by Brian Brett
The original bird was noted for the brilliant red comb on the cock. The hen was combless, unlike the majority of modern varieties. I had a combless Rhode Island Red hen for several years—combless only because, when she was young, she was struck by a marauding Cooper’s hawk that ripped the tip of her head off. Instead of a comb, she grew back a punky tuft of feathers and had a cute, thuggish look.
A real chicken can fly like the wind, melt into the jungle, and crow at unexpected moments. The scrawny, two-to-three-pound wild fowl so won the hearts of fight enthusiasts that even today, in Java, a phenomenon known as “deep play” exists—where fanatical cockfighters will stake more money than they can win on their birds.
The chicken enjoyed pride of place in the land of the pharaohs 3,500 years ago. Egyptian lords stepped aside when the cock strutted about the court, and its cry was a conversation stopper. We can only imagine the aristocrats pausing in dilettantish delight at the crow of a great rooster before it shat on the marble floor and strode off.
The chicken is impressively attractive to human culture. Biologists have estimated its diffusion rate across the planet at approximately one to two miles a year. It made it from Asia to the Americas a hundred years ahead of Columbus. Before the electronic age the transfer of technologies and ideas moved at a similar speed. I like to imagine a scholar publishing a text in Düsseldorf and the ideas reaching Paris at the same time as a new variety of chicken from the same city.
WHEN I RAISE EGG layers, I prefer a mixed flock. Bantams are the best brooders. Their broody hens will stubbornly hatch anything short of dinosaur eggs. If you place a smooth round stone under one, it will try and hatch that too. Leghorns give white eggs. The luminous-feathered Ameraucanas have blue-green eggs.
Rare, unusual varieties like the black-skinned silkie or the Polish chicken add an amusing diversity to the flock. The Polish chicken has an extravagant tussock of feathers that falls over its eyes like the furred helmet of medieval Polish soldiers—hence its name. It’s also an extraordinarily stupid bird. One collapsed in the yard, and I couldn’t understand what had happened until I picked her up. She was gaunt, starving. I took her inside and sat her on my lap. Sticking my finger in a slice of Sharon’s rich chocolate cake, I held it up to the bird’s beak. After a few minutes she was pecking at the crumbs in my palm. Once she got a dose of sugar, I fed her some grain. The poor hen had been so blinded by her extravagant feathers that she couldn’t find the scattered scratch (wheat and cracked corn) in the grass or the feed dispenser. I clipped her feathers back from her eyes, and within days she was in the pink again, fully fed and fleshed out.
Up until the middle of the twentieth century thousands of chicken varieties thrived. The advent of the factory farm and the trammelling of commercial fowl into a very few inbred varieties have led to numerous extinctions and have critically endangered more. In the United States alone there are twenty varieties that exist in numbers of fewer than five hundred. These include famed birds like the Andalusian, the buckeye, the chantecler, the Java, the Nankin, and the Sumatran. The red jungle fowl itself is near extinction. Only a few dozen birds have been discovered that show no genetic dna from domestic chickens—the common yard rooster is a promiscuous bird.
TO KEEP OUR CHICKENS healthy, with plentiful access to range and safety, we run two chicken sheds, far enough apart that the birds can pasture without contact, thus curtailing disease transmission potential. This might be why we’ve never had an outbreak of anything dangerous. Traditions passed from farmer to farmer also impart healthy, nontoxic methods for controlling pests. For instance, mineral oil on the coop’s perches will reduce or eliminate mite populations because the bugs transfer between birds at night and the oil smothers them. Lately we’ve been summer-raising meat birds—letting the fields fallow in the winter, which kills any pests or diseases that might have arrived with the commercial chicks of spring—but I miss my layers and the exotic pleasure of sliding a hand under a hen and pulling out a warm egg while she clucks morosely.
Since before recorded history people have lived with birds. Not only do birds entertain and comfort, but they feed us. Brillat-Savarin, the nineteenth-century French epicure, noted: “Poultry is for cuisine what canvas is for painters.” However, in North America, after the Second World War, the taste of both the chicken and the egg changed when agribusiness discovered how to keep several laying hens in a single cage and then stack the cages in “batteries.” Within a short while the majority of hens (the cocks were all destroyed at birth) were confined in cages. They never saw the sun, living out their lives in cages as small as twenty by eighteen by sixteen inches, five birds to a cage, in block-long buildings holding up to ninety thousand chickens fed on processed high-protein pellets, the cage floors slanted to allow the eggs to roll out onto conveyor belts. Their beaks were melted off so they wouldn’t cannibalize each other (cannibalism always appears among tortured animals), their feet growing into the cage wire as they choked on the dust, their bodies spattered with manure, forced to undergo artificial moulting using regulated illumination cycles and starvation; and then, before they were two years old, every chicken was recycled for “chicken products.” Battery chicken production escalated, along with the production of confined broilers in the 1950s, following the discovery of nicarbazin—the breakthrough drug that diminished diseases common to overcrowding. Undoubtedly, Brillat-Savarin is rolling over in his grave. Bon appétit!
By the eighties the manufacture of poultry feed (like that of most livestock feed) began to be calculated in computerized control rooms—where specialists studied shipping tables of carloads of raw materials, calculating against costs the necessary proteins, enzymes, fillers (and so on) that made up a standard pellet mixed from different grains (soy and wheat and corn and barley), alfalfa, canola oil, enzymes, minerals, rendered animal (cattle, pigs, chickens) by-products, fish (sometimes from fishing beds polluted by heavy metals—mercury, cadmium, lead), and high-protein excrement recycled back into the feed.
Consider putting five teenagers in a room not big enough for one of them to fully stretch; then pull out their teeth, feed them powdered meal made from dead animals and excrement and pesticide-laced grains on conveyor belts, and put them under constantly increasing light levels. Now imagine what you’d find when you opened the door. The world of the battery hen.
Animal rights groups and the general public gradually became aware of these conditions, and the resulting outcry has led to some changes being instituted in this hideously cruel industry.
Continuous antibiotics are no longer permitted in Canada, but low-level antibiotics remain common in the United States, and the chickens are still sprayed in broiler sheds by huge rollers blasting out pesticides and antioxidants and arsenical compounds that enhance growth and egg production. These practices and their variations are slowly being banned in North America and Europe (Britain banned forced moulting in 1987) even as they are being revived in Third World countries.
Also, because of the uproar over these inhumane conditions, nervous processed-food manufacturers like McDonald’s and kfc have created minimum standards (for instance, the cages are bigger) that are slightly less horrific. The mistreatment of livestock has fed a growing rebellion, and many countries are banning animal and fish byproducts altogether in feed. A new, gentler regime is arising. This can be affirmed by the confusing variety of eggs we encounter in the more conscientious big-box grocery stores. However, despite the labels depicting radiant little farms or cheerful chickens, it’s still a grim world for poultry.
Since 1955 the average flock size in a laying house has risen to eighty thousand birds. But between 1986 and 2002 the number of major American egg producers declined from 2,500 to 700. Globalization and corporate consolidations led to the construction of ten “farms” that each raise more than 5 million hens. Another sixty-one producers keep more than 1 million hens each. These are U.S. Department of Agriculture numbers from 2002. This is the Goliath that the small farm with its li
ttle flocks of fifty or one hundred or two hundred clucking hens in the yard is competing against, yet almost everywhere the small farms can’t keep up with the demand for real eggs from humanely raised chickens. Sometimes, when I’m trapped on a reading tour, and I gaze at those pathetic runny, pallid, thin-shelled eggs served in a dismal franchised restaurant, I can only think we’ve broken the primordial egg in order to make an evil omelette.
WE RESCUED OUR FIRST batch of chickens, red rocks, from a small commercial layer facility. We had only just moved to Trauma Farm. I had grown up as a child among farmers, and my father had gifted me with much knowledge about animals without my even knowing it. To catch the chickens I brought along our resident flock of nineteen-year-old skateboarders and anarchists.
Me and three of the boys arrived at this last local, small-scale egg factory in the evening, when the birds were settled down, and I set the boys loose in the semi-dark shed. The first question was from Joaquin: “How do you catch a chicken?” This caught me off guard because I’d assumed they’d know, taught by their father, as I was. But it’s a different world for their generation. Describing how to hold a chicken is more a matter of showing than of explaining. There were soon a few feathers flying and Charlie Chaplin routines, but we safely rounded up thirty chickens that escaped the soup pot to be housed in our old-fashioned coop.
Because commercial birds are given an enriched diet under intense light to keep them laying, they burn out fast, but they can be reclaimed. I bought them for a dollar apiece. These were so-called free-range chickens, which meant they still had beaks and were kept in a shed, not a cage. They are usually slaughtered in their second year, yet a chicken can easily live a decade, even if it’s a little grungy by then and won’t lay much. We moved them to our coop, where they received only natural light, and weaned them onto grain. Battery hens, like children raised on fast food, will spurn real grain at first, but gradually they return to their natural appetites and learn how to scratch as well. After they went through their moult they started laying again.
That first night, about three in the morning, I was suddenly awoken by an elbow in the ribs. “What’s wrong?” I asked. Even the frogs had grown creepily silent.
“Listen!” Sharon said. “Our rooster is crowing.” She was born in Thunder Bay and had never lived on land larger than a city lot. She was thrilled.
I groaned and turned over. “You’ll get used to it.”
“I love the sound, but why is it crowing in the dark?”
“Something disturbed him. He’s protecting the hens. He’ll soon go back to sleep, and that’s what I want to do.”
We named the rooster Charlie, after a rooster my father’s family used to keep. It slept in their basement rafters. The original Charlie was so mean the postman refused to come into the yard. Our version of Charlie was a big, white, lovable goof. He’d strut around the yard pompously, guiding the hens to bug nests with much clucking, guarding against dog and raccoon scares; and after the first eagle left a big pile of hen feathers on the grass, topped by a gory-looking gizzard, he sent the hens fleeing every time a plane flew overhead.
There was also a feisty hen who decided she liked our house better than the coop. She took to sneaking into the mud room and laying eggs in my toolbox. Sometimes she’d sleep there if we didn’t catch her. Despite our reaction, she was graced with a streak of stubbornness and kept coming back, so we christened her Gertrude because she reminded us of a Scandinavian housekeeper with her own mindset. After we put a door on the mud room she’d often sleep in the trees, which corrupted a growing number of hens, and I would have to go out every night near dark and shake the chickens (with a great deal of squawking) out of the cedars and send them scurrying into the coop.
This soon earned me the nightly query, “Have you shaken the chickens?”
IT'S RELAXING TO WATCH chickens. I can sit with them for hours, observing the dynamics of their behaviour. They live in a more restricted social world than ours. Any chicken that moves beyond its station will soon be attacked, and often gang-attacked—including the rooster on rare occasions, despite his guard-duty strutting.
City children are often afraid of chickens at first, but within a few days at the farm they are striding out there and grabbing the hens by the neck to raise them up and look for eggs, until I tell them to be nice to the birds or the hens won’t give any eggs. Then they settle into a good relationship. I’ve also found that most children accept death more easily than adults. They will suddenly look up and see a dead rooster hanging from a winter tree and say: “Why is that rooster hanging in the tree?” After I gently explain that it’s for dinner, they will usually say, “Oh,” and go about exploring the hens for the real treat—the egg. They know a gift when they see it.
We hired a young university student, working her way across the country, to help in the garden, but when she learned I was going to be slaughtering chickens she begged to assist me. This seemed a little twisted at first. Although I slaughter animals, I’ve never enjoyed slaughtering, unlike some sadistic farmers I’ve met. She explained that she loved eating meat, and that, like me, she believed it was two-faced to eat meat without having at least once participated in the slaying of a living creature. So I said okay, curious about how this lovely, city-raised, idealistic student would deal with the passion play of death.
Over the years I’ve developed a simple system with minimal stress for both me and the chickens when I am slaughtering. It’s more complex and much sadder now that I’m forced by regulations to drive them to the slaughterhouse an island away.
I gather the chicken up, holding it until it’s calm, loop the baling twine around the legs, and hook the twine over a nail in the rafters of the woodshed. Then in a swift move I slide the killing blade into its brain through its beak and let the chicken drop and hang, killing it instantly.
Few people witness real, violent deaths today. Our knowledge of death is mostly a product of Hollywood films, where the standard victim clutches the heart, or the wound, and keels grandly over, dead. Those deaths are one in a thousand. When almost all creatures die they release their natural electricity, especially upon bleeding out. The bird is already dead, but around ninety seconds after its death it will convulse and shake wildly. As soon as I kill the brain I cut the throat or sometimes cut the head right off. When the electric death throes begin, the convulsing headless chicken will usually just shake and go still, but the occasional chicken will flip so hard that it will leap right out of the baling twine and run around, somersaulting and shivering in the ecstatic dance of the death of the nervous system.
The first chicken I killed with my helper watching did exactly that. I was so used to the death convulsions I didn’t think anything about it; then, to my surprise, the girl began performing the same dance. She suddenly started screaming and strutting a weird, high-stepping ballet in front of the convulsing chicken. It was completely physical, unthought, visceral, a kind of communion with death and a simultaneous rejection. The guttural noises coming out of her matched her spastic ballet, which echoed the chicken death.
I had no idea what to do. “Are you all right?” I asked when she finally slowed down. A dumb question under the circumstances.
“Yes . . . yes . . . ,” she gasped. “No . . . no . . . that was extreme . . . . Oh man, I had no idea . . . . Oh, that was awesome . . . .” She finally choked back her shock and smiled shyly at me, embarrassed. “Wow, I had no idea it would be that real.”
“Well, of course. Death is always real.”
WITH LAYERS WE OCCASIONALLY found ourselves renewing the flock, slaughtering them for soup or stewing birds, then bringing in fresh chicks. Chicks need a hen and a rooster to guide them through both diets and dangers. If it’s a whole new flock, we take those roles, scaring them when we see eagles or luring them to food. Sharon is brilliant at this. She collects worms and beetles and bugs, and drops them into the brood under the heat lamp. At first they are frightened. But there’s always a brave one.
A first tentative peck. Then a chase and, before long, a chick fleeing with a worm while being pursued by the rest of the flock darting for the worm. It’s a sight.
Chickens raised by hens often have an aversion to sow-bugs. Someone once told me the birds find them sour tasting. I’ve never eaten a sowbug myself, so I have no idea, but we discovered that we could feed the bugs to young, undiscerning chicks and they would eventually show a real appetite for them, which gave us a laugh and was useful too, because the sowbugs are a menace to seedlings in the garden.
Here, now, standing beside my coop, I’m comforted listening to the clucking hens who always keep one eye to the sky and one eye to the ground where, with soothing conversations, they direct their little chicks to grains and grasses and insects. While I know the bureaucrats are diagramming scenarios for the elimination of all domestic fowl from the open air and the raising of commercial poultry in sealed “biosecure” environments, I also know all is still right with the world when you can stand in the meadow, even if temporarily, and admire the birds living their lives with their fullest attention.
Distantly, down by the pond, the peacock cries merely to honour the sun, and the heron spreads the canopy of his wings, sunning himself like an ancient pope blessing the fishes. The sheep stand a few feet away with a kind of awed, dumbstruck gaze. And I think that somehow in the shade-dappled highlands of the remaining forests of Bolivia or Uttar Pradesh—after we and our chicken factories have all faded into dust and smoke—in that last jungle of the world, there will be the distant crow of the rooster of celebration, and the dynamic flock will begin rebuilding itself again.
4
BREAKFASTS
FOREVER
FARMERS TEND TO eat their breakfasts late. Livestock are eager for the dawn, and if you have a cow in milk, she’ll be calling. First light is the time to open the corrals, check there’s hay in the bins, release the chickens, confirm no deer have broken into the vegetable garden, fix the overflowing water trough, and so on. There’s always a couple of hours of work in the morning on most farms, though since we’ve designed Trauma Farm to be less schedule intensive, I can write in the morning, and others can farmsit easily when we’re away.
