It’s been ages since we had chickens, and spring has me considering… is it time for a return? The truth is, I’m chicken. I don’t know if I’m quite ready to resume responsibility for more living beings, even though chicken lives are cheap. It’s daunting. On the day I was gifted our first brood of backyard chickens, I was told they would be docile after sundown, and easy to handle. It didn’t take long for me to test the theory. So, with an ease that belied my inexperience, I indeed pulled them down from the rafters, one by one, in those first weeks of being chased by dogs who were learning new boundaries. The chasing stopped pretty quickly, and the friendly dogs became the least of our concerns. With simple training they learned, after three merry kills, not to mess with mama’s chickens.
Pangs of empathy would grab me when I commanded each dog being trained to “drop it,” even those handful of times. I felt solidarity with what (I imagine) a dog feels in the thrill of the chase. I’d do it, in a heartbeat: I would chase my chickens till feathers rained down, and the taste of fresh blood in my mouth reminded me what I was, deep down. I would be a she-wolf, and my own chickens would not be safe from me. As it happened, the dogs were so gentle with their killing that several times they obeyed my command, only to release an unharmed, clucking banshee, careening up into the rafters, where she stayed until I pulled her down at dark.
I lost two hens, one cleanly and quickly enough to eat for supper. (This was a gentle learning curve, as I had received twelve chickens for free, and knew most of my mistakes were due to inexperience.) I hadn’t learned yet how to dress a chicken, in spite of reading several books, so I called my husband, who came home to teach me. I hadn’t wanted to kill her, but I wasn’t going to waste her. She was a meat chicken, after all. All that they say about the touch and smell of your own freshly killed food was true, for me. There was a sacred hush, the sickening gurgle of what might become nausea, if I’d let it. It seemed too indulgent, though, to get sick. It seemed more appropriate to continue with some decorum through the carnage–scalding the feathers off, pulling them out while trying not to damage skin, slicing the feet and head clean off with the sharpest knife I’d ever seen this man wield.
People who you know well will sneak up on you like that. You think they are tame, and then the thin veneer of civilization casually falls away, like a jacket in warmer weather. The part of you that wants to be vegan–and secretly hopes they are incapable of violence, on principle–is shattered. The part of themselves that always could survive emerges, denizen of the wilds, and suddenly friendly with the everyday barbarisms toward which we turn our peripheral vision. We do this, I realize, at our own peril, but out of the need to rest. It was somehow still shocking to find myself in the blood and feathers with this domesticated coffee snob, with whom I sometimes watch late nights of Cowboy Bebop, eating Ritz and Nutella like a couple of teenagers.
Somewhere, I knew, there were scores of naked chickens strung up, draining blood. They would make their way to kitchens and tables to be discussed as “tender,” “stringy,” or “too dry,” without regard to what was in their craws when they expired. We noticed this chicken had some undigested corn in her craw at the moment of her untimely death. Soon, she was almost a whole chicken from a grocery store, and I was on terra firma again. I helped clean up the feathers and the blood. If I am going to cry, it will be this moment, I thought, but instead felt gratitude. I took her inside, where she became an alchemy of golden broth and savory smells, bringing us all to peace around a table, any chaos and strife subsiding for a solemn (and then festive) moment.
On eating one’s own chicken, there is another level of awe for how they survive this world in sub-freezing temperatures, keeping mites at bay with dust baths, with prehistoric claws and beaks…and eyes that demonize them by being purely efficient, zero tolerance for anthropomorphism. Our flock provided endless hours of raw comedy in the form of strutting necks, ruffled-pride screams, and feathery “vents” sticking like so many fluffy butts in the air. They endeared themselves to us, despite the hassles they produced, and one feels utterly responsible for them, at the same time cursing “those dumb chickens” on the regular. I didn’t understand why chicken owners felt so compelled to complain about their birds’ intelligence, but it was universal: every chicken owner I knew loved them and complained about how stupid they are. And yet, in the dead of night, if one single hen should not come home to roost I slept lightly. I saw her nobly in my minds’ eye, huddled against the cold on a tree branch somewhere that I missed, an infrared magnet of heat, silhouetted for any fox or cat or coyote to find.
I once found an extra pair of feet roosting inside our chicken coop. I’d woken out of a dead sleep to a blood-curdling scream. Rushing outside in the summer night in just my underwear to investigate, I saw a black hen emerge from the coop like a bat out of Hades, escaping the door I’d forgotten to close. No other clues explained the noise. Shining the light into the coop only revealed the rows of bird feet on their roosts. There was one pair that seemed bigger, somehow, until an equally flustered, juvenile Great-horned owl flapped down from the rafters, yellow eyes wide and disoriented. Here, I had a conundrum: that owl was not welcome to my chickens. Yet, it was so irrevocably noble in its bewilderment that I could not wish it any harm. Thankfully, it found the door and stepped out, no birds harmed. I could not be angry at the owl. If I were an owl, I’d do it, too: free lunch.
The rescued black hen was restored to her flock, the door slammed shut. Yet, the owl persisted, walking around in the fenced area around the coop. A weed that had practically become a shade tree over the summer now overhung most of the enclosure, and the predator tried in vain to fly out, and kept running into the tree. We decided to give it space, reasoning that the rooster’s deafening crow inside the metal walls of the coop, and the bright LED of the headlamp, might be too disorienting for it. I half dreaded, half hoped, we’d find it still there in the morning, and call the Raptor Rehabilitation of Kentucky, who had thoroughly impressed us with a live bird demonstration earlier that fall. It was not to be, as the bird had made its way back into the wilds that birthed it. There is a part of me out there somewhere, with that owl, and another part here that keeps chickens. They rarely meet under the moonlight on the same night, in just my underwear. I can just imagine what it was like to be a hen on that roost, turning a sleepy head to one side, noticing the shape of the feet next to mine, smelling the dead-flesh raptor breath, and alarmed into a cacophony of black feathers. Just one look at those eyes would do it. I’d bolt, too, straight from the shell of home, into the crawling night. But there are times–when I am both dreaming and awake–when I am a hen, beholding an owl which has snuck into my safety, and somehow I manage to return the stare.