every chick deservers a mother
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The sun is out this January morning. Chickens enjoy lots of sun. You can’t raise healthy chickens without letting them soak in all the sun they want, and letting them roam as much as they want. The next time you buy chicken, ask your grocer, “How much sun did this chicken get? How far was it allowed to roam? Did it ever get to chase another chicken around a tree, or cross a bridge over a stream? Eat a tadpole or a frog?”
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The chicks are two weeks old today. Even though it’s a wet December day, their mother is taking them a long way from the cozy, dry barn where they bed down during the night. Flower beds are favorite spots for chickens to scratch, so if you are planning on getting chickens and want beautiful flower beds, you’ll need to pick one or the other. Or you’ll need to protect your flower beds with fencing.
Out at the edge of the woods, when it’s time for protection or to get out of the steady rain, the chicks will huddle underneath their mother. A little rain doesn’t stop her.
Collecting eggs is always an adventure. An old trick I use to get hens to lay in certain nests is to keep some wooden eggs in the nest. Many hens prefer to lay eggs where other hens have.
With eggs coming in so many different shades and sizes, why do large egg producers insist on packaging identical eggs in the same carton? Wouldn’t it be more exciting if every carton looked different inside? When I mentioned once to a clerk that I had chickens and that they laid eggs of various colors, she said that she once received a variety of eggs from a friend. She was thrilled at the various colors of the eggs, but her children refused to eat any of them. They would only eat perfectly white supermarket eggs. In a way it’s sad that most children have no idea how varied chicken eggs can be.
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It’s been 13 days since the chicks hatched, December 19. For the first time the mother hen has taken them outdoors. Now their diet will be primarily what they can find and they will soon be traveling great distances every day, becoming strong, healthy chickens.
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It’s the start of another year. I woke up to a mild day with fog drifting through the tree branches. Now there is some sunlight filtering through the clouds. Not a bad way to begin the year.
A great way to start the year is by making tofu. It’s a simple process, and I find going through the steps very relaxing, especially squeezing the soy milk out of the crushed, cooked soybeans. The result is so fantastic that I haven’t bought tofu in many years. A dish of freshly made, still warm tofu is about the most delicious thing one could ever eat. But like so many things, if you want it, you’ve got to make it yourself.
A byproduct of making tofu is “okara” which is the leftover groundup soybeans after you’ve squeezed the soy milk out of them. Okara is delicious by itself or made into patties, or muffins or meatballs, but it’s also something the chickens and our dogs go nuts over.
The okara you buy in stores can be very dry, but when you hand squeeze soy milk, you leave enough of the moisture in the okara that it retains a lot of flavor.
According to research from 2004 where researchers compared chicken and human genomes, humans and chickens share 60 percent of the same genes. It’s believed that you need to go back 310 million years to get to a common ancestor between birds and mammals. It’s amazing that even after 310 million years, humans and chickens still share more than half of the same genetic material. It explains some deep-rooted behavior which we share.
Watching roosters jostle with each other, build up their harems, and try to outdo each other, reminds me of the way some men just can’t help themselves. They’ve got to be in control and take as much as they can. There has to be a genetic basis for this behavior. You see it in so many animals including humans.
Researchers often warn against projection our feelings into animals. This is true. You can’t even assume that other humans are feeling what you are feeling. And yet, since we share a common ancestor and share much of the same genetic material, I also believe that it’s just as naive to assume that animals aren’t like us in more ways than we imagine.
May 2014 be a wonderful year for us all.
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<p>It’s a cool, drizzly New Year’s Eve. Some of the hens have a found a dry spot to rest up on the wood pile. The <a href=”http://www.globalanimalpartnership.org” title=”Global Animal Partnership” target=”_blank”>Global Animal Partnership</a> has developed a 5-Step system of standards for raising farm animals. Their highest level, Step-5, allows up to 5.5 pounds of chicken per square foot. This basically means that all a farmer has to do to meet this highest standard, is provide 1 square foot of space per chicken. It’s hard to grasp how anyone would even think of keeping chicken so close together.</p>
<p>I’m sure the Global Animal Partnership means well, but when you read through their standards, in many ways, it seems that they are going out of their way to give good marks to chicken raised in rather deplorable conditions. So when you go to a store like Whole Foods and purchase chicken which passes the highest conditions of the Global Animal Partnership standards, it really doesn’t mean much. You are still buying chicken which has been raised in very crowded conditions, in flocks numbering the thousands and tens of thousands, and which have had very short lives. You are not buying chicken which enjoy life like those pictured at A Man and His Hoe.</p>
<p>When you think of it, for a store like Whole Foods, which needs to sell tens of thousands of chickens weekly, at a price most people are willing to pay, the farmers who have to meet those conditions have no choice but to crowd their chickens together and get those chickens to market weight in as short as time as possible.</p>
<p>Having mother hens raise those chicks a handful at a time, giving them acres of grassland and woods to raise those chicks, and letting those chicks experience the full range of complex chicken behavior, well all of that is out of the question.</p>
<p>Reading through the <a href=”http://www.globalanimalpartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/GAP-5-Step-Animal-Welfare-Standards-for-Chickens-Raised-for-Meat-v2.0.pdf” title=”GAP-5-Step-Animal-Welfare-Standards-for-Chickens-Raised-for-Meat-v2.0″ target=”_blank”>Global Animal Partnership’s 5‐Step® Animal Welfare Rating Standards for Chickens Raised for Meat</a>, you get a good idea of all of the problems regular chicken farmers face when raising chickens under crowded conditions. By reading all of the practices that are prohibited, you realize that many farmers use those prohibited practices.</p>
<p>For 2014, I wish that more people consider what it means that the meat they eat comes from animals which have had deplorable lives, and that they search out farmers like myself, who are committed to giving the chickens they raise, a most wonderful life.</p>
We’re a week past the solstice and the roosters are getting active. For the peace of the flock, it’s time to thin out the number of roosters. Your typical chicken farmer only raises hens, however since I have hens hatch chicks, I need a good stock of roosters so the hens can lay fertile eggs.
Roosters come with many different personalities. Some are mellow, others aggressive. Some develop spurs which curve upward, which is good for the hens. The roosters which develop spurs which point downward can injure hens when they mount them. There are many things to consider when deciding which roosters to keep and which ones to put on the dinner table.
During these dark winter days, it’s helpful to look back and be reminded of warm, sunny days. Mother hens provide a wonderful spot for chicks taking a rest. Some huddle underneath her, others around her, and some perch on her back. Every chick deserves a mother.
You never see such beautiful eggs from an industrial chicken farm.
It’s almost time to call it a day. These chickens are taking a break from a day of foraging for food. Soon they’ll be in the chicken yard, high up on their roosts, settling in for a long, winter night.
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At nine days, the chicks are already adept at scratching and preening. The great thing about having a mother, is that she is always nearby for a warm place to rest. It’s late December and hovering around 40 degrees F, but with a mother nearby, the cool weather is just fine for these lucky chicks.