Chickens Are Très Chic! May 16, 2009
Posted by EDW in Food, Life, Social Commentary, Things Environmental.Tags: animals, chickens, Culture, Food, Life, Love, Pets, Thoughts, trends
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Miss Edna. Her cheeks are fluffier than yours are.
Just before I got my chickens, I remarked to a friend (who was also about to embark on her own chicken experience) that I anticipated a profound learning experience. I had no idea how right that statement was, how much I would learn, and how much simply having some chickens in my yard would change me.
Chickens are amazing little creatures. Before I had chickens and was therefore able to observe them up-close-and-personal, there were, in my mind, a lot of myths about chickens. For instance, I’d heard that chickens were moronically stupid, and would drown themselves by throwing their heads back and opening their beaks to a rainstorm. Nevermind that this makes no sense if you think about it for longer than two seconds. I never questioned it. I also assumed they were indiscriminate omnivores, and would eat anything you put in front of them. This is also not true. Chickens have very specific preferences. Or mine do, anyway. They love mushrooms and grapes and tomatoes. Especially tomatoes. Tomatoes send them into a fluttering, jumping, squawking, trilling, pecking ecstasy of excitement. They like to be fed the plump caterpillars from my flower garden, which I pluck from the lantana bushes with a pair of chopsticks. They also like to eat my ferns, which is considerably less charming, and seems to be something of a thrill simply because it causes me to squawk and flutter as I shoo them back into the yard. Surprisingly, they don’t care for mango or blackberries, red bell pepper or carrot. And all of them but one are teetotalers. Only Goldie, one of my reds, has a taste for wine. I serve it to her in an acorn cap, like a tiny chalice. No, I am not kidding about that. I have happy hour with my chickens nearly every afternoon.
I expected to like the chickens a lot. After all, I bargained away my rights to a birthday present in May if I could get chickens in March. I expected to find them interesting and funny and endearing. I was looking forward to delicious free-range eggs that weren’t steeped in steroids and hormones and composed of weird, artificial feed. I wanted to know where my food was coming from, and that the animals providing it were happy and living fulfilling little feathered lives.
What I didn’t expect was that I would fall head-over-heels in love with my chickens. My plan was to eat them when their egg-laying capacities began to wane. But now? No way, man. Call me a softy, call me sentimental or impractical. I don’t care.
So, this realization brings with it a dilemma. If I can’t eat MY chickens, then I have to consider if I can, in good conscience, eat ANY chicken. Just because I didn’t have the pleasure of having a cocktail with a particular bird, does that mean I can justify frying it up for Sunday dinner? This is troubling to me because I like chicken. Fried chicken. Chicken-and-dumplings. Beer-can-chicken. I mean, I’m from the south. Chicken is what’s going on down here.
However, this dilemma gives me hope for chickens, because the popularity of raising your own backyard flock is undergoing a kind of resurrection. Our local feed store sells out of chicks the same day receive a shipment, and the manager says it’s been difficult to find suppliers with chicks because everyone wants them. Early this spring, I went to the library to find some books about raising chickens, and every single book on the subject was checked out. As if to underscore how en vogue chickens have become, Austin recently held the first-ever Funky Chicken Coop tour.
My hope is that as more people interact with chickens and get to know them as interesting, individual, sentient members of another species, people will also become more intolerant and unsupportive of the commercial meat and egg industries. These industries (which make it possible for you to buy a whole chicken at Wal-Mart for less than $5.00) are nothing less than institutionalized torture and abuse of another species for that most hideous of motives: Profit. I cannot imagine any of my “girls” having to endure such treatment- it breaks my heart to think about it their proud little beaks being burned off, or the six of them being crushed together in a tiny wire box, with no sunshine and no fresh air, no crickets, grass, red wine, or even ferns.
This is what a chicken’s life should look like.
Very insightful – and I, as you have, feel that I would grow very attached to any animals that I’d be in close contact with on a recurring basis. On the other hand, I wonder if that’s because I wasn’t raised from the get-go in a farm-like culture. I have a friend whose family farms all sorts of animals and they’d not think twice about eating their chickens or slaughtering their swine when the time came. So I wonder if this sentimentality toward livestock, that you speak of, is one that is more easily arrived at by a person whose experience hasn’t been jaded by early/lifelong interactions with their ‘meals’, as most of us detached city slickers might be.
Is this experience going to turn you into a vegetarian…after all, many other animals go through the same thing that chickens go through. Insightful post. Thx
You’re gonna hate me for this M, but I coldly feel it’s nothing more than a ranking of our emotions. If we’re emotionally attached then we’ll have a difficult time with it …if not, it’s no big deal. Take little kids and how they attach themselves to everything they encounter …reptiles, fish, small rodents. As we get older we lose that emotional connection. It becomes easier for us to justify their deaths. andweallfalldown makes a good point about farmers simply ‘accepting’ the death of the animals they raise …they’ve grown use to it. That initial stark emotion was gone at a young age.
I personally haven’t had many encounters with animal deaths and because of that I still to this day get a sick feeling in my stomach when I see anything wounded …no matter how insignificant, unimportant or common the creature. It’s hard for me to look at the lobster tank in the grocery store! But you get used to things I think …and it’s not really an issue of you being a ‘bad’ person. And when you get really used to it, then you can justify making money off it.
It’s sad but…
I read another blog by a family that is trying to be self-sustaining and they keep their own animals for slaughter. They sent their pig off and they were definately sad about it, missed that pig and it’s friendly personality, but it was a matter of having put time, money and energy into that animal as a means of sustenance. SO they did what needed to be done for the family and gave thanks to that pig that they did care for and happily recieved the life giving energy that their friend was providing for them. For them it was not an option to choose friendship with a pig over feeding the family. (But they don’t have outside jobs or income to give them the option to go to the store and buy bacon…)
And I don’t think killing animals for food is sad. I certainly don’t feel sad when I am eating some yummy meat-laden meal!
andweallfalldown: Yes, I do think that I relate to animals differently since I didn’t grown up on a farm. I don’t know if I can be vegetarian because I do believe meat is good for you, if it’s raised in the right conditions. And it’s yummy. I don;t know if I could slaughter “The Girls” but I might be able to slaughter some other chickens that I didn’t name and have cocktails with. A friend of mine once told me that you never name anything you plan on eating, which has proved to be sound advice, at least for me.
Troy: I don’t hate you, I think you’re right. Most people are so far removed from the deaths of the animals they eat that we are uncomfortable with it when we see it up close, even if it’s done humanely. However, I read a quote recently in a Mother Earth News article about raising meat chickens. The quote advised against people slaughtering too frequently, lest we become emotionally blunted to “our natural feelings of compassion for other living creatures.” (M.E.N., June/July 2009) I’ve also read that people who work in slaughter houses have a higher rates of mental illness.
R: Yeah, I loves me some pork, too. I mean, how do you cook without pork? And I like the idea of giving thanks and receiving the gift of life from an animal friend. If I ever get to the place where I’m slaughtering animals, then I’ll have to channel my Native American roots and thank my chicken sisters for their nourishing flesh. In that same Mother Earth News article I reference above, the author says she slaughters he chickens because she does care about them, that if she didn’t care, she’d just eat tortured chicken flesh from the grocery, and this way she gets to make sure her chickens have a comfortable existence first. I thought that was an interesting take on it.
There wasn’t a place to comment on the New Orleans post. Did you see any ghosts this time? Condolences on your babies, RIP. Congratulations on your achievement!!!! Give me a call, I am off on Tuesday and Thursday this week.
[...] I worried I was kidding myself about whether or not my chicken, the one I raised from a chick, and who used to drink wine with me from an acorn-cap chalice, was still [...]