Chicken Addiction
by Dorothy Dow Crane

When my friend moved to the village of Red Hook 20 years ago, she was welcomed with a bowl of neighborly eggs that had been laid by hens next door. Back then, eggs didn’t always come in a gray cardboard carton, and not all hens lived in the country. The small backyard chicken flock attracted about as much attention as the backyard tomato patch. Within a few years of my friend’s “welcome eggs,” the Red Hook and Rhinebeck village codes were amended to prohibit backyard poultry. Officials cited noise, nuisance, and the attraction of uninvited wildlife such as skunks, raccoons, possums, and rats as reason enough to impose outlaw status on poultry.

Since Michael Pollan detailed the toll our industrial food chain takes on both animal and human communities, there’s been an ongoing public debate about the nutrition and safety of American food production. Most of us are now paying more attention to where our food comes from and for many, eating food grown close to home and as chemically free as possible—becoming a “locavore”—is well worth the effort. Even Michele Obama has planted an organic garden on the White House lawn. Then, last summer, when 380 million eggs were recalled for salmonella contamination and images of de-beaked hens crammed into tiny cages laying our breakfast eggs appeared on our TV screens, the enormous gap between the plump, happy hen on the egg carton and the reality of agribusiness egg production became painfully obvious.

Now the fight is on to bring back the backyard chicken, or at least the backyard hen. Skirmishes have broken out all over the country as officials and residents squabble over whether hens may loll on your lawn with the family dog and cat (San Francisco, Chicago, and Houston say yes) and if so, how many (three hens in Burlington, four in Little Rock, five in Madison), and whether a license should be required (no for the small flock in Portland, Oregon, but yes in New York City). Rochester even requires an official coop inspection, conjuring up visions of the chicken police.

The first thing any backyard chicken owner will tell you is about the immense pleasure and relief of knowing exactly where your eggs come from. The eggs themselves are stunning: blue eggs, green eggs, eggs the color of walnut, pale pink eggs. You will hear about the smooth warmth of a just laid egg in your palm. You will learn about the strength of the shell, the sharp focused rap required to break it open, how the deep orange yolk stands at attention in the skillet, how the thick white hugs in around the yolk. And then you’ll hear about the flavor, the complex savor of walk-on-the-ground eggs that’s never present in the runny, pale things from the supermarket. Once you have eaten a fresh backyard egg, the return to storebought is almost unbearable.

These small flock owners are not only passionate about their eggs. They also talk about the enormous affection they feel towards their “girls.” It doesn’t seem to matter whether “the girls” are purebred Silkies that look like balls of fluff who have donned Sunday go-to-church hats, or basic Rhode Island Reds named Rusty and Rosie. The willing listener is likely to hear that “Buffy, the boss, is first out of the coop each morning,” that “Oprah likes to sit on my lap on the front porch,” and that “Selma our oldest girl, stopped laying a few years ago, but we love her. Our run has become Canyon Ranch for aging chickens.”

These owners are quite comfortable with the murky line between pet and livestock and more than willing to add poultry care—no small task—to their daily chores list. Chickens are totally dependent on their owner for protection. A possum or a raccoon in the henhouse will leave a horribly sad scene behind. The adventurous hen that flutters up and over the chicken run will likely be taken out by Rover in no time flat. And chickens, unlike cats, are not fastidious. They poop in their water and their food. Their coops need regular cleaning. Rosie and Rusty may feel like pets, but you can’t take them along when you go to the beach for a week. “They’re a lot more trouble than either a dog or a cat,” one owner told me. “You can’t leave town without a reliable chicken sitter, and you can’t even stay out late at night because the chickens have to be locked up before dark.”

While village residents may have reservations about noise, odor, and rodents marauding the chicken feed, chicken supporters point out that animal problems start with the irresponsible owner, not the animal itself. Small flock owners claim that a handful of hens produce less mess and less noise than the two large dogs allowed next door, permit free. And whereas dog droppings should be bagged and carefully disposed of, chicken droppings can be composted and returned to the soil. Your pet dog or cat won’t (or at least shouldn’t) eat your leftover salad, your beef scraps, or that winter squash you forgot to cook, but your chickens will be thrilled. They’re tiny composting machines that also lay eggs. And eat ticks.

Roosters are the one thing that backyard flock owners neglect to mention as they wax eloquent about their eggs and their girls. Very few municipalities allow backyard roosters, and for good reason. Roosters are noisy, and because their job is to protect their hens, they can be dangerous. They will peck the hand that feeds them. Industrial farms sort out roosters and kill them as they hatch. Because it’s very difficult to sex a newborn chick, some rooster chicks are bound to slip through and end up in that box of hen chicks you mail ordered (yes, chicks come through the mail) or bought at your local feed store. What is the backyard owner to do when she discovers that one of her cute Maran hens who was supposed to lay dark brown eggs is a guy, strictly into crowing and strutting? The backyard owners I spoke with said they were simply not capable of killing their chickens, even the unwanted, troublesome, illegal ones. Most towns prohibit poultry slaughter, and few owners have the skill to pull it off humanely.

I heard several interesting strategies. One had a friend with farm experience come to do the dispatching and then gave the rooster a decent burial. Another took the rooster on a long drive and released it to fend for itself. The rooster found his way home several days later. Yet another took the rooster to a nearby chicken-processing outfit and picked him up clean and wrapped in plastic two days later. That rooster stayed in the freezer for almost a year before he finally reached the dinner table in what was described to me as “a very sad meal.”

According to Jenny Brown, Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary director, their sanctuary receives more queries about taking roosters than any other animal. Hens, it seems, can be seen as useful pets, but roosters, the other half of the poultry population, are regarded as objects to be eradicated as efficiently as possible. “Anyone who buys mail order or feed store chicks is complicit in an industry that routinely kills almost all its baby roosters,” she warned. According to Brown, the only ethical way to acquire a flock is from your local farm animal sanctuary.

For some, chickens are mostly high-style, high-maintenance amusement with eggs. Martha Stewart’s Auracana, tucked lovingly under her arm, washed and blown dry for its TV debut, is the latest feathered fashion fad. Hen-cams, hen-blogs, chicken diapers, and even chic chicken suits are available for the poultry obsessed.

It’s unlikely that my friend’s neighbor who offered welcome eggs years ago ever considered dressing up her chickens unless it was for the dinner platter. Whatever the motives of the backyard hen keeper—healthy delicious eggs, the desire to micro farm, comic relief—the chickens themselves don’t seem to care much about what’s in vogue. They’re more interested in the timing of their next meal.