Trauma Farm (6 page)

TO KEEP OUR CHICKENS
healthy, with plentiful access to range and safety, we run two chicken sheds, far enough apart that the birds can pasture without contact, thus curtailing disease transmission potential. This might be why we’ve never had an outbreak of anything dangerous. Traditions passed from farmer to farmer also impart healthy, nontoxic methods for controlling pests. For instance, mineral oil on the coop’s perches will reduce or eliminate mite populations because the bugs transfer between birds at night and the oil smothers them. Lately we’ve been summer-raising meat birds—letting the fields fallow in the winter, which kills any pests or diseases that might have arrived with the commercial chicks of spring—but I miss my layers and the exotic pleasure of sliding a hand under a hen and pulling out a warm egg while she clucks morosely.

Since before recorded history people have lived with birds. Not only do birds entertain and comfort, but they feed us. Brillat-Savarin, the nineteenth-century French epicure, noted: “Poultry is for cuisine what canvas is for painters.” However, in North America, after the Second World War, the taste of both the chicken and the egg changed when agribusiness discovered how to keep several laying hens in a single cage and then stack the cages in “batteries.” Within a short while the majority of hens (the cocks were all destroyed at birth) were confined in cages. They never saw the sun, living out their lives in cages as small as twenty by eighteen by sixteen inches, five birds to a cage, in block-long buildings holding up to ninety thousand chickens fed on processed high-protein pellets, the cage floors slanted to allow the eggs to roll out onto conveyor belts. Their beaks were melted off so they wouldn’t cannibalize each other (cannibalism always appears among tortured animals), their feet growing into the cage wire as they choked on the dust, their bodies spattered with manure, forced to undergo artificial moulting using regulated illumination cycles and starvation; and then, before they were two years old, every chicken was recycled for “chicken products.” Battery chicken production escalated, along with the production of confined broilers in the 1950s, following the discovery of nicarbazin—the breakthrough drug that diminished diseases common to overcrowding. Undoubtedly, Brillat-Savarin is rolling over in his grave.
Bon appétit!

By the eighties the manufacture of poultry feed (like that of most livestock feed) began to be calculated in computerized control rooms—where specialists studied shipping tables of carloads of raw materials, calculating against costs the necessary proteins, enzymes, fillers (and so on) that made up a standard pellet mixed from different grains (soy and wheat and corn and barley), alfalfa, canola oil, enzymes, minerals, rendered animal (cattle, pigs, chickens) by-products, fish (sometimes from fishing beds polluted by heavy metals—mercury, cadmium, lead), and high-protein excrement recycled back into the feed.

Consider putting five teenagers in a room not big enough for one of them to fully stretch; then pull out their teeth, feed them powdered meal made from dead animals and excrement and pesticide-laced grains on conveyor belts, and put them under constantly increasing light levels. Now imagine what you’d find when you opened the door. The world of the battery hen.

Animal rights groups and the general public gradually became aware of these conditions, and the resulting outcry has led to some changes being instituted in this hideously cruel industry.

Continuous antibiotics are no longer permitted in Canada, but low-level antibiotics remain common in the United States, and the chickens are still sprayed in broiler sheds by huge rollers blasting out pesticides and antioxidants and arsenical compounds that enhance growth and egg production. These practices and their variations are slowly being banned in North America and Europe (Britain banned forced moulting in 1987) even as they are being revived in Third World countries.

Also, because of the uproar over these inhumane conditions, nervous processed-food manufacturers like McDonald’s and kfc have created minimum standards (for instance, the cages are bigger) that are slightly less horrific. The mistreatment of livestock has fed a growing rebellion, and many countries are banning animal and fish byproducts altogether in feed. A new, gentler regime is arising. This can be affirmed by the confusing variety of eggs we encounter in the more conscientious big-box grocery stores. However, despite the labels depicting radiant little farms or cheerful chickens, it’s still a grim world for poultry.

Since 1955 the average flock size in a laying house has risen to eighty thousand birds. But between 1986 and 2002 the number of major American egg producers declined from 2,500 to 700. Globalization and corporate consolidations led to the construction of ten “farms” that each raise more than 5 million hens. Another sixty-one producers keep more than 1 million hens each. These are U.S. Department of Agriculture numbers from 2002. This is the Goliath that the small farm with its little flocks of fifty or one hundred or two hundred clucking hens in the yard is competing against, yet almost everywhere the small farms can’t keep up with the demand for real eggs from humanely raised chickens. Sometimes, when I’m trapped on a reading tour, and I gaze at those pathetic runny, pallid, thin-shelled eggs served in a dismal franchised restaurant, I can only think we’ve broken the primordial egg in order to make an evil omelette.

WE RESCUED OUR FIRST
batch of chickens, red rocks, from a small commercial layer facility. We had only just moved to Trauma Farm. I had grown up as a child among farmers, and my father had gifted me with much knowledge about animals without my even knowing it. To catch the chickens I brought along our resident flock of nineteen-year-old skateboarders and anarchists.

Me and three of the boys arrived at this last local, small-scale egg factory in the evening, when the birds were settled down, and I set the boys loose in the semi-dark shed. The first question was from Joaquin: “How do you catch a chicken?” This caught me off guard because I’d assumed they’d know, taught by their father, as I was. But it’s a different world for their generation. Describing how to hold a chicken is more a matter of showing than of explaining. There were soon a few feathers flying and Charlie Chaplin routines, but we safely rounded up thirty chickens that escaped the soup pot to be housed in our old-fashioned coop.

Because commercial birds are given an enriched diet under intense light to keep them laying, they burn out fast, but they can be reclaimed. I bought them for a dollar apiece. These were so-called free-range chickens, which meant they still had beaks and were kept in a shed, not a cage. They are usually slaughtered in their second year, yet a chicken can easily live a decade, even if it’s a little grungy by then and won’t lay much. We moved them to our coop, where they received only natural light, and weaned them onto grain. Battery hens, like children raised on fast food, will spurn real grain at first, but gradually they return to their natural appetites and learn how to scratch as well. After they went through their moult they started laying again.

That first night, about three in the morning, I was suddenly awoken by an elbow in the ribs. “What’s wrong?” I asked. Even the frogs had grown creepily silent.

“Listen!” Sharon said. “Our rooster is crowing.” She was born in Thunder Bay and had never lived on land larger than a city lot. She was thrilled.

I groaned and turned over. “You’ll get used to it.”

“I love the sound, but why is it crowing in the dark?”

“Something disturbed him. He’s protecting the hens. He’ll soon go back to sleep, and that’s what I want to do.”

We named the rooster Charlie, after a rooster my father’s family used to keep. It slept in their basement rafters. The original Charlie was so mean the postman refused to come into the yard. Our version of Charlie was a big, white, lovable goof. He’d strut around the yard pompously, guiding the hens to bug nests with much clucking, guarding against dog and raccoon scares; and after the first eagle left a big pile of hen feathers on the grass, topped by a gory-looking gizzard, he sent the hens fleeing every time a plane flew overhead.

There was also a feisty hen who decided she liked our house better than the coop. She took to sneaking into the mud room and laying eggs in my toolbox. Sometimes she’d sleep there if we didn’t catch her. Despite our reaction, she was graced with a streak of stubbornness and kept coming back, so we christened her Gertrude because she reminded us of a Scandinavian housekeeper with her own mindset. After we put a door on the mud room she’d often sleep in the trees, which corrupted a growing number of hens, and I would have to go out every night near dark and shake the chickens (with a great deal of squawking) out of the cedars and send them scurrying into the coop.

This soon earned me the nightly query, “Have you shaken the chickens?”

IT'S RELAXING TO WATCH
chickens. I can sit with them for hours, observing the dynamics of their behaviour. They live in a more restricted social world than ours. Any chicken that moves beyond its station will soon be attacked, and often gang-attacked—including the rooster on rare occasions, despite his guard-duty strutting.

City children are often afraid of chickens at first, but within a few days at the farm they are striding out there and grabbing the hens by the neck to raise them up and look for eggs, until I tell them to be nice to the birds or the hens won’t give any eggs. Then they settle into a good relationship. I’ve also found that most children accept death more easily than adults. They will suddenly look up and see a dead rooster hanging from a winter tree and say: “Why is that rooster hanging in the tree?” After I gently explain that it’s for dinner, they will usually say, “Oh,” and go about exploring the hens for the real treat—the egg. They know a gift when they see it.

We hired a young university student, working her way across the country, to help in the garden, but when she learned I was going to be slaughtering chickens she begged to assist me. This seemed a little twisted at first. Although I slaughter animals, I’ve never enjoyed slaughtering, unlike some sadistic farmers I’ve met. She explained that she loved eating meat, and that, like me, she believed it was two-faced to eat meat without having at least once participated in the slaying of a living creature. So I said okay, curious about how this lovely, city-raised, idealistic student would deal with the passion play of death.

Over the years I’ve developed a simple system with minimal stress for both me and the chickens when I am slaughtering. It’s more complex and much sadder now that I’m forced by regulations to drive them to the slaughterhouse an island away.

I gather the chicken up, holding it until it’s calm, loop the baling twine around the legs, and hook the twine over a nail in the rafters of the woodshed. Then in a swift move I slide the killing blade into its brain through its beak and let the chicken drop and hang, killing it instantly.

Few people witness real, violent deaths today. Our knowledge of death is mostly a product of Hollywood films, where the standard victim clutches the heart, or the wound, and keels grandly over, dead. Those deaths are one in a thousand. When almost all creatures die they release their natural electricity, especially upon bleeding out. The bird is already dead, but around ninety seconds after its death it will convulse and shake wildly. As soon as I kill the brain I cut the throat or sometimes cut the head right off. When the electric death throes begin, the convulsing headless chicken will usually just shake and go still, but the occasional chicken will flip so hard that it will leap right out of the baling twine and run around, somersaulting and shivering in the ecstatic dance of the death of the nervous system.

The first chicken I killed with my helper watching did exactly that. I was so used to the death convulsions I didn’t think anything about it; then, to my surprise, the girl began performing the same dance. She suddenly started screaming and strutting a weird, high-stepping ballet in front of the convulsing chicken. It was completely physical, unthought, visceral, a kind of communion with death and a simultaneous rejection. The guttural noises coming out of her matched her spastic ballet, which echoed the chicken death.