As I write this, I am watching one of our chickens get ready to die and like most deaths it is a long process; awkward, ugly and lacking in dignity. This chicken, named Boss for her henchwoman-like qualities, has been, for most of our time together, just another face in the flock.
We knew her briefly, and named her causally for her second rank status in the pecking order. When she became ill, as with all of our other chickens, we get to know them a little better, we start to really see them only when they are preparing to leave.
I never intended to advocate for chickens, to guard them so furiously nor to love them so completely.
We adopted ten chickens that had been rescued from a battery hen facility nearly two years ago. I thought I knew chickens from the robust Rhode Island Reds my family kept, but I had never seen anything, any living thing, so broken in all my life.
Maybe I had been lucky or maybe I had just lived with my eyes firmly closed.
It was the one smallish red chicken who jammed herself in the corner, like a dejected child that has been punished so many times that he or she now feels like they belong in the corner, that first moved me. The way she hunched over, trembled when we got too close and kept her eyes jammed shut. Or maybe it was also the blue bruising sharking up her side and across her wings, or her lack of feathers that made her look like a battered, walking package of chicken meat in the supermarket.
At that moment, their vulnerability was so great that it would have been monstrous to turn away.
We didn’t interfere much with the chickens in their first week with us, we left them alone in a sunny coop, feed them quality food and gave them time to adjust to their new surroundings.
One chicken sat down, closed her eyes and simply never got up during that first week.
Slowly, and with much gentle care, the other nine chickens learned to walk properly, dustbath, sleep on a perch and scratch for worms and other insects.
A year passed and we lost three more. Cancer ate into two of the chickens’ reproductive organs and the third developed a large untreatable growth that crippled her leg.
I can’t be sure of the exact nature of Boss’ current illness, whether it is simply because of a hard life, cancer or maybe being fed too many hormones back at the factory farm, but I knew she would not be long with us when eggs started breaking inside her.
Watching her stand, upright like a penguin, with a bright yellow yolk and translucent egg white dripping out of her to form a broken mass on the dark earth, saddened me.
She seemed as surprised as me as she bent down, looked under her belly, to see what was dripping out of her vent.
A sad message from the biosphere, a Humpty Dumpty lament for the planet, when all the world’s chickens start laying broken eggs, mused a friend when I told her about the hen.
I do what I can to ease the suffering of the chickens, but there is little that I can do to undo the fact that they were genetically bred to live on a factory farm, they have been debeaked, fed drugs and hormones, and spent the first twelve months of their lives living in a hellish cage space smaller than a piece of standard computer paper for each imprisoned chicken.
No matter what type of food I feed them, how much I love them, how many times we call the veterinarian, it is simply impossible to undo this damage inflicted upon them.
I lose a lot of sleep over the chickens.
As I lay awake at night, with the familiar children’s rhyme swimming in my head, I find myself worrying that, like Humpty Dumpty, all the King’s horses and all the King's men won’t be able to put this institutionalized system of factory farming back together into something humane again.
Help eradicate battery hen cages, if you don’t want to give up on eggs then buy free-range and organic eggs. You’ll alleviate a lot of pain and suffering while paying only pennies more for a healthier option.
Valerie Williams is a writer living on Salt Spring Island, Canada. She lives with five chicken friends.
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