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Fowl Play

I pass the koi pond and the back house gate; then the swing-gate of the chicken run which we generally leave open for the dogs to patrol at night, and then I unlatch and drop the ramp to the coop itself. I love the thump of the hinged door, with its little wooden steps, when it hits the ground, and the desperate rush of the chickens into the sun, cackling excitement and joy. Every day the chickens know delight. I wish I were as good as that.

As the birds rush towards the sun a ruthless cock leaps onto the nearest hen, and she crouches dutifully, wings spread and trembling. The hens that escape the sex-mad, morning roosters sometimes won’t stop for a hundred feet. I don’t blame them.

I open the side door, and check the feed, and the water. When I am raising layers I also carry the little woven collecting basket in the crook of my arm, besides balancing my tea mug. Small farming can involve a lot of dexterity. There it lies in a nest of straw. Magic. As fresh as it’s going to get. The egg—despite its current, sorry state in factory farms—is one of history’s great cultural icons. From the cosmic egg to the primordial egg to the golden egg laid by that doomed goose, this marvellous creation has long inspired our imaginations. “Whiter than an egg...” Sappho said some 26 centuries ago. This phrase, quoted from a rare Greek text known as the Dinner of the Learned, is all that remains of a poem written by a long dead woman with a fondness for young girls. It has taken on its own beauty over the years. Kenneth Rexroth called the fragment a supernatural gleam and a delusion. When I first encountered Sappho I was shocked by its evocative simplicity, and the shock has remained with me for forty years. An egg can hardly be called white, but it’s a phrase that means more than it means; it can also describe, a cooked and peeled egg, as firm and white as a young Greek woman’s thigh. It evokes purity, the qualities of whiteness, the mythology of eggs.

How lovely the egg—within it all the miracles of creation. Besides white, you can find brown, blue, speckled, grey, and even the legendary black eggs of a mysterious bird, possibly a honeycreeper, in deepest Central America. Pablo Neruda once talked of encountering eggs in the jungle that shone like a shotgun barrel.

Eros, that libidinous symbol of Greek mythology was born from the egg laid by Nyx, the goddess of night. Leda met her swan, and the twins, Castor and Pollux, were born of her eggs. A multitude of cultures—Phoenicians, Egyptians, Hindus, Japanese—insisted the world was egg-shaped, or that it was hatched from an egg laid by the creator of the land. According to the Dogon people of the Sudan and Mali, the cosmos is represented by the Nommo, a gigantic egg with two placenta. The Russians have a cruel wizard named Koszcey who can only be killed by a needle hidden in a magical egg. The Egyptian Sun God hatched from an egg. And Sun Hou-zi, the divine ape of China was also born of an egg, impregnated by the wind. The serpent-circled egg was a key symbol of the ancient cult of Orpheus. The egg—the soul of the philosopher; the serpent—the mysteries.

Gallus gallus, the red jungle fowl and its variant the grey jungle fowl, strode out of the Indus Valley and into our yards at least 5000 years ago, and was more famous for its fighting cocks than its eggs or meat in the ancient world. Black chested and legged, its red-brown neck feathers shine deep mahogany. It generally lays clutches of 6-8 brown eggs, an impressive number in the wild bird world, though some birds can produce more, including the partridge which will clutch up to seventeen eggs. The chicken is so prolific the world is now eating more than 71 million tonnes of chicken a year.

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—only because, when she was young, she was struck by a marauding Cooper’s hawk who ripped the tip of her head off. Instead of a comb she grew back a punky tuft of feathers that gave her a cute, thuggish look.

A real chicken can fly like the wind, melt into the jungle, and crow at unexpected moments. The scrawny, 2 –3 lb. wild fowl soon won the hearts of farmers and fight enthusiasts. Even today, in Java, a phenomenon known as ‘Deep Play’ exists—where fanatical cock-fighters will stake more money than they can win on their birds. The chicken enjoyed pride of place in the land of the pharaohs 3500 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 1.5 to 3 kilometres a year. It made it from Asia to the Americas 100 years ahead of Columbus. Before the electronic age this was about the same travel speed as our transfer of technologies or ideas. I like to imagine a scholar publishing a text in Dusseldorf and the ideas reaching Paris at about the speed that farmers passed along a new variety of chicken.

When I raise chickens for eggs, I prefer a mixed flock. Bantams are the best brooders. Their ‘broody’ hens will stubbornly hatch anything short of dinosaurs. If you place a smooth round stone under one it will try and hatch that too. Leghorns give white eggs. The luminous-feathered Ameraucana has blue-green eggs. Rare, weird varieties like the black-skinned silkie or Polish chickens add an amusing diversity to the flock. The Polish chicken has an extravagant tussock of feathers that fall over its eyes like the furred helmet of medieval Polish soldiers, hence its name. It’s also an extraordinarily stupid bird. All the intelligence was long ago bred out of it. I had a bird keel over in the yard, and I couldn’t understand what happened until I picked it up. The bird was gaunt, starving. I took it inside and held it on my lap and began stroking it. Sticking my finger in a piece of Sharon’s rich, chocolate cake, I held it up to the bird’s beak. After a few minutes it was pecking up the crumbs from my palm. Once it got a shot of sugar into it, I fed it some grain. The poor bird had been so blinded by its extravagant feathers that it couldn’t find the scratch in the grass or the feed dispenser. I clipped its feathers back from its eyes, and within days it 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 has led to numerous extinctions and has critically endangered more. In the U.S. alone there are 20 varieties that exist in numbers of less than 500. 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 and with plentiful access to range and safety, we run two chicken sheds, far enough apart that the birds can pasture without contact, which keeps disease transmission down, and which might be why we’ve never had an outbreak of anything grim. Old tradition passed from farmer to farmer also teach healthy, non-toxic methods for controlling pests. For instance, if you brush mineral oil on the coop’s perches it will keep mite populations down because they like to move from bird to bird at night and the oil smothers them. Lately, we’ve been summer-growing meat birds—letting the fields fallow in the winter, but I miss my laying hens, and that exotic pleasure of sliding a hand under a hen and pulling out a warm egg while she clucks morosely.

Since recorded history began people have lived with birds. Not only do birds entertain and comfort, but they feed us. Brillat-Savin, the nineteenth century French epicure, noted: “Poultry is for cuisine what canvas is for painters.” However, in North America, after wwii, a different attitude towards livestock grew to dominate farming; along with it, the ‘battery hen.’ The agri-business version of a Van Gogh stamped out on black velvet canvases or TV trays. When agri-business discovered it could keep several hens in a single cage, and then stack the cages, a major industry was born. The battery chicken came into its own, along with confined broilers in the 1950s—following the discovery of nicarbazin—the breakthrough drug, that diminished diseases common to over-crowding.

Within a short while the majority of battery hens (the cocks were all destroyed at birth) were confined in cages. The layers never saw the sun, living out their lives in cages as small as 20”x18”x16”, five birds to a cage, in block-long buildings holding up to 90,000 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, spattered with manure, forced to undergo artificial moulting using starvation in darkness, and then, before they were two years old, every chicken was recycled for ‘chicken products.’ Bon appétit!

The manufacture of poultry feed (like most livestock feed) was soon calculated in computerized control rooms—where specialists study shipping tables of railway carloads of raw materials, calculating against costs the necessary proteins, enzymes, fillers, etc., that make up a standard pellet mixed from different grains (soya and wheat and corn and barley), alfalfa, canola oil, enzymes, minerals, rendered animal (cattle, pork, chicken) by-products, fish (sometimes from heavily polluted heavy metal—mercury, cadmium, lead—contaminated fishing regions), and excrement that was recycled back into the feed.

Consider putting 5 teenagers into a room not big enough for one of them to fully stretch out; then pull out their teeth, feed them powdered meal made from dead animals and excrement and pesticide-laced grains on conveyor belts and, and control the lights according to what levels would cause them the fastest weight gain. Now imagine what you would find when you opened the door. That’s the world of the battery hen.

Permanent antibiotics are no longer permitted in North America, I’m told, but the chickens are still sprayed in broiler sheds by huge rollers blasting out pesticides and anti-oxidants and arsenical compounds that will enhance growth and egg production. These practises are also in the process of being banned in America and other modern countries (Britain banned forced molting in 1987) even as they are being revived in third world countries.

Recently, due to the uproar over these inhumane charnel houses, nervous, processed food manufacturers like MacDonald’s and KFC have created minimum standards (eg, the cages are bigger) that are slightly less horrific. The mistreatment of livestock has fed a growing rebellion, and many countries are also banning animal and fish by-products altogether in feed. A new kinder, gentler regime is arising, as can be affirmed by the confusing variety of eggs we can encounter in the more conscientious big box grocery stores, but despite the labels depicting radiant little farms with cheerful chickens, it’s still a grim world for poultry.

Since 1955 the average flock size in a laying house has risen to 80,000 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 10 ‘farms’ that each raise more than 5 million hens. Another 61 producers keep more than 1 million hens. These are U.S. Department of Agriculture numbers from 2002. This is the goliath that the small farm with its little flocks of 50 or 100 or 200 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 on tour, lecturing, and I gaze at those pathetic white, runny, pallid, thin-shelled eggs I’ve encountered when trapped in a dismal franchised restaurant I can’t help but 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 me even knowing it. To catch the chickens I brought along our resident clutch of nineteen-year-old skateboarders and anarchic rebels who’d been raising hell in the urban world and looking for a rebel, alternate community, which we inadvertently provided at Trauma Farm.

I took these three boys to the last local, small-scale chicken factory in the evening, when the birds were settled down, and set them 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, like I was. But it’s a different world for their generation. Describing how to hold a chicken is more a matter of showing than explaining. Another dying art. There were soon a few feathers flying, and Charlie Chaplin routines, but we safely rounded up thirty chickens who thus escaped the soup pot, housed in our old-fashioned coop.

Because commercial birds are fed an enriched diet, often under intense light to keep them laying, they burn out fast, yet 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, and are usually slaughtered in their second year, yet a chicken can easily live a decade, even if it’s a little grunged by then, and won’t lay much. We moved them to our coop, which only received natural light and weaned them onto whole grain and natural grain mashes. 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’d been 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 it. He’s their protector. 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 such a mean-minded bird that the postman refused to come in the yard. Our version of Charlie was a big, white, lovable goof. He’d cluck around the yard pompously, 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 them fleeing every time a plane flew overhead.

These chickens also came with 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 in 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 and social order. 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 parades and demonstrative bug-finding skill, when he clucks loudly enough to bring the hens running.

City children are 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 woman, a 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. While I slaughter animals, I’ve never enjoyed the job, 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 when I’m forced 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.

Hardly anyone witnesses real, violent deaths today. Our knowledge of death is now 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. Almost all creatures when they die release their natural electricity, especially when they bleed out. The bird is already dead, but around 90 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 die, but the occasional chicken will flip so hard, it will leap right out of the baling twine and run around, somersaulting and shaking 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 doing the same dance. She suddenly started screaming and strutting a high, weird-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 alright?” I asked when she finally slowed down. A dumb question in the circumstances.

“Yes... yes...” she gasped. “No... no... that was extreme... O man I had no idea... O 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.”

We often find ourselves renewing the flock, bringing in new chicks. Chicks need a hen and rooster to guide them, both with diets and dangers. If it’s a whole new flock, we find ourselves taking those roles, scaring them when we see eagles, or luring them to food. Sharon collects worms and beetles and bugs, dropping them into the brood under the heat light. 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 pursued by the rest of the flock, darting for the worm. It’s a sight. Chickens raised within a flock often have an aversion to sowbugs. 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 them to young, undiscerning chicks, and they would eventually show a real appetite for them, which gave us a laugh, and did a good deed also, because the sowbugs are a menace to seedlings in the garden.

Here, now, standing beside my coop, I find honest comfort listening to the clucking of the hens, who always keep one eye to the sky, and one eye to the ground where they direct, with soothing conversations 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 into sealed ‘bio-secure’ environments, 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. It makes me jealous of them.

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 from it with a kind of awed, dumbstruck gaze. And I think somehow, that in the shade-dappled highlands of the remaining forests of Utter Pradesh, after we and our chicken factories have all faded into dust and smoke, there, in the last jungle of the world, will crow distantly the first rooster of celebration, and the dynamic flock will begin rebuilding itself again.