You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hume. Animal advocate and author Leah Garsas

wants us to reconsider our global appetites for meat, dairy, and eggs. Of course, she's devoted to

ending practices that cause animals to suffer before they wind up on our plates. But in her 2019 talk from

TEDx, Seattle, she tells the story of her powerful friendship with an unlikely ally, a factory

chicken farmer, and shares the lessons we can take from crossing enemy lines.

In the summer of 2014, I found myself sitting across from a man who by every definition was my enemy.

His name was Craig Watts, and he's a chicken factory farmer.

My career is devoted to protecting farmed animals and ending factory

farming. And up until this point in my life, I had spent every waking moment standing up against

everything this man stood for. And now I was in his living room. The day I met Craig Watts, he had been raising

chickens for 22 years for a company called Purdue, the fourth largest chicken company in the entire

country. And as a young man, he had yearned for this way to stay on the land in one of the poorest counties in the state.

So when the chicken industry came to town, he thought,

this is a dream come true.

He took a quarter of a million dollar loan out,

and he built these chicken houses.

Purdue would give him a flock, he'd raise them,

and each flock he'd get paid, and then he'd pay off in small increments that loan, him a flock. He'd raise them. And each flock, he'd get paid,

and then he'd pay off in small increments that loan, like a mortgage. But pretty soon,

the chickens got sick. It's a factory farm, after all. There are 25,000 chickens that are

stuffed wall to wall, living on their own feces, breathing ammonia-laden air.

And when chickens get sick, some of them die.

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