Today I read a remarkable newspaper article.

From now on, chickens in the Netherlands may no longer be caught and hung upside down by their legs before slaughter.

What an extraordinary time we live in.

A hundred years ago there were no chicken farms with hundreds of thousands of birds where ten thousand chickens had to be “caught” every day before they were slaughtered, plucked and cut into pieces. Few people would have believed such a system could ever exist. Today, around 300 million chickens are slaughtered every year in the Netherlands—more than 800,000 every single day.

Good news, looking back from the future.

A hundred years from now, people will probably read today’s newspaper with the same disbelief with which we read newspapers from a century ago.

Animal welfare organisation Wakker Dier took three large poultry companies to court. The court ruled that chickens may no longer be lifted by their legs during catching. Companies that continue to do so face a penalty of €30 per chicken—about US$35 at today’s exchange rate.

Unfortunately, there is one catch. The maximum fine is €15,000.

For a company slaughtering close to a million chickens every month, it quickly becomes a matter of calculation. Is it cheaper to change the way you work—or simply to pay the fine?

Still, it is a step in the right direction, towards a society that is slowly learning to treat animals more humanely.

I have fourteen laying hens and one rooster. They have a comfortable coop, a spacious run, and every day they enjoy leftovers from our vegetable garden, scraps from our meals and plenty of chicken feed. I have no intention whatsoever of slaughtering them. They provide us with eggs.

But they also provide something else. I genuinely love those birds. And sometimes I think they love me too.

A hundred years from now, I am convinced that the way we treat living creatures will have changed completely.

Animals will have rights. The right to decent treatment. The right to daylight and fresh air. The right to enough space to behave like animals. The right to a reasonably long life instead of one that is cut as short as possible for maximum profit.

Am I a vegetarian?

No. I still enjoy chicken and a good steak. Not every day, but I try to do it less every year.

But I buy meat with the highest animal welfare labels, or directly from farmers and butchers I know personally.

Yes, it costs more than buying meat in the supermarket. But perhaps that’s exactly the point. Meat should simply be much more expensive if we want to treat animal life with respect.

And yes… that probably means we should eat a little less of it.

But we might enjoy it a lot more.

We may even discover a different diet that is healthier—for us, for the animals, and for the planet.

And perhaps that, too, is progress.

Back From The Future is a series in which I look back from the year 2125 at the choices we are making today.