Pecking Order (2 page)

Bending down, the visitor looked along the tier and saw every deflector was similarly covered. He straightened up and, by standing on tiptoe, was just able to see into the bottom of the uppermost row of cages. Three birds were standing, one was lying motionless at the back. The visitor said, ‘I think there’s a dead bird in this cage.’

‘Probably,’ said the owner. He kicked a foot at the lowest tier of cages, causing the animals inside to scrabble back. Then he found a foot hold and raised himself up to see inside. ‘Brittle bones,’ he declared. ‘Some birds develop the disease. Something to do with not being able to move. Their legs become paralysed, the other birds push it to the back and it starves to death.’

‘And who….’ said the visitor, pointing vaguely to the cage.

‘Rubble clears them out, when he remembers. Let’s carry on, I can feel my chest seizing up.’

They walked down the aisle, the visitor privately astounded by the merciless system. As they passed one cage the farm owner stopped and pointed to the birds inside. Each one had a short, blunted beak. ‘Rubble’s trimmed them. Must have been pecking each other.’

‘How does he do that?’ asked the visitor.

‘A pair of what looks like gardening secateurs. He heats the blade up and nips off the last third.’

‘And that’s legal?’

‘MAFF officially approved it in 1997. Although we normally only bother with it when they start trying to eat each other.’

‘Cannibalism?’ The visitor was half-laughing at what he thought was a joke.

‘Yeah. Because they get all the food they need, it rarely happens when they’re in cages. But down there,’ he pointed to his feet, ‘it’s different.’

The visitor was confused. ‘Down where?’

‘The slurry pit. You climbed upstairs to get in here remember?’

The visitor had stopped and was trying to look between the closely packed cages into the darkness below.

‘You’ll not see much from here. Come on, I’ll show you,’ said the owner, plucking a couple of eggs from the nearest trough. Soon they reached a cross roads where a walkway cut across their aisle. At the point where the tiers of cages ended a shoulder width gap allowed them to see into the pit.

‘It’s cleared out once a year and sold off for garden fertiliser. This one’s almost full. When it’s empty the drop is about twenty feet. Now it’s what? About six.’

The visitor looked down at the uneven floor of droppings and feathers below.

‘Chickens,’ he searched for the right word ‘…exist down there?’

‘Sometimes a cage door pops open. Quite a few scratch out a living in the pit. Here, watch.’

He cracked one of the eggs on the edge of a cage and threw it into the part of the pit best illuminated by the weak light above. A group of creatures raced out of the shadows and fell upon the egg. At first the visitor couldn’t understand their strange appearance: all he could see was bulky brown bodies interspersed with spikes. They looked like hedgehogs. But these animals moved quickly on two legs and now he could see the outstretched necks and rapidly dipping heads. He realised their bodies were encased by manure, just the ends of ruined feathers poking out.

The farm owner laughed grimly, ‘Hedgekens we call them. Half hedgehog, half chicken.’ He lobbed the other egg in and their attention immediately turned to it. Like vultures at a kill, more were emerging from all around. They formed a heaving throng around the remains, desperate for food.

‘And they’ll eat each other?’

‘Oh yeah. When one goes down, they’ll try it. Right that’s enough of this air for me, you can ask me anything else outside.’ They walked back to the chipboard doors and out into the foyer. The farm owner lowered the handkerchief and brushed at the shoulders of his jacket with it. ‘The dust in there. It makes my chest go all tight in no time.’

‘Where does it all come from?’

‘The bloody birds. Bits of their feathers. They preen and peck and that stuff floats off into the air.’

‘So what else happens in there?’ asked the visitor.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Apart from feeding what else…’ in actually asking the question the visitor was suddenly aware of how stupid it sounded, ‘…what else happens?’

The owner was frowning. ‘Nothing. They stand there and lay eggs.’

The visitor was beginning to comprehend how barren their environment was. It astonished him that, despite everything, nature still worked to make the animals produce an egg with such regularity.

‘The birds in there,’ said the visitor, nodding at the chipboard doors. ‘They looked a lot less healthy than the ones being loaded into the other shed.’

‘The ones outside are straight from the breeders. They’re about seventeen weeks old and due to start laying any day. So far they’ve been raised in big open-floored sheds. They’ve got about a year before their productivity starts to drop away. The ones in this shed have been going for about six months. We’ll cull them in another six and get a fresh load in. Dead ones go for processing into pies, pet food, that sort of stuff.’

‘What an incredible system. The efficiency levels are staggering. And tell me, does Rubble cull the entire shed?’

‘He would if he could,’ said the farm owner smiling. ‘No, we try to change to contents of a shed over in two days. First day we cull the old birds.’ The farm owner twisted his cupped hands in opposite directions to imitate snapping a neck. ‘Rubble and a few people from the village do it. They load the carcasses onto lorries and next day the fresh birds arrive. Each lorry carries a few thousand chickens; each shed holds twenty-thousand birds. They’ll be loading up that other shed all day.’

The two men walked back down the steps and along the side of the shed. The lorry had now gone to fetch another load of birds and the space between the buildings was deserted. From the outside, the windowless exteriors could allow them to pass for any number of modern industrial buildings found throughout the country. Only a light build-up of feathers and dust on the protective grills of the extractor fans mounted on the structure’s two-hundred-metre-long walls gave any clue as to the unnatural purposes the building was being used for.

When they reached the spot where the lorry had been parked, the visitor’s step slowed. Looking down at the congealed blood and scattering of feathers in the sand, he said quietly, ‘I didn’t know that chickens could scream.’

The farmer looked nonplussed. ‘Any animal can scream if you hurt it enough. You should hear the noise a hare makes when the hounds get hold of it. Sounds just like a little girl. Even frogs can scream. Did you never, you know, play around with frogs when you were a lad?’

‘No I didn’t,’ the man said thoughtfully, still staring at the ground.

The farmer looked his visitor up and down, taking in the smooth suit and soft hands. ‘Come on then, let’s get a coffee,’ he said, leading the way.

They reached the office building at the end of the two sheds and the visitor looked up at the bulk bins towering above him. They had the appearance of two upside down bottles, permanently held in position by their metal frames. As if feeding a monstrous infant whose appetite could never be sated. The visitor looked back down and said, ‘Funny. A farm with no farm house.’

‘Eh?’ replied the owner. ‘No – but it’s not your average farm is it? It’s really a factory – the chickens are just part of my machinery. Let’s go up to my office and we can talk business.’

They went through another door, up some carpeted stairs and entered a large room. Immediately to their side was a group of humming monitors. The owner casually waved a hand at them as he walked past. ‘Ambient temperature, air ventilation, water allocation, food rations… I can control everything from up here. In fact, I prefer to keep out of the sheds as much as possible.’

Shelves ran along one wall, with boxes untidily strewn on the ground before them. The visitor paused to read the words on a couple of egg cartons. ‘Country fresh?’

‘Country fresh, fresh laid, farm fresh, country laid, you can call them anything you bloody want to so long as it doesn’t involve the words “barn” or “free range”. Those are just two samples you’re holding there, but we supply all the major supermarkets. They deliver the boxes and cartons ready-branded and we fill them up. Simple.’

At the end of the room was a wide desk with a computer and a rack of files. Screwed into the exposed breeze blocks of the wall behind was an enormous whiteboard with a graph depicting bird numbers and egg production by month.

Next to it was a poster with beautiful photographs of various breeds of chicken. The top of the poster read, ‘
British Breeds of Poultry. Produced by Fancy Fowl Publications Limited. In association with Fred Hams.
’

Eric examined the different images: a Speckled Sussex Female stood with its head up, black plumage peppered with dots of white; a Gold Penciled Hamburgh Male, with long inky feathers stretching along to a magnificent tale that was almost peacock-like in proportions; a marmalade-coloured Buff Orpington Female, shaped like a tea cosy with a head barely discernable from the body; a Duckwing OEG Female, its sinewy white body on two muscular, widely spaced legs. The man remembered the chicken darting agilely around the yard in a
Rocky
film, Sylvester Stallone unable to get any where near it. All the birds had proud, upright postures, feathers almost glowing with vitality. The visitor thought of the bedraggled, harried, miserable specimens trapped in the sheds and said, ‘Do you have different breeds of chicken in the other shed then?’

The owner glanced round to see what he was looking at. ‘Oh that,’ he said dismissively. ‘The wife got me that a couple of years ago. Said my office was too clinical. She doesn’t understand the realities of the industry, bless her. No, we only use Rhode Island Reds. Most productive chicken there is. It’ll lay an egg a day, week in, week out. In fact it’d probably use its dying breath to squeeze one more out. How do you take your coffee?’

‘Just black,’ his guest replied.

The owner passed him a cup and a small teacake wrapped in silver foil. The farmer quickly tore his one open, shoved the entire thing in his mouth and then threw the wrapping on the floor. Awkwardly, the visitor unwrapped his and took a small bite. Unsure what to do with the foil, he popped it in his pocket.

The farm owner had moved towards the window overlooking the canteen below. ‘I prefer to take my breaks up here at this time of year. It allows me to get in some quality bird-watching of my own.’ He laughed his abrasive laugh and pointed down at the tables. ‘Don’t worry: it’s mirrored on their side. They can’t see us.’

In fact they were visible to those below, but only as two ghostly shadows.

‘We get some right little crackers coming in here for their summer jobs I can tell you. Look at the jellies on that one. Hey,’ he pretended to address the girl directly below him, ‘do you like chicken love? Because you can suck my cock – that’s fowl!’

He barked up into the visitors space, who raised a finger to wipe a fleck of spittle he’d felt land on his eyebrow.

‘Ah, it tickles me that joke. I get quite a few summer workers, students mostly. A lot of girls to work in the egg packing room directly below us. Less clumsy than cack-handed lads.’

‘How many full-time staff members do you have then?’

‘Just Rubble – the system means that, more or less, we just leave the birds to it. Apart from him I’ve got a few part-timers, who come in to collect the eggs. Lets see…’ he raised a hand and his outstretched finger tapped the air. ‘One, two, three, four on that side table. Four in the packing room. Another three not on today. So all together a nice round dozen including Rubble.’

They looked down at the top of Rubble’s head. His hair was roughly shorn to a length that allowed you to see the bony angles of his skull. It seemed to sink directly onto a pair of sharply sloping shoulders with no neck in between. The other staff appeared to have coagulated away from him and into their own little groups: part time employees, a few female students together, a mix of young lads playing cards and watched by a girl who kept tossing back her hair. But Rubble sat alone, reading some kind of comic.

‘He seems an interesting character,’ commented the visitor.

‘Rubble? That’s one way of describing him.’

‘Isn’t he a bit old to be reading comics?’

‘Oh, he doesn’t read them. Just flicks through looking at the pictures.’

‘You mean he’s illiterate?’

‘More or less. He tried to get into the army a few times. It was his dream. But the application forms defeated him. He just about understands his pay slip, but I have to give him cash since he doesn’t even have a bank account.’

‘Unusual for this day and age.’

‘You’re telling me. I think he has a saving accounts in the post office in the village. He goes every Tuesday morning just before nine o’clock to get his precious comics.’

‘And you say that caravan is his permanent home?’

‘That’s right. No radio, no TV – apart from the security monitor. Hasn’t a clue about life beyond the farm. Sometimes the students ask him stuff – who’s Prime Minister? Which team won the Premiership? He hasn’t a clue.’

The visitor shook his head, ‘There’s nowt as queer as folk.’

‘Aye,’ agreed the farm owner. ‘So you think your management trainees could learn some things from how I run this place?’

The suited man turned to address the farm owner. ‘Absolutely – the efficiency levels you’ve achieved here could teach the industrial chiefs of tomorrow some valuable lessons in people management. As you know, the business world is a competitive place. Every employee has to pull his weight. And I believe the way you’ve married technology with production here is most interesting. It certainly provides some fascinating pointers.’

The farm owner had been nodding enthusiastically, but not really taking the speech in. ‘So what about numbers?’

‘Well the amount of seminars I run varies. But on average I’d look to bring around sixteen management trainees here, say four times a year.’

‘And how much do other companies charge for this sort of thing?’

‘Well I pay the Bourneville factory in Birmingham £20 per person and McVities in Manchester £18, to name just two.’