Chicken Zen

We have new chicks! We have just picked up our meat chicks that we will raise for the summer and our broody layer hen is hatching chicks as we speak that will hopefully grow up to be good layers.

I have been raising chickens for a few years now and am still in love with them. I was reluctant to get chickens. I knew they were an inevitability but I dragged my feet getting into raising them. My husband said "let's get them" and I said "let's wait". I was afraid of making a mistake and we did, lots but over time our chickens have trained us to be good caretakers.

Okay, so the baby chicks are pretty cute and fuzzy but that is fleeting. What I really love is the simple joy of watching them socialize in their strange chicken ways. I love feeding them, and I love watching them work out the pecking order, I love seeing them turn into broody, obsessive mothers and I love watching them find something new.

The first chickens we had were duel breed chickens( Chantecler)and we kept some and killed some. The second chickens we got were meat chickens and we gave all of them names like "chicken finger" and "Sunday dinner" because we thought it would keep us from loving them. It didn't work. We have had Ameraucanas, Australorps and Buckeyes. We even had Ducks (that is a different story)We loved them and played with them and fed them and tucked them in each night and you know what, we killed them anyway with a few tears but happy to be a part of the whole experience.

The comment people most often make is "I could never eat anything I raised". Actually the first thing people say is "don't you need a rooster to get eggs?" "No you don't, only if you want fertilized eggs". Anyway back to the other point. Think about that statement. How did we get so far from our food source as to utter those words? I have heard it over and over again. I am dumbfounded. Yes it is difficult. I am not a monster. It is a commitment to a process. A process that ensures the raising of animals in a most humane way that allows them to be the most chicken-like in their existence while ensuring they are protected from predators and receive supplemental feed when they can't hunt their own. In exchange we eat them. The layers are kept longest, the meat birds the shortest, but really I like to think they have all had rich lives partaking in the chain of life. In the wild the fox, weasel, hawk, coyote, Fisher and sometime raccoon would eat them, here, most of the time, my family eats them.

You don't have too over sentimentalize chickens giving them human qualities and refusing to eat them because that one did the "cutest thing" or the other one "reminds my of my old auntie". But you also don't have to keep them at a distance and resist naming them. You can love them and also kill them. They aren't pets, they are farm animals and it is a complex relationship. There is an unspoken bond between farmer and animal. The animals depend on us now and we depend on them later, that is our deal.

I thank the chicken for bringing me hours of joy, for eggs that have kept me alive and finally for feeding me it's flesh. My job is to make sure that chicken had the best possible chicken life until it died. I do this with great earnest. Then, I hope it has a quick death at the hands of someone who respects the process enough to consider all of this. It sure sits easier with me than eating chicken that lived a dark, cold life in a tiny pen and died at the hands of a machine. I find it more and more difficult to eat anything I didn't raise.