With chickens, it's complicated

A most unusual and incredibly specific personal history

Jun 28, 2023

Every year, I debate whether I want to have chickens or not. It has been relatively easy to deny them thus far because a) I don’t have the infrastructure for them and b) I don’t like them.

I’ve never really felt the connection with chickens that I’ve felt with essentially every animal I’ve ever interacted with (tbd on snakes). Everything wants to kill them—things that dig, things with sharp teeth, things that swoop from the sky—even each other, if your baby chicks all grow up to be roosters.

But, since falling in love with the sheep (and starting this newsletter) I’ve been trying to be more open to bringing new animals onto our farm.

It’s complicated, though. Let me show you what I mean.

1.

When I was ten, my grandparents gave each family group (six in total) a baby chick for Easter, unannounced. The adults were horrified, and the kids (sixteen in total) were delighted. When it came time to go home, after our annual highly competitive Easter egg hunt, my family went home with six baby chicks in the back of our car because “no one had space for theirs.”

We lived in a subdivision. Which brings me to my next point.

2.

My mom loves chickens. When I visited her in South Carolina this fall, she took me out to meet her new flock of hens. “One of them asks to be picked up when she sees me,” she said. I rolled my eyes.

We walked over to their coop and one of the hens ran to the door, squatted down, held her wings out to the side. My mom picked her up and beamed at me. “Told you.”

3.

When I was in third, fourth and fifth grade, I was one of a group of kids that got bussed to a special “extension” school to take enrichment classes on a variety of subjects. One of those classes was “science lab” in which our primary activity was chicken dissection.

The science teacher, Mr. K, owned a chicken farm, and had freezers in the back of the room full of birds that had died of mysterious causes. So, every week he’d put a whole, dead, thawed (or sometimes fresh from the morning) bird out on the table and cut it open. I can perfectly picture the slippery blue-purple heart, the bright yellow cornmeal interior of the gizzard.

4.

When I was fifteen, I got accepted into the South Carolina Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics, a boarding school for kids who run out of math and science classes to take in their home districts. In between junior and senior years at Governor’s School, students have to participate in something called the Summer Science Program, which is a six-week embed at a university. During that time, the student conducts a research project which culminates in a formal presentation.

Midway through junior year, the forms went around. You could pick your university (I picked Clemson, which was nearby) and your field (I picked zoology because I loved animals). In the extra notes field at the bottom of the form, I mentioned I was hoping for Equine Sciences, but would settle for Bovine, too.

I got assigned to Poultry Sciences.

5.

When I was in high school, we had one remaining chicken—Mr. Rooster.

Mr. Rooster was a truly giant Rhode Island Red that my mom had picked out from a regular-looking house with a backyard swarming with red chickens. Mr. Rooster had originally come with a small group of hens, but they died over the years from various traumatic causes (including an incident involving our newly adopted dog, Chipper, who turned out to have a strong prey drive).

When Mr. Rooster was the last chicken left, he was allowed to take up residence in the garage, alongside our scruffy, eternally sooty Westie dog, Caspar. Mr. Rooster loved one person and one person only—my mom—and absolutely terrorized everyone else.

He seemed to reserve special ire for my boyfriends over the year. One boy refused to get out of his car when he would come to pick me up because he was afraid of the bird. Mr. Rooster, who must’ve been disappointed that his prey was such a wuss, took to flying up onto the hood of the boy’s black Honda Civic—the one with the sound system in the trunk—and staring, unflinchingly, through the window.

6.

I had to kill and dissect hundreds of chickens during my time studying the effects of ascorbic acid on corticosteroids in chickens the summer I was a student in the Poultry Sciences department.

The chickens, hundreds of them, lived in rolling metal cages, and died in a metal trash full of carbon dioxide. My supervising professor, an extremely quiet man, held the lid on while the chickens flapped frantically inside the can, beating themselves against the walls. He looked at my stricken face and apologized. Someone, he said, had decided this was the most humane method and so they were mandated to do it this way.

“If it were up to me,” he said softly, “I’d cut their throats. It’s much better.”

7.

My children love chickens. At their all-outdoor nursery school, they play alongside a flock in which no two chickens are alike—this one has feathered feet, this one a universe’s worth of speckles. They are mesmerized by them, enchanted by the baby chicks.

“Please mama,” they say, standing beside the feed troughs of baby chicks at Tractor Supply each spring. “Please.”

I don’t know for sure where we’ll end up, but I think I’m feeling the urge to try chickens out for myself and to get to know them on my own terms—this time without the scalpels and spectrometers. This time, maybe I’ll do it with a warm and dry chicken coop, a kid-sized basket for carefully gathered eggs and, hopefully, a rooster whose mission in life is to intimidate my enemies.

Fingers crossed.