This morning i went to feed our chickens in the usual manner. That is, i tried my best to scatter handfuls of feed around strategically, so that certain chickens could eat out of view of other chickens, surreptitiously. This never works. The feeding of the enemy chicken is always detected, and that chicken is chased off by its nemesis, who may well be chased off by another chicken who is the nemesis of the nemesis. It doesn't matter that there is plenty of feed for everyone, and that they have the run of a large garden, it's a dominance thing. The bad-ass chickens do their best to keep marginalized chickens away from all feed, but accept allies feeding along side them. Because we have two adolescent chickens trying to find a place in the pecking order, two hens who were introduced only a few months ago, and both the new hens have chicks just old enough to feed with the others, every feeding has become a chaos of posturing and charging at other chickens, interspersed with periods of eating.
Today i made the mistake of trying to hold back a particularly obnoxious mother hen from harassing the adolescent rooster, who gets the worst of it and i suspect often goes a little hungry. I know that rooster is likely not long for this world, as the ruling rooster has started to target him too, so we'll have to do something about him before the two roosters square off for real, which could lead to one or both of them getting seriously injured or possibly killed. The ruling rooster is doing his job just fine, so the other one is soup. There can be only one. He probably has no more than a month. There are always more roosters around than there are flocks needing roosters, such is the world. But i feel a little bad about it and would like him to enjoy the time he has.
Anyhow, when i shoved the obnoxious mother hen back from chasing him with my toe, the other mother hen, who has it in for the first mother hen, decided i was attacking that hen, and piled on. Then the ruling rooster got involved, although i'm not sure what he was thinking. He pinned down the hen i shoved, but that can be either a 'cool it, yo' gesture, or a 'hey baby, have i got a humpin' fer you' move. And it isn't beyond the rooster to turn the one into the other. But before that outcome was determined, the pinned hen had thrown him off in response to the continued pecking of the other hen, talons were slicing and beaks were jabbing. The adolescent rooster attacked whoever was closest in the fight at that moment, i can't remember who. My guess is his angle was 'see, i can be a rooster too'. The other rooster quickly put an end to that, but was distracted by the continued fight between the girls, who were taking pot-shots at the nosy punk roosters too. Basically, they were all shouting 'I'm the boss of you' and retorting 'Shut up' at the same time. It ended when the obnoxious hen got the other hen's comb in her beak and rag-dolled until it bled, which caused the other hen to flee. The two roosters faded into the background. Their rooster duties done for the moment, they knew their rivalry would pit them in the final conflict another day. I just looked at them all, having been defeated as soon as my annoyed shove triggered this chicken savagery.
So, anyone who claims animals are noble has not owned chickens. The chickens have their reasons, don't get me wrong. It's a system, and it works. The fit survive. Let's just not dress it up as anything else, okay? Chickens are generally pretty funny, i admit. And they can express a sort of affection, for instance to get you to flip over a rock so it can eat the bugs underneath, as several do to me. One will stand on my foot, crooning and pecking lightly at my shin until i provide the desired service. I choose to interpret this as affection, although it isn't in any but the most superficial sense. In reality chicken behaviour is honed to maximize odds of survival of the species in their native home, the jungles of South East Asia. (How about that huh? Jungle birds.) I'm a means to acquire tasty spiders, by pure trial and error she has developed a method to get me to function. I get to chuckle and point out the cuteness to my husband, the chicken gets a vital protein boost. Later i get the eggs, too. Plus when she's old we'll probably make soup out of her. She and her flock are still getting an excellent deal. If she was in her jungle home, getting old would probably mean some jungle cat clawing her open one day, maybe after younger hens had been drumming her out of the flock for months. She'll likely live longer, healthier, and less stressed than that with us.
Industrially farmed chickens have a bad deal. Constant stress and confusion. The comparison has to be made to the life of a chicken that has not been interfered with by humans, doesn't it? I don't know what the vagaries of living in the jungles of Laos are, but wild chickens must live a fuller life. 'Fuller' here meaning with all the trimmings, such as sex and offspring, the triumphs and failures of finding your place in the flock, lean days and days full of succulent berries in season.
A free range chicken on a decent farm has it pretty good, though. All the upside of a wild life but without the predators, the lean times, and probably fewer parasites too. Life span could be significantly shorter than that of the average wild bird. Fortunately chickens don't anticipate death. They don't worry about their legacy, their sins, their unfinished business, or wonder what happens afterward. They struggle not to be killed, sure, but good humans end that struggle very quickly, it is minimally unpleasant compared to many drawn-out deaths in the wild. So if the rest of their life was good, what is the problem? Believe me, the other chickens won't grieve. I've seen a mother hen call over her chicks to eat another chick dead no more than an hour or two - her own dead chick. Chickens live in the moment.
