It would be wonderful if, instead of being considered commodities and consumables, chickens came to be respected and loved for their own sakes by their human families; however the chicks are still purchased from industrial hatcheries and roosters are sent who knows where?
Rafaella Tsirozidou holds one of her five emotional support
chickens.
“Would you be pleased if chickens came to be viewed more and more as
animals to be kept as pets? Is the routine objection of neighbors to
roosters an insuperable one?”
This inquiry was prompted by an article in The Boston Globe, January
28, about a family’s lawsuit to keep their 7-year-old daughter
Rafaella’s beloved hens.
My answer: It would be wonderful if, instead of being considered
commodities and consumables, chickens came to be respected and loved
for their own sakes by their human families – a trend that
tentatively emerged a few decades ago when some people started
keeping a few hens for eggs in opposition to factory farming, only
to discover how friendly and personable their chickens were. Who
knew?
But Marcela Garcia, the sympathetic author of The Boston Globe
article that supports the family’s fight to keep their five hens,
inadvertently brings out two big problems with backyard
chicken-keeping: most of the chickens are purchased from industrial
hatcheries, either directly or via retailers like Tractor Supply
Company, and most towns prohibit roosters, as exemplified in Chicken
Coops Allowed In Backyards Starting Feb. 1 in Baltimore County,
Maryland, where the new legislation stipulates “no roosters.”
In what is now a familiar story, The Boston Globe article relates in
passing that “Rafaella’s mom got her a few baby chickens around
Easter last year” and that the family had “already sent the roosters
in the flock away to avoid noise complaints from neighbors.” Where,
I wonder, did the roosters get “sent away” to?
These two aspects of modern backyard chicken-keeping – the purchase
of chickens incubated parentless in factory-farm hatcheries, and the
prohibition and bleak fate of the unwanted roosters – align this
ostensibly sunny enterprise with the dark reality of industrial egg
production. Apart from the roosters who are warehoused with hens
specifically for breeding before they are slaughtered, the egg
industry has no use for the billions of male birds who are therefore
destroyed, by suffocation or maceration, as soon as they hatch.
The mid-20th-century replacement of traditional chicken farming with
industrialized chicken and egg production banished actual chickens
from the yards and the consciousness of people who now experienced
chickens and eggs solely as items bought at the supermarket or eaten
in a restaurant.
The late 20th-century resurgence of a suburbanized semblance of
old-fashioned chicken farming has brought actual chickens back to
life for people who, to their surprise, have found that the hens
they bought for eggs are warm and personable individuals. But many
of these same charmed people, who wouldn’t dream of eating their own
chickens, continue eating those who are sold in the supermarket and
served in restaurants.
Even in places like the Eastern Shore of Virginia where we’re
located, and where truckloads of thousands of crated chickens are
being taken every day to the local Tyson and Perdue slaughter
plants, a distinction is not unheard of between “our chickens” and
those chickens who, though visible in the trucks, are disconnected
emotionally in people’s minds from the ones they know and love. This
may be in part the result of seeing the chickens in the trucks
sitting lumped together motionless, unlike the ones in the yard. But
if you look at the chickens in the crates on their way to being
slaughtered, you will see their faces and their eyes and their life
peering out at you.
For these reasons, I’m ambivalent about backyard chicken-keeping
while seeing it, hopefully, as an opportunity to expand perceptions.
I’m in total favor when the keepers rescue or adopt their chickens
instead of buying them. Even so, buying a victim out of slavery may
be considered, in my opinion, a form of rescue. For the chicken,
from the chicken’s point of view, it is a permissible trade-off. The
chicken-keeping issue before us is complicated.
For more on the issue, visit Backyard Chicken-Keeping
This article was first published on Animals 24‑7.