an emergency session of the Food & Commodities Authority, for example, when he recommended the culling of livestock. Within a few days, thirty-five million chickens spread over ten square kilometres could vanish like that. The numbers staggered his imagination. A shed full of chicks, a rolling surface of teeming life; where the farmer walked, the sea parted. In sheds free of the virus, he had seen how farmers plucked sick and enfeebled birds from among the others and killed them with a pinch to the back of the neck. The whacking of the skull against the wooden shoe was just to be sure. They tossed them into buckets full of other dead chicks. Their arms had made that movement countless times before; they almost never missed. When the chicks became a bit larger, the farmer would pull a wheelbarrow behind him through the shed.
    No one shed a tear for the chickens. When it came to pigs and cows, though, things were different. The apocalyptic images of men in white suits using a hydraulic claw to load dead heifers and sows into trucks were printed indelibly in people’s minds.
    Following an outbreak of an avian flu virus, all the chickens were gassed, and badly paid and sketchily briefed students or asylum-seekers came in afterwards to clean up the sheds. The Rendac trucks had replaced the carcass bins. Death had vanished from the landscape, the way living animals had also quietly disappeared from it — they lived in increasingly great numbers in increasingly large stall complexes, and the speed with which they grew was stunning.
    He couldn’t avoid talking to Ruth about it at times, and when he did he withdrew behind the facts. Most of the epidemics, he said, began in Asia, because of the frequent contact there between humans and animals. There, one found ducks and chickens piled up at open-air markets. The chain of infection was easy to trace back. Ducks were often the carriers of viruses transmitted by their congeners in the wild, and they in turn infected the chickens. The Asian markets were crowded — little wonder that it was precisely there that the avian flu virus first hopped to humans. Along with the increasing urbanisation, and a billion instances of global travel each year, and you could see how a pandemic could get rolling within a matter of days. That was why chickens had to be bred under controlled conditions. Every step they took outside the shed was a risk, for the birds and for humans. Don’t forget, he went on, that the Spanish Flu wiped out about 2 per cent of all mankind — for us, that would mean about three or four funerals each month.
    Her objection was ironclad. If that’s the way the world was, she said, then it shouldn’t be. Capitalism and expansion were what had made it so ugly, and sometimes Ruth could not sleep at night, thinking that he was serving the interests of big industry.
    He didn’t like what he saw, he would reply. It was not beautiful and it was not good, but aesthetics and morality were not a part of his job. He only combatted the diseases that came from the world the way it was, in order to prevent worse.
    â€˜And what about the animals’ pain?’ she asked.
    The naiveté of the question bowled him over.
    He said: ‘Humans are animals, too.’
    â€˜Pain is bad,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t do anything that increases the amount of pain in the world.’
    While he was still trying to figure out whether a fight was brewing here, she said: ‘Do you actually know what pain is? Real pain? I don’t think you do, otherwise you couldn’t walk through a stall like that without feeling anything.’
    â€˜So in order to understand the chicken’s pain, you have to have experienced it yourself? What do you think the pain of a chicken is like?’
    His question was