By any definition, Leah Garcés considered Craig Watts her enemy. As CEO and president of the nonprofit Mercy for Animals, Garcés has devoted her life to protecting animals. When she met Watts in the spring of 2014 at his poultry farm in North Carolina, he was one those factory farmers she deeply despised. In fact, she was so worried that his invitation to meet was an ambush that she gave her husband the address with the reminder, "If I don't come back, look for me rotting away in the chicken litter."
Watts had raised over 720,000 chickens in 22 years for Perdue, the fourth-largest chicken company in the US. He had been searching for ways to stay on the family land in one of North Carolina's poorest counties, and when Perdue offered him a contract to raise chickens, it sounded like a lucrative opportunity. He took out a $200,000 bank loan to build four giant chicken houses. But soon the chickens, crammed 25,000 wall-to-wall in the ammonia-laden air, started to become sick or died, and squeezed by Perdue's profit margins, Watts struggled to pay the bills.
To her surprise, Garcés realized that Watts was not her enemy, but an ally: Chicken farmers like him wanted to end chicken farming as much as she did. He described the enormous toll this kind of farming took on his physical and mental health. Yet because of his hefty loans, Watts saw no way out.
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