UPC United Poultry
Concerns
May 2018
Whenever I tell people stories about chickens enjoying themselves, many become very sad. The pictures I’m showing them are so different from the ones they’re used to seeing of chickens in a state of absolute misery.
Let us perceive chickens with envisioned eyes that pierce the veil of these birds’ “mechanization” and apprehend the truth of who they are.
Juliet nestles under her foster mother Daffodil's wing. Photo by Karen Davis
Her love of her children definitely resembles my love of mine.
– Alice Walker
The emphasis has been on smaller, more efficient but lighter-weight egg
machines.
– American Poultry History
In our day, the hen has been degraded to an “egg machine.” In previous eras,
she embodied the essence of motherhood. In the first century AD, the Roman
historian Plutarch praised the many ways in which mother hens cherish and
protect their chicks, “drooping their wings for some to creep under, and
receiving with joyous and affectionate clucks others that mount upon their
backs or run up to them from every direction; and though they flee from dogs
and snakes if they are frightened only for themselves, if their fright is
for their children, they stand their ground and fight it out beyond their
strength.”
The Renaissance writer Ulisse Aldrovandi described how, at the first sign of
a predator, mother hens will immediately gather their chicks “under the
shadow of their wings, and with this covering they put up such a very fierce
defense – striking fear into their opponent in the midst of a frightful
clamor, using both wings and beak – they would rather die for their chicks
than seek safety in flight.” Similarly, in collecting food, the mother hen
allows her chicks to eat their fill before satisfying her own hunger. Thus,
he said, mother hens present, in every way, “a noble example of love for
their offspring.”
I saw this love in action, when a hen named Eva jumped our sanctuary fence
on a spring day and disappeared, only to return three weeks later in June
with eight fluffy chicks. Watching Eva with her tiny brood close behind her
was like watching a family of wild birds whose dark and golden feathers
blended perfectly with the woods and foliage they melted in and out of
during the day. Periodically, Eva would squat down with her feathers puffed
out, and her peeping chicks would all run under her wings for comfort and
warmth. A few minutes later the family was on the move again.
One day, a large dog wandered in front of the magnolia tree where Eva and
her chicks were foraging. With her wings outspread and curved menacingly
toward the dog, she rushed at him over and over, cackling loudly, all the
while continuing to push her chicks behind herself with her wings. The dog
stood stock still before the excited mother hen and soon ambled away, but
Eva maintained her aggressive posture, her sharp, repetitive cackles and
attentive lookout for several minutes after he was gone.
Sitting on her nest, a mother hen carefully turns each of her eggs as often
as thirty times a day, using her body, her feet, and her beak to move each
egg precisely in order to maintain the proper temperature, moisture,
ventilation, humidity, and position of the egg during the 3-week incubation
period. Embryonic chicks respond to soothing sounds from the mother hen and
to warning cries from the rooster. Two or three days before the chicks are
ready to hatch, they start peeping to notify their mother and siblings that
they are ready to emerge from their shells, and to draw her attention to any
distress they’re experiencing such as cold or abnormal positioning.
A communication network is established among the baby birds and between them
and their mother, who must stay calm while all the peeping, sawing, and
breaking of eggs goes on underneath her as she meanwhile picks off tiny
pieces of shell that may be sticking to her chicks and slays any ants that
may dart in to scavenge. During all this time, as Page Smith and Charles
Daniel describe in The Chicken Book, “The chorus of peeps goes on
virtually uninterrupted, the unborn chicks peeping away, the newborn ones
singing their less muffled song.”
A mother hen with her chicks in the Florida Everglades. Photo by Davida G.
Breier
During the first four to eight weeks or so, the chicks stay close to their
mother, gathering beneath her wings every night at dusk. Eventually, she
flies up to her perch or a tree branch, indicating her sense that they, and
she, are ready for independence.
A mother hen with her chicks in the Florida Everglades. Photo by Davida
G. Breier
Whenever I tell people stories about chickens enjoying themselves, many
become very sad. The pictures I’m showing them are so different from the
ones they’re used to seeing of chickens in a state of absolute misery. The
New York Times restaurant critic William Grimes wrote of a
beautiful black hen who entered his life unexpectedly one day, an apparent
escapee from a poultry market in Queens. “I looked at the Chicken endlessly,
and I wondered. What lay behind the veil of animal secrecy? Did she have a
personality, for one thing?” His curiosity is satisfied by close
acquaintance with and observation of the endearing bird. By the end of his
bittersweet book My Fine Feathered Friend, he and his wife Nancy
“had grown to love the Chicken.”
We have to start looking at chickens differently, so that we may see them as
Alice Walker described her encounter with a hen she watched crossing the
road one day with three little chicks in Bali. In her essay, “Why Did the
Balinese Chicken Cross the Road?” in Living By the Word, Walker
writes:
It is one of those moments that will be engraved on my brain forever. For I really saw her. She was small and gray, flecked with black; so were her chicks. She had a healthy red comb and quick, light-brown eyes. She was that proud, chunky chicken shape that makes one feel always that chickens, and hens especially, have personality and will. Her steps were neat and quick and authoritative; and though she never touched her chicks, it was obvious she was shepherding them along. She clucked impatiently when, our feet falling ever nearer, one of them, especially self-absorbed and perhaps hard-headed, ceased to respond.
Let us with equal justice perceive chickens with envisioned eyes that
pierce the veil of these birds’ “mechanization” and apprehend the truth of
who they are. In The Chicken Book, Page Smith and Charles Daniel remind us,
most poignantly: “As each chick emerges from its shell in the dark cave of
feathers underneath its mother, it lies for a time like any newborn
creature, exhausted, naked, and extremely vulnerable. And as the mother may
be taken as the epitome of motherhood, so the newborn chick may be taken as
an archetypal representative of babies of all species, human and animal
alike, just brought into the world.”
This is What Wings Are For.
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