Veganwolf.com
The chi of chickens
Common Ground Magazine (Vancouver) January
2009
http://www.commonground.ca/iss/210/cg210_guy.shtml
The
chi of chickens
EARTHFUTURE by Guy Dauncey
We keep chickens - five
mature females and two youngsters - who we
think are roosters. That spells
possible trouble ahead, since the
roosters may fight once they mature, but
right now they are total
buddies, scouting the garden for bugs, seeds, worms
and anything else
that pleases a young chicken's palate.
These are
some happy chickens. They have a custom-made home I made
using a plan from a
1948 British gardening book, with cozy roosting
boxes and a shaded space
where they can shelter from the rain. For
much of the year, however, we open
the gate, giving them an acre of
rural land to wander.
I never
thought much about chickens before we had them. To see them
in their free
state has been a revelation. Every day they explore the
garden, clean up
fallen birdseed and scratch for bugs everywhere. In
summer they jump for the
lowest-hanging raspberries. These are wild
birds that humans have
domesticated; they are the closest living
relatives of the
dinosaur.
After a morning of hunting and gathering, they look for a quiet
place
with whatever sun they can find to lie in; our dog and cats don't
bother them.
Their chi - their life energy - is healthy and alive. It
is so
satisfying to see how they enjoy their daily explorations, how they
bond together and how they play their little pecking order games,
just
as humans do. How they rush to hide a tasty morsel of food,
trying their
best to eat it in private. How they clearly enjoy their
lives. And how they
chatter - chickens make up to 200 different
sounds, using 30 different
phrases.
When dusk falls, they slowly make their way back to the
henhouse;
there's always one who lingers for the last bug. One of our young
cockerels has decided he prefers to roost in a tree so he makes an
effortful jump-fly into the branches of the maple that overhangs the
coop.
We're vegetarian so we keep our chickens for their eggs, which
they
announce with a squawk. When they stop laying, we keep them till they
die - or are killed, alas. We live in the country where mink, eagles,
hawks and raccoons all fancy a tasty chicken, if they can catch
one.
Contrast this with the life of a captive chicken, forced, if it's
laying, to spend its whole short life in a cage the size of a piece
of
paper, stacked on high with 30,000 other birds. If it's a broiler,
raised
for its meat, it is crammed in a space so crowded that each
fellow chicken
has an average of just 550 square centimetres (9
inches by 9 inches) in
which to live out its entire life. Being
crammed so tightly, they peck each
other. To prohibit them, the ends
of their upper and lower beaks are
forcibly cut off, using an
electrically heated blade.
In Britain,
during the run of celebrity chef Hugh
Fearnley-Whittingstall's TV series,
Hugh's Chicken Run, residents of
the Devon town of Axminster were invited to
see free-range and
intensive systems alongside each other in a shed. Many
people left in
tears and half of the four million viewers who saw the shows
said
they would only buy free-range chicken.
This is our doing,
driven by profit and the desire for a cheap
chicken wing, regardless of the
pain it causes. We cause the birds'
suffering and we can end it, if we
choose.
Sweden banned battery cages in 1995, Austria in 2004, Germany in
2007
and all of Europe will do so in 2012. In California, voters in
November's elections approved a motion to end the use of battery
cages,
as well as cramming veal calves and breeding pigs into cages
and crates so
small that the animals cannot turn around or fully
extend their
limbs.
What about Canada? Which of our politicians will speak up for the
chickens? They are awaiting our choice to set them free.
- Guy
Dauncey is president of the BC Sustainable Energy Association,
editor of
EcoNews and author of Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to
Global Climate Change
and other titles. He lives in Victoria.
http://www.earthfuture.com
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