You might remember that short period during the pandemic when eggs were unavailable. I was very annoyed that the one period when I had time to cook breakfast in the mornings there was no breakfast to cook. However, I was finally able to persuade my wife that we needed to keep chickens. Purely for logistical purposes, you understand: we had to guarantee our supply chain. During the pandemic, otherwise sensible people bought into that kind of logic.
My wife had never been keen on the idea previously. Like most Jewish women, she thinks of the natural world as that greenish blur between the taxi and the front door; and, while I’d managed to persuade her to move to a cottage in the country with roses round the door, keeping livestock was a Step Too Far. This was not what her forebears left the shtetl for.
I am less concerned about the chickens’ inner lives – they are immensely stupid creatures
My family were different. My parents met on a chicken farm – it was in the 1960s, when farmers were learning new Scientific Methods for breeding them: fertilised eggs from American hens were smuggled into the country wrapped in silver paper, so they could be passed off as Easter gifts to customs officers, before being hatched and interbred with English breeds; chicken sexers were flown in from Japan (which then led the world in chicken-sexing) to weed out chicks with dicks and improve efficiency. (The hens justify the means.) And young people from very different backgrounds were drafted in to do the paperwork.
My mother kept a diary at the time, and though I have tried very hard to find some inkling of Romance in her careful reporting of bloodspots and albumen viscosity – and failed – the idea of keeping chickens has always had a sentimental appeal that goes beyond ‘a machine for converting kitchen scraps into protein’. That is a line from one of my father’s books on poultry keeping for pleasure and profit; even that didn’t kill the allure.
We started with four hens, and, as with all new chicken-keepers, our main priority was to think up clever names. My father’s advice never to name an animal you intend to eat (my parents kept a pig called Bill who eventually died of old age) was dismissed in the excitement. Punning names are traditional, often on a theme – a friend of mine owns Princess Layer, Hen Solo and Chewbawka – and my wife was keen on David Hen-Gurion and Henjamin Netanyahu until I pointed out that the chickens were females. I chose Hildeggard for the Alpha hen; I had planned on naming the others after Margery Kempe or Julian of Norwich (‘All will be shell and all manner of things will be shell’) but I was told I’d had my turn and the others were named after the women in our family.
Top tip: never name chickens after the women in your family. When they get ill – which they will – your sister will become distraught by the offhand manner in which you discuss Catherine’s imminent death, and whether it would be a kindness to wring her neck.
Before too long, my wife had fallen in love with them. She binned my father’s books and went online to find online forums giving advice more to her taste, such as when it was advisable to take them to the vet, and the importance of enriching their living space. (‘I bought this swing for my girls. They haven’t used it yet, but I’m sure they’ll love it when they do!’) The coop that I had put together was rejected for a plastic Eglu – sleek design, insulated for all seasons, in a range of colours, with a clip at the back of the nest box to hold a webcam – and an extensive run; which, of course, had to be lined with oakwood chips, enriching and hygienic. The chickens trampled them into the earth in a week.
I am less concerned about the chickens’ inner lives – they are immensely stupid creatures, and I have seen them baffled by how to get into the coop because they are standing a few inches to the right of the door, so I am not sure how much enrichment they really need – beyond working out the pecking order. At first I assumed it was the first bird to the feed who ruled the roost; in fact, it’s the second. The first one starts eating, and if she is not threatened within a minute the Alpha chicken pushes her out of the way and starts eating. (In much the same way, when Kuwaiti women were seen walking ahead of their husbands for the first time, it turned out not to be the advance in gender dynamics everyone supposed but the result of landmines.) My wife initially wanted me to intervene on behalf of the untermensch-hen, but realised it was not in her interests: the chicken at the top of the pecking order always dies from overindulgence, and her place is taken by the next in line – who succumbs in turn to the burdens of office. There is a reason farmers all vote Tory.
Aside from the anthropological insights, their presence is incredibly soothing – I’m writing this in the garden; Victoria, Elizabeth and Trudy are patiently weeding the flower beds, having already accounted for any annuals I was foolish enough to bother planting – and when I stand up from this table I know they will run to cluck round me like aunts at a family party when you’re holding a baby.
And the eggs – they’re fantastic. There is nothing like fetching an egg, still warm, and boiling it for your breakfast; they taste incredible. And since the supply chains are secure, I can be as free with them as a Renaissance prince: giving half a dozen to an Amazon delivery driver to make up for the chickens launching themselves at him; if I make meringues, I casually discard the yolks rather than pretend I might one day whip up mayonnaise and leave them in the fridge until they harden like ping pong balls.
And, in case there was any doubt, there is absolutely no question of eating the chickens when their productive life was over. (My wife was almost banned from one of the Facebook groups for asking whether anyone had done so, and only readmitted when she explained to the moderators that she was seeking clarification that it was unthinkable.)
Oddly enough, I think my father would have agreed. I took my parents to see the film Chicken Run – I thought it might have romantic connotations for them – and my father walked out in disgust. The whole premise of the film, he felt, was flawed: laying hens and broiler hens were completely different, and Mrs Tweedy’s plan to make pies out of them (when they wouldn’t even have been good for soup) was an insult to good husbandry. The scenes where the chickens made an aeroplane which they flew out of the farm, however, were perfectly reasonable. They need some enrichment, I suppose.
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