A wonderful essay on chicken keepers from
Christian Century:
Loving and eating animals
On a sunny winter day I visited
the Academy for Global
Citizenship, a public charter
school on the southwest side of
Chicago. The school emphasizes
sustainability and experiential
education, which includes having
the students feed and water the
school yard chickens, clean
their coop, and collect their
eggs. As I approached the coop,
a half dozen kindergartners
crowded around to introduce me
to Buttercup, Daisy, and
Puddles. Like the students, the
school’s resident hens were a
diverse trio, one gold-speckled
brown, one glistening iridescent
black, and one fluffy white. But
all had the glittering eyes and
brilliant red combs of healthy
hens, and they clucked
conversationally with each
other, as contented hens do.
The children chattered away
alongside the hens, comfortable
with them yet respectful of
their space—neither cuddling
them as if they were pets nor
keeping a wary distance as they
would with wild animals. When
recess was over I followed the
children as they scampered to
line up at the school door. I
had come to join them for their
afternoon class, a review of
everything they had learned in
their unit on chickens.
Having grown up in the fourth
of five generations of a central
Illinois farm family, I have a
more than passing familiarity
with chickens. Some of my
earliest memories are of
gathering still-warm eggs from
the nesting boxes in my
grandparents’ chicken coop. But
these days I’ve become
interested in urban chicken
keeping—and in the notion of
“keepers” in general.
Keep has echoed in my
mind ever since I heard Wendell
Berry say that there’s really
only one commandment concerning
the creation: keep it. The
phrase appears early in Genesis,
when God put man “in the garden
of Eden to till it and keep it.”
Investigating further, I found
that the English verbs
till and
keep come
from the Hebrew words
abad and
shamar.
These are not arcane or abstruse
terms but wonderfully
straightforward words describing
everyday activities.
Abad is
the root of words related to
work, service, or serving.
Shamar means
to preserve and protect—to keep.
Suddenly I understood why a
soccer goalie is also a keeper,
and why the inner region of a
castle, the most secure area, is
a keep. Echoes of the gentle
benediction that ends the church
service, “The Lord bless you and
keep you,” sent me to my
computer, where I again found
the word
shamar and
learned that the benediction
comes from the priestly blessing
that the descendants of Aaron
were to pronounce over the
people of Israel. I heard
shamar reverberating
back thousands of years, back
before Christianity, even before
Aaron. And I heard it
ricocheting right up to the
present day, bouncing around the
playground at the Academy for
Global Citizenship. As I began
to fully appreciate the
resonance of “to keep,” even the
mundane word and work of
housekeeping began to take on a
reverent glow.
But what about our collective
home, our blue marble spinning
in space? How do we keep it,
preserve and protect it? It
seemed that by investigating how
urban chicken keepers relate to
their chickens, and how keeping
chickens situates humans in the
larger ecosystem, I might be
able to explore that question.
Buttercup, Daisy, and Puddles
might be good teachers, I
thought, because as the children
intuitively knew, hens occupy a
distinct space between pets and
wildlife. We love pets like
family members. We admire
wildlife for its beautiful
otherness. But chickens? They do
not fit into either of the
animal categories to which we
are most accustomed, and so they
force us out of our comfortable,
binary ways of thinking. They
are neither completely wild nor
fully tame. Rather they are the
domesticated descendants of wild
jungle fowl, prized by many
cultures for their powers of
divination. Because they
represent the liminal, they
might be a means by which we can
better understand the
contradictions and complexities
of the relationships between us
and our fellow humans, our
fellow creatures, and our common
world.
And so I found myself sitting
in a pint-sized chair in a
colorful classroom, curious to
see how city kids keeping a few
chickens might illuminate the
question of our mandate “to
keep” the creation. The teacher
calmed the kids down and then
started a PowerPoint
presentation to review the parts
of a chicken, eliciting
exclamations of “Wing!” “Beak!”
“Comb!” and “Feathers!”
Then the teacher asked, “What
are the five things the animals
who live with us need?” Hands
shot up around the room. “Food!”
was the first answer, followed
quickly by “Water!” Then the
teacher and students discussed
shelter and how animals needed
sun and air to be healthy, but
also protection from the sun on
hot days and from wind, rain,
and snow.
I was intimately familiar with
animals’ food, water, and
shelter needs, since I’d grown
up on a farm and had done chores
every morning and evening. Even
on the coldest, darkest winter
mornings, I lugged two sloshing
five-gallon pails of water to my
cow, Frosty, and made sure she
had enough hay before I ran down
the lane to catch the school
bus. Each of my five siblings
did the same, looking after the
food, water, and shelter needs
of their sheep, chickens, goats,
rabbits, cows, and pony.
As far as I was concerned,
food, water, and shelter covered
basic animal needs. But in the
classroom more hands were up,
waving the bodies attached to
them and vying for attention.
“Friends!” shouted one student.
The teacher nodded as she
clicked to a photo of a flock of
chickens in a green pasture:
“And what else?”
“Love!” shouted three or four
kids in unison, putting their
arms around themselves and
rocking back and forth in what
was apparently the school’s sign
language for love.
Love was not an animal need I
would have thought to
articulate. But as I reflected
on the summers spent on my
grandparents’ farm, love was
certainly present, as were
“friends” in the large flock of
laying hens. Sometimes a flock
of young males shared the
chicken yard as well—fryers that
would end up one
Sunday
afternoon as the crispiest fried
chicken on the planet, a fact
that complicated but did not
contradict the love that was
showered upon all the chickens
and other animals that my
grandparents kept.
On that central Illinois farm
where my father and grandfather
were born, taking care of the
hens and gathering their eggs
each day was not so much a chore
as a mission. Each day eggs
appeared in the straw-filled
nesting boxes, their size and
shape perfect for a child’s hand
to cradle. I’d return to the
house and show the basket to
Grandma. She would
oohh and
aahh over
it, then ask, “Did you thank the
hens?” If I forgot, she had me
go back out and do it.
A habit of gratitude becomes
second nature when you grow up
with a grandmother who insists
that you thank the hens every
time you gather their eggs. Even
now, 50 years later, this
question echoes in my mind every
time I eat an egg. And whether I
do it out loud or internally, I
always thank the hens.
The hens on that farm had all
five of the things the children
identified: food, water,
shelter, friends, and love. Yet
none had names like Daisy,
Buttercup, or Puddles; in fact,
none of them had names. Perhaps
it was because when their
egg-laying days were over, all
their days were over. I’m not
sure what end-of-life issues the
hens and children at the Academy
for Global Citizenship will
face, but on the farm the end
came swiftly, and then Grandma’s
hens were transformed into the
most delicious and velvety
chicken soup, with the rich,
golden flavors that come only
with a long and happy life.
That is certainly an odd
notion—to love a creature and
then to eat it. But the oddness,
or outright discomfort, is a
surface dissonance—one that can
disguise the deep harmonies
beneath. That dissonance may
arise from simple, binary
thinking (pets vs. wildlife;
life vs. death) and from a
reluctance to embrace complexity
and ambiguity. But beyond the
dissonance is the deep harmony
of how things work in this
world, with plants dying to feed
animals and animals dying to
feed plants.
Native Americans understood
these necessary
interdependencies and felt their
weight. They apologized when
taking any living thing for
food, whether it was a berry,
fruit, root, green, or animal.
They did not make a distinction
between plant harvesting and
animal harvesting. In either
case they recognized that they
were taking life to sustain
life. At the same time, they
acknowledged that one day it
would be their turn to return to
the earth to feed plants and
animals, including other humans.
It has taken scientists quite a
while, but some have come to a
point of view similar to that of
the Native Americans (see
Michael Pollan’s “The
Intelligent Plant,”
New
Yorker, December 23,
2013). It turns out that plants
interact with and react to their
environment and can be shown to
have a desire for life similar
to an animal’s. Pulling up a
beet or carrot brings death as
certainly as bringing down the
hatchet on the neck of an old
hen. And from chemical signals
that plants emit, we can
conclude that they do not want
to be sliced, diced, sautéed,
and eaten any more than a
chicken does.
But this is not a reason to
despair or to stop eating.
Rather, it’s a reason to fully
embrace the cycles of life, from
living soil to living soil, in
the humble awareness that our
lives are dependent upon the
deaths of plants and of animals
and that our own death will
contribute to greater plant and
animal life (if allowed to
return to earth without the
poisons of embalming). We are
part of a world where everything
eats everything, and we need to
recognize that this is, as the
Creator proclaimed, “good.” It
is also good to acknowledge and
accept that we humans are
temporary manifestations, way
stations between soil and soil.
Along the way, we have those
clearly articulated
responsibilities of
abad and
shamar,
to work and serve and preserve
and protect the creation. On the
one hand, this is simple (food,
water, shelter, friends, love),
and on the other hand, it is
not. Anyone who keeps chickens
enters a world of complex
interconnections and messy
contradictions, facing the
problems of chicken sex, of poop
on eggs, of predators—sometimes
including your own lovable yet
murderous pooch—and difficult
end-of-productive-life issues.
Dealing with these matters is
not easy, but when we do, we are
more intimately connected to our
food, to each other, and to the
world we all share.
Yet many of us, while
hyperconnected to our digital
devices, are completely
disconnected from the natural
world and from the sources of
our sustenance. This has led to
a sort of collective eating
disorder, which has in turn led
to a disordered relationship
with our responsibilities
regarding the creation.
The vast majority of eggs, for
example, come from chickens
given food, water, and shelter
but no respect, gratitude, or
love. Certainly no one thanks
the modern battery hens, whose
eggs roll off onto a conveyor
belt as soon as they are laid.
During my confirmation in the
Lutheran church, I was told not
just that there is sin, but that
there are two kinds—sins of
omission and sins of commission.
With an inward groan I realized
that in most situations in life
I was pretty much damned if I
did and damned if I didn’t. It’s
true that we who eat eggs from
industrial sources are guilty of
both. We are party to the sins
of commission: the debeaking of
the baby chicks immediately
after hatching, their close
confinement with thousands of
other hens without room to
stretch their legs or flap their
wings, the whole life of the
bird lived without sunlight,
green grass, or fresh air,
without the ability to chase a
cricket. But on top of all that
is the sin of omission: no one
ever thanks these long-suffering
hens for their eggs.
The notion that keeping
chickens might help recenter and
reorder our lives and
relationships led me not only to
the kids at the Academy for
Global Citizenship, but to Mike,
who keeps Henrietta Thoreau and
three of her friends in his
backyard in a central Illinois
city (nameless because the town
ordinance prohibits chickens).
“I’m curious,” I said to Mike,
“How do you relate to your
hens?”
“Well, when I come home, I get
a glass of wine and go into the
yard to watch my chickens.
They’re entertaining, and they
chill me out,” says Mike. “But
they’re not too bright. They’re
interested in you because you
are where their food comes from.
They don’t realize that the
situation is reciprocated:
they are
where
our food comes
from,” he chuckled, collecting
three warm brown eggs.
Eating one of those eggs, or
any egg, in gratitude and in
full awareness that it is a
chicken embryo, is a kind of
sacrament, a humble
thanksgiving. With every bite we
can recognize the reciprocity,
the inherent interconnectivity
and interdependence that
sustains us all. And we can
begin to live in the mystery of
a world in which life begets
life, acknowledging that death
is always part of the circle of
life. It’s breakfast, and it’s
also an unborn chicken, and
that’s not only OK but good,
because it’s how the world
works.
By keeping chickens or tending
a fruit tree, a raspberry bush,
or a garden, we are obeying the
command to keep the earth. We
can also practice
shamar by
supporting farmers who tend
their plants and animals in a
way that respects, preserves,
and protects a piece of the
creation—an idea that had not
occurred to me before I met
Buttercup, Daisy, and Puddles.
And so I thanked the hens once
again.
A version of this essay
will be included in Terra
Brockman's forthcoming book, City
Creatures: Animal Encounters in
the Chicago Wilderness
(University
of Chicago Press).
It’s not just the business structure that becomes industrialized
through the decades: The raw material, chicken, does too. That wide
variety of genetics, represented by all those breeds raised by different
farmers, gets progressively narrowed down and improved upon. Generation
by generation, birds were redesigned to fit the evolving model of
poultry production: stocky, fast-growing, indolent, and efficient at
converting feed to flesh. Today, most of the chickens we eat belong to
only a few proprietary breeds produced by only a few companies. Compared
to what it was, the gene pool of chicken is shallow.
Here and there, though, stubborn holdouts are attempting to preserve
that almost-lost variety. The 6-minute video below comes from a trip I
took to meet one such holdout: Frank Reese, proprietor of Good Shepherd
Poultry Ranch in tiny Lindsborg, Kansas. Reese raises only birds that
were rejected by the poultry industry decades ago as unfit to contribute
to industrial production. The birds are feisty and amusing, and their
names are poetic: Wyandotte, Minorca, Ancona, Spanish. But Reese doesn’t
labor by himself in the middle of nowhere just so he can look back into
chicken’s past. He breeds and raises and slaughters and sells these
birds, over and over again, because he believes that their unique
characteristics deserve stewardship and protection—and that someday,
large-scale chicken production will want those genetics again.
This is the first installment in a video project about agriculture that I’ve been working on for a year with the support of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT. I’ll be rolling out segments on this blog as the year goes on.
