For years, it was a repressed memory.

It was a day when Altoona native Karen Davis was just a child, walking to a friend's house near 58th street in the Eldorado neighborhood.

"I don't recall knowing that my friend's father kept chickens; this would have been back in the early 1950s," she said. "But I clearly remember him taking a brown hen out of a shed, laying her on a platform or a wooden chopping block, and using a hatchet to cut her head off. I can still picture her head lying there, clucking on the right side of me, and on the grass on the left side was her body still running around the yard."
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After earning a Ph.D in literature from the University of Maryland in College Park, Davis founded the animal advocacy group United Poultry Concerns in 1990. The group aims to promote the respectful treatment of domestic foul and teach people the truths of the egg and chicken meat industry.

Davis also runs a small chicken sanctuary in Machipongo, Va., and has relayed her personal experience keeping chickens in the numerous books she has written and talks she has given.

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