
I love discovering a just-laid egg, still dewy and warm from the hen’s body. My egg collecting rarely coincides with a hen’s egg laying, but in those very occasional moments, I stop to cup the pulsing egg, feeling awe at the mystical power cradled in my palm. That egg could become a peeping chick, a rich nutritional package for the circling crows, or an omelet in my kitchen.
Humans have long depended on the productivity of chickens, and the English language speaks to our shared past. The proverbs “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch” and “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” are reminders to be prudent and cautious. A dependable person is a “good egg,” and we set aside a “nest egg” for the future.
Centuries-long cohabitation brought about a deep understanding of chicken ways by humans. We knew the protective powers and defensive fury of a hen so intimately that a person could behave as a “mother hen.” A setting hen makes use of her assets by plucking her own feathers to cushion her nest, a practice that we note in others who “feather their nests” by leveraging their positions for personal gain. We recognize the relationality of a flock as they establish a “pecking order,” and speak of “ruling the roost.” The companionability of chickens makes sense of the phrase “birds of a feather flock together.” We might get out of a situation by “flying the coop,” feel “madder than a wet hen,” or resign ourselves to “ruffling a few feathers.” Most significantly, chickens represent abundance, a “chicken in every pot,” a life of satiation and contentment.

Arguments about the original domestication of chickens are futile – chickens have been with people in nearly all times and nearly all places. We have a lengthy and fruitful partnership. Humans paid homage to the remarkable biological processes of chickens in song, stories, and religious rites; ancient texts and medieval manuscripts attest to the affection and esteem that chickens received from humans.
In contrast, current feelings about the chicken are not nearly so laudatory. The stink of sewage lagoons, the reek and dust of thousands of caged birds, the mass slaughter and dismemberment of ranks of fowl – these create both a sensory and ethical aversion, the desire to look away from the reality of contemporary chicken existence.
In confinement, chickens become unpleasant. Without freedom of movement, without the pleasure of dust baths and the constant drama of relational maneuvering, they, like humans, “behave badly to each other, bedeviling and pecking each other in boredom and frustration; they become neurotic and susceptible to various diseases of the body and the spirit.”[1] Instead of responding with appropriate horror at the conditions of our longtime companions, we instead belittle their social behaviors, and minimize their ability to feel pleasure and pain, even as we consume them in chicken nuggets, chicken strips, and chicken wings.

Far from being admired for their ability to “scratch out a living” or hide a clutch of eggs, chickens are now often portrayed as “dumb clucks” and “bird brained.” The human-chicken relationship has been radically altered, and in a remarkably short period of time. This sad diminishment began just one hundred years ago with the widespread use of confinement poultry operations in the United States. By the 1920s, the farmstead chicken had ceased to be the statistical norm, with batteries of caged chickens producing thousands and thousands of eggs to be distributed to urban centers. As historians Page Smith and Charles Daniel explain, the chicken was transformed from “an object of veneration, of pleasure, of curiosity or delight” into “a product not much different from…a bar of soap.”[2]
Obviously, this is a tragedy for chickens. For so many, every moment of their existence is a hellscape of confinement, a desecration of a creature adaptable and ingenious enough to create a mutually beneficial partnership with humans and spread to every habitable region of the globe. Chickens are now bred for those characteristics most beneficial for confinement: docility, lack of intelligence, rapid and unhealthy weight gain, and the ability to produce eggs continuously, even to the physiological detriment of the hen. The chicken of today is a far cry from those populating the farmsteads of yesteryear, with less diversity, less resistance, and less flavor.

This is a tragedy for humans also. Eggs and meat from confined birds are but poor imitations of their former free-range selves. The bird that we once depended on for sustenance has now become a vector of disease and infection in confinement. We pay a high price for our nuggets and wings, as we participate in the wholesale devastation of a vibrant species; we enact daily cruelties on the creature that was our partner in the work of life.
Most significantly, we miss out on the mystery of the chicken-human partnership. Instead of awe and wonder at the ways of chickens, we feel disgust at their reek and waste. Instead of respect and appreciation for a special chicken dinner, we feel nothing for the chicken strips plopped upon our plates. We miss the humor and delight of chickens, their distinctive vocalizations, their continual background chatter.

Amidst the globe’s overwhelming issues, chickens are a relatively easy fix, even for those of modest means. Many urban areas once again allow homeowners to keep small flocks in their backyards. Can we welcome the return of the chicken, not as pets but as cohabiting producers? Can we limit ourselves to the products of those happy hens, and refrain from buying caged eggs or meat from birds raised in confinement? Can we support the work of local farmers who raise free-range birds?
Let’s fill our language once again with chicken talk. How lovely it would be to contemplate the humor of hens and the ridiculousness of roosters, to savor a freshly laid egg, and to marvel at a hidden nest.
[1] Page Smith and Charles Daniel, The Chicken Book, University of Georgia Press, 2000, p. 272.
[2] Ibid.
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