Chickens & Life Lessons

When we moved onto an old farm property, we were sure chicken-raising would be an instant part of our agricultural activity.  But we discovered that there was so much else to do, chickens didn't move into our lives for three years, when a friend who was anxious to get rid of a mother hen and a few chicks urged us to take hers.  Our children were eager to have them and I brought them home without more than a cat-carrier and box for them to sleep in.  While the kids were excited, my husband was less so as it meant he had to challenge his under-developed carpentry skills to build a coop in his few spare moments.  Those first layer hens had names, like Maple and Blackie and they were held and hugged often. I delighted in their bedtime routine so unlike that of my kids.  Come dusk, they'd find the coop and tuck themselves in; all we had to do was remember to close the doors.  I'm embarrassed to admit that a night did come when we forgot to close the door and came home the next day to find a feather trail and a dead hen or two, oddly not eaten. We replaced those within a few months and my children again gave them names.

Since then, three years later, we've had multiple batches of hens, our recent one consisting of several castaways from families unable to care for them for some reason or other.  By now,  my kids have stopped giving them names and stopped picking them up to hug, with the newfound knowledge of life and death that comes of living with farm animals, be it so simple as chickens.  We had a chick that turned into a mean attack rooster that frightened many visitors; when a friend said she'd come over and help us turn him into to stew with her fail-safe axe method, we took her up on her offer.   Some time later, I tried nursing back to health a hen that was attacked by the neighbor dog; but when its stench filled our living room as it failed to recover,  that hen fell to the same ending on the chopping block before getting buried deep in the woods.  Just last week, we had an eagle land on our porch railing then dive toward the hens.  My husband scared him away just in time, but we feared for our cat for days after that.  

One might rightly ask why do we choose to tie ourselves down to such duties as the feeding and care of hens just for a few dozen eggs a week, especially now that grocery stores are more likely to sell affordable eggs labelled such things as "free-range" and "antibiotic free."  I must admit I love seeing our hens free-ranging around the yard (well, yes, there's a down side to that too); I love giving my kids a firsthand knowledge of where some of their food comes from and what it takes to make that food appear before them.  Perhaps it simply comes down to habit; it's hard to imagine now buying eggs that come from a source we don't know.  

Whatever we've learned from this endeavor, it's fairly messy and ambiguous, in contrast to the knowledge coming to us through Google where, according to Nicolas Carr "intelligence is the output of the mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized."  Sure, we've googled "how to get rid of the mean rooster" but I like to think that raising chickens will keep us from turning into "pancake people" that Carr describes as "spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button."