(Beth Clifton collage)
by Karen Davis, Ph.D., president, United Poultry Concerns
“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 insuperable?”
This inquiry was prompted by a January 28, 2022 Boston Globe article 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?
(Karen Davis photo)
Two big problems
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.
First, most of the chickens are purchased from industrial hatcheries, either directly or via retailers like Tractor Supply Company.
Second, most towns prohibit keeping roosters, as exemplified by an ordinance that took effect on February 1, 2022 in Baltimore County, Maryland, which limits hen-keeping relative to the size of the yard in which they were kept, but allows no roosters under any circumstance.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Familiar story
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.”
[Editor’s note: roosters are commonly prohibited not only to prevent crowing at dawn from disturbing neighbors, but also to try to suppress cockfighting. Gamefowl breeding thrives, nonetheless, in cities throughout the U.S. under the cover of backyard hen-keeping, since it is gamefowl hens whose eggs provide fighting cocks, and roosters can be discouraged from crowing by keeping them in total darkness.]
Where, I wonder, did the roosters get “sent away” to?
(Beth Clifton collage)
The dark reality of industrial egg production
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 experience chickens and eggs solely as items bought at the supermarket or eaten in a restaurant.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Warm & personable individuals
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 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.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Complicated issue
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.
Beth & Merritt Clifton
For more on the issue, visit www.upc-online.org/backyard.
KAREN DAVIS, PhD is the President and Founder of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl, including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. Her latest book is For the Birds – From Exploitation to Liberation: Essays on Chickens, Turkeys, and Other Domesticated Fowl published by Lantern Publishing & Media.
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Here is the human problem when it comes to eating the flesh of other animals. This is what happens on this planet, from tiny organisims to massive creatures…some creatures consuming others. And, speaking of plants, it should be noted that PLANTS communicate. Does that mean we need to also consider that perhaps we should NOT be eating plants? I am not kidding here. It seems to me that just about every living thing has some kind of awareness and intelligence. Spiders travel far and remember where they have located their web with the egg packet. Wild native bees dig holes in the ground and travel far for food and return to that specific hole in the ground. So, it seems to me that we are left with an interesting situation…living things are aware and have their own kind of intelligence, even the plants and trees communicate. Perhaps a serious respect for all life is what is needed.
Laurella, you are so right that a “serious respect for all life is needed” by our species. I share your view that all living beings including plants have “some kind of awareness and intelligence.” In my article, “If Plants Have Feelings, How Does This Affect Our Advocacy for Animals?” (https://upc-online.org/alerts/210822_if_plants_have_feelings-how_does_this_affect_our_advocacy_for_animals.html), I address this very issue.
Obviously, in order to live, we must eat plants, whether they have feelings or not, but it’s important to remember that when we eat animals, we harm many more plants than we do on an animal-free diet, because of all the crops that are grown strictly to feed farmed animals and all the trees and other plants that are destroyed for land to grow these crops, and all the land that is denuded for the grazing of cattle. Two-thirds of all soybeans grown in the Brazilian rain forest are grown for farmed animal consumption, not for tofu and other human foods. Whatever feelings plant life may have, there is no question that animal life is full of feelings. The spectrum includes birds, mammals, aquatic animals, and insects. To show our respect for both animals and plants, we can (and we should unless we are starving to death otherwise) forego animal products in favor of animal-free foods.
Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns. http://www.upc-online.org
Thanks to Karen Davis, for examining in several aspects the situation of those chickens who, to the “surprise” of people who acquired them to be workers, contributing to the household economy, endear themselves to their humans, so that their status evolves into a kind of pet. Her reassurance at the end of this article, that chicken-keeping intended as a form of rescue should be permissible, is most welcome.
Would it be any wonder if, at some time not far off, in at least a few places around the world, chickens were to be received into the category of “pet” now occupied mostly by cats and dogs, along with a few other terrestrial vertebrates? There are ample witnesses, Karen herself being one, to the close, affectionate relationships that routinely develop between chickens and the humans who care for them with kindness and affection. It’s especially surprising, to me at least, that though they are not mammals, they like to be touched and held, and try to remain in close contact with a favorite human. And they’re like that, even though to my knowledge they were never especially bred for docility, as were most of the mammals we keep as pets. Also, many of these people who live with chickens and love them seem to enjoy having the chickens come stay with them in their own living quarters, instead of keeping them at a distance outside the house.
The other issue, about roosters and their loud calls, remains to be discussed. Perhaps one gets used to it? But then again, it’s possible the close relationships with chickens that the witnesses describe are exclusively with hens, and never with roosters; or do I remember wrong?
Thanks to Beth Clifton for that wonderful photo, a fascinating portrait of a chicken in profile, that appears next to the heading “Warm & personable individuals.”
Mark, thank you for your thoughts. I assure you that many roosters can be every bit as cuddly and physically affectionate as hens, but like any other species, including us, they vary in temperament and “taste,” and not every rooster or hen wants to be picked up and physically held. Also, their response to being held can change over time as they get older, need medical care, etc.
While the poultry and egg industry says chickens bred for meat or eggs are docile compared with their wild or feral counterparts, even so, they will rush away from being grabbed even by someone they know well (like me in our sanctuary), or if they perceive any sort of threat. Their instincts as prey animals are intact despite the breeding and other human manipulations and handling.
Chickens see sunlight an hour before we do because they can see infrared light as well as ultraviolet light and the entire color spectrum. Roosters crow in the tropical forests in what, for them, is visible sunrise, and as the large flocks of chickens who roost together in the trees at night break up into smaller groups starting at dawn, the roosters in these smaller sub-flocks communicate with one another throughout the day until they all reconvene in the late afternoon/early evening. I see the close semblance of this behavior in our sanctuary hens and roosters every day, particularly since we enclosed our entire 12,000 square ft. sanctuary in 2014, allowing our chickens to roost in the tree branches inside the predator-proof sanctuary, as they choose.
I LOVE the exuberant call of roosters in the early morning and intermittently throughout the day. Chickens, hens and roosters, are fully vibrant beings. In many ways, they are far more vibrant, alert and full of joy than their human coinhabitants. I yearn for the day when chickens can reclaim their Earthrights. If only they could.
Our flock, “inherited” from original owners of our home, lived very well. We had a hectare of land. They had their own fenced yard and two barn shelters with nest boxes. But because we disabled the electric charge around the fence out of concern for any living being who might contact it, seven of our flock were massacred by unknown canids, either coyotes or domestic dogs. I very much wanted to bring the four surviving hens with me when I moved, but they were instead adopted by a neighbor who was glad of the addition to her flock of hens.
I saw baby chicks for sale at the feed store and always felt badly for them, caged on top of a pile of farm equipment without any shelter or sustenance. The Mojave is a beautiful place, but many of the inhabitants have callous and uncaring attitudes toward other living beings. I sometimes called it, “The land that time forgot.”
Similarly, I continue to be amazed at the people that love their companion animals, yet continue to eat meat. When I was a volunteer at a local animal shelter, the annual volunteer appreciation picnic featured grilled hot dogs and hamburgers. I was the only person to bring veggie patties!
See Can Brother Wolf sell going meatless to dog-&-cat shelters and rescues? ANIMALS 24-7 has been embarrassing humane societies for serving meat at events for approximately 35 years now. The Humane Society of the U.S. finally adopted a vegetarian policy for public events in 2005, but broke it at least once, in 2014.
Honestly, I think pet shelters and rescues will be ironically among the last groups in society to make the connection. Every shelter/rescue in my area, save for one, features meat- centered fundraisers and have been outright stubborn in making any sort of change. One of them even had a pig roast “for the animals!!”
Yes, it’s surprising, and disappointing, that people who help animals (that is, a select group of animals) don’t mind at all participating in the exploitation and destruction of other animals. My own particular peeve is with the National Audubon Society for running their Conservation Ranching Program, intended to promote good grassland management that’s good for wild birds and others in those ecosystems — terrific, but then they advertise the ranchers’ beef, with a link to order it. Why can’t they see that there is a bit of cognitive dissonance going on there? My messages of protest have been ignored.
I live on the island of Kauai for a month or so a year. I have been an animal activist and then advocate since 1987.
There is a cockfighting contingent on this island. When Hurricane Iniki hit the island in 1992, it blew off the roof of some of the cages where these fighting cocks and hens were kept. Since that time their has been a huge profusion of feral chickens on the island. They tend to co-exist within residential communities. It is my observation that cocks, protecting the hens in their flock roosting in the trees and bushes, will crow intermittently all night rather than just before or at dawn. They will continue this behavior unless the flock is scared off. They tend to roost at around 4 pm in the afternoon and if scared off they will find another place to roost. That is the only way I have found a way to stop the roosters from crowing every 30 or 40 minutes all night. If you can scare off the hens, the rooster will leave with them, but otherwise he will continue to push his territorial limits all night by returning to crow all night. When it is hot during the summer and you want to leave your screened windows open, they can lead to sleepless nights and getting up multiple times a night chase off cocks. It can lead to murderous thoughts regardless of how vegan you are.