Hen And Chicken Quotes

When some claim demarcation and “regulation”, others fancy “deregulation”, preferring foxes guarding the henhouse or chicken yards with free chickens and free foxes. Friend or foe, hen or fox, anyone can have a go. (“This far”)

Go to Old Delhi,and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them.They know they are next, yet they cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with humans in this country.

When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.

Here’s another question I have. How come when it’s us, it’s an abortion, and when it’s a chicken, it’s an omelette? Are we so much better than chickens all of a sudden? When did this happen, that we passed chickens in goodness. Name 6 ways we’re better than chickens. See, nobody can do it! You know why? ‘Cause chickens are decent people. You don’t see chickens hanging around in drug gangs, do you? No, you don’t see a chicken strapping some guy into a chair and hooking up his nuts to a car battery, do you? When’s the last chicken you heard about come home from work and beat the shit out of his hen, huh? Doesn’t happen, ’cause chickens are decent people.

But her attention was on the prince across from her, who seemed utterly ignored by his father and his own court, shoved down near the end with her and Aedion. He ate so beautifully, she thought, watching him cut into his roast chicken. Not a drop moved out of place, not a scrap fell on the table. She had decent manners, while Aedion was hopeless, his plate littered with bones and crumbs scattered everywhere, even some on her own dress. She’d kicked him for it, but his attention was too focused on the royals down the table. So both she and the Crown Prince were to be ignored, then. She looked at the boy again, who was around her age, she supposed. His skin was from the winter, his blue-black hair neatly trimmed; his sapphire eyes lifted from his plate to meet hers. “You eat like a fine lady,” she told him. His lips thinned and color stained his ivory cheeks. Across from her, Quinn, her uncle’s Captain of the Guard, choked on his water. The prince glanced at his father—still busy with her uncle—before replying. Not for approval, but in fear. “I eat like a prince,” Dorian said quietly. “You do not need to cut your bread with a fork and knife,” she said. A faint pounding started in her head, followed by a flickering warmth, but she ignored it. The hall was hot, as they’d shut all the windows for some reason. “Here in the North,” she went on as the prince’s knife and fork remained where they were on his dinner roll, “you need not be so formal. We don’t put on airs.” Hen, one of Quinn’s men, coughed pointedly from a few seats down. She could almost hear him saying, Says the little lady with her hair pressed into careful curls and wearing her new dress that she threatened to skin us over if we got dirty. She gave Hen an equally pointed look, then returned her attention to the foreign prince. He’d already looked down at his food again, as if he expected to be neglected for the rest of the night. And he looked lonely enough that she said, “If you like, you could be my friend.” Not one of the men around them said anything, or coughed. Dorian lifted his chin. “I have a friend. He is to be Lord of Anielle someday, and the fiercest warrior in the land.

I said, "I'll take the T-bone steak." A soft voice mooed, "Oh wow." And I looked up and realized The waitress was a cow. I cried, "Mistake--forget the the steak. I'll take the chicken then." I heard a cluck--'twas just my luck The busboy was a hen. I said, "Okay no, fowl today. I'll have the seafood dish." Then I saw through the kitchen door The cook--he was a fish. I screamed, "Is there anyone workin' here Who's an onion or a beet? No? Your're sure? Okay then friends, A salad's what I'll eat." They looked at me. "Oh,no," they said, "The owner is a cabbage head.

Self-pity is the hens' besetting sin," remarked Mr. Payton. "Foolish fowl. How they came to achieve anything as perfect as the egg I do not know! I cannot fathom.

When you let the wolves guard the hen house, there's bound to be a few chicken dinners.

At night frantic men walked boldly to hen roosts and carried off the squawking chickens. If they were shot at, they did not run, but splashed sullenly away; and if they were hit, they sank tiredly in the mud.

The coops were finished. They were not masterpieces, and I have seen chickens pause before them in deep thought, as who should say: "Now what in the world have we struck here?" But they were coops, within the meaning of the act, and we induced the hens to become tenants.

I WANT her though, to take the same from me. She touches me as if I were herself, her own. She has not realized yet, that fearful thing, that I am the other, she thinks we are all of one piece. It is painfully untrue. I want her to touch me at last, ah, on the root and quick of my darkness and perish on me, as I have perished on her. Then, we shall be two and distinct, we shall have each our separate being. And that will be pure existence, real liberty. Till then, we are confused, a mixture, unresolved, unextricated one from the other. It is in pure, unutterable resolvedness, distinction of being, that one is free, not in mixing, merging, not in similarity. When she has put her hand on my secret, darkest sources, the darkest outgoings, when it has struck home to her, like a death, "this is _him!_" she has no part in it, no part whatever, it is the terrible _other_, when she knows the fearful _other flesh_, ah, dark- ness unfathomable and fearful, contiguous and concrete, when she is slain against me, and lies in a heap like one outside the house, when she passes away as I have passed away being pressed up against the _other_, then I shall be glad, I shall not be confused with her, I shall be cleared, distinct, single as if burnished in silver, having no adherence, no adhesion anywhere, one clear, burnished, isolated being, unique, and she also, pure, isolated, complete, two of us, unutterably distinguished, and in unutterable conjunction. Then we shall be free, freer than angels, ah, perfect. VIII AFTER that, there will only remain that all men detach themselves and become unique, that we are all detached, moving in freedom more than the angels, conditioned only by our own pure single being, having no laws but the laws of our own being. Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled. Every movement will be direct. Only to be will be such delight, we cover our faces when we think of it lest our faces betray us to some untimely fiend. Every man himself, and therefore, a surpassing singleness of mankind. The blazing tiger will spring upon the deer, un-dimmed, the hen will nestle over her chickens, we shall love, we shall hate, but it will be like music, sheer utterance, issuing straight out of the unknown, the lightning and the rainbow appearing in us unbidden, unchecked, like ambassadors. We shall not look before and after. We shall _be_, _now_. We shall know in full. We, the mystic NOW. (From the poem the Manifesto)

If every kitchen in America had enough chickens attached to it to eat all of the scraps coming out of that kitchen, no egg industry or commerce would be necessary in the whole country.

I am a battery hen. I live in a cage so small I cannot stretch my wings. I am forced to stand night and day on a sloping wire mesh floor that painfully cuts into my feet. The cage walls tear my feathers, forming blood blisters that never heal. The air is so full of ammonia that my lungs hurt and my eyes burn and I think I am going blind. As soon as I was born, a man grabbed me and sheared off part of my beak with a hot iron, and my little brothers were thrown into trash bags as useless alive. My mind is alert and my body is sensitive and I should have been richly feathered. In nature or even a farmyard I would have had sociable, cleansing dust baths with my flock mates, a need so strong that I perform 'vacuum' dust bathing on the wire floor of my cage. Free, I would have ranged my ancestral jungles and fields with my mates, devouring plants, earthworms, and insects from sunrise to dusk. I would have exercised my body and expressed my nature, and I would have given, and received, pleasure as a whole being. I am only a year old, but I am already a 'spent hen.' Humans, I wish I were dead, and soon I will be dead. Look for pieces of my wounded flesh wherever chicken pies and soups are sold.

The cloth overlay of Billy’s cart clucks, and a brown chicken pokes her head out from under the covering, stepping out of the basket she was riding in. “There is a chicken in your cart.” “I know,” Billy snaps, and slaps his napkin across his lap. “Why is there a chicken in your cart?” “Because this was supposed to be chicken stew,” he says. “I’ve been hand-feeding this bird for days to be sure it was not poisoned before the fact. And now . . .” He pours Mirabella some water and drinks from her cup. The hen clucks, and Billy tosses down a chunk of bread. “Now her name is Harriet,” he says quietly. Mirabella laughs.

But songbirds are trash," the chicken said, and the guinea hen laughed, saying, "Well, then, I guess we could all use a little more trash in our lives.

The secret is," said Phoebe, smiling, "that I have learned how to talk with hens and chickens.

Father, I am from a different egg than your other children. Think of me as a duckling raised by hens. I am not a domestic bird destined to spend his life in a chicken coop. The water that scares you rejuvenates me. For unlike you I can swim, and swim I shall. The ocean is my homeland. If you are with me, come to the ocean. If not, stop interfering with me and go back to the chicken coop.

The natural lifespan of wild chickens is about seven to twelve years, and of cattle about twenty to twenty-five years. In the wild, most chickens and cattle died long before that, but they still had a fair chance of living for a respectable number of years. In contrast, the vast majority of domesticated chickens and cattle are slaughtered at the age of between a few weeks and a few months, because this has always been the optimal slaughtering age from an economic perspective. (Why keep feeding a cock for three years if it has already reached its maximum weight after three months?) Egg-laying hens, dairy cows and draught animals are sometimes allowed to live for many years. But the price is subjugation to a way of life completely alien to their urges and desires. It’s reasonable to assume, for example, that bulls prefer to spend their days wandering over open prairies in the company of other bulls and cows rather than pulling carts and ploughshares under the yoke of a whip-wielding ape.

You don’t have roosters with your laying hens. How do they lay eggs?” Dear folks, chickens don’t need roosters to lay eggs. They need roosters to hatch eggs, but not to lay them. Just like women don’t need men to lay eggs; they just need a man to hatch one. A mere century ago, not one in a hundred would have been ignorant of this common agrarian knowledge.

Animal agriculture is now dominated by the factory farm- 99.9% of chickens raised for meat, 97% of laying hens, 99% of turkeys, 95% of pigs, and 78% of cattle.

Thus far, our responsibility for how we treat chickens and allow them to be treated in our culture is dismissed with blistering rhetoric designed to silence objection: “How the hell can you compare the feelings of a hen with those of a human being?” One answer is, by looking at her. It does not take special insight or credentials to see that a hen confined in a battery cage is suffering, or to imagine what her feelings must be compared with those of a hen ranging outside in the grass and sunlight. We are told that we humans are capable of knowing just about anything that we want to know—except, ironically, what it feels like to be one of our victims. We are told we are being “emotional” if we care about a chicken and grieve over a chicken’s plight. However, it is not “emotion” that is really under attack, but the vicarious emotions of pity, sympathy, compassion, sorrow, and indignity on behalf of the victim, a fellow creature—emotions that undermine business as usual. By contrast, such “manly” emotions as patriotism, pride, conquest, and mastery are encouraged.

I remember the dog at home, when I was a girl; the one that killed chickens. They tied a dead hen around his neck and he carried it around with him all day until he just lay there unmoving with his eyes shut in a morass of shame. It was cruel. There's nothing so hideously easy as giving someone a bad conscience.

Smoke says the beef is much better than the squawky white birds." Her expression changed from annoyed to dismayed. "Squawky white birds? Chickens? You ate Mrs. Beale's chickens?" Smoke whined apologetically. Saetan leaned back in his chair. Oh, it was so satisfying to see her thrown off stride. "I'm sure Mrs. Beale was delighted to feed a guest - even if she wasn't aware of it," he added dryly, remembering too well his cook's reaction when she learned about the missing hens.

Following Homo sapiens, domesticated cattle, pigs and sheep are the second, third and fourth most widespread large mammals in the world. From a narrow evolutionary perspective, which measures success by the number of DNA copies, the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful boon for chickens, cattle, pigs and sheep. Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness. Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueller with the passing of the centuries. The natural lifespan of wild chickens is about seven to twelve years, and of cattle about twenty to twenty-five years. In the wild, most chickens and cattle died long before that, but they still had a fair chance of living for a respectable number of years. In contrast, the vast majority of domesticated chickens and cattle are slaughtered at the age of between a few weeks and a few months, because this has always been the optimal slaughtering age from an economic perspective. (Why keep feeding a cock for three years if it has already reached its maximum weight after three months?) Egg-laying hens, dairy cows and draught animals are sometimes allowed to live for many years. But the price is subjugation to a way of life completely alien to their urges and desires. It’s reasonable to assume, for example, that bulls prefer to spend their days wandering over open prairies in the company of other bulls and cows rather than pulling carts and ploughshares under the yoke of a whip-wielding ape. In order for humans to turn bulls, horses, donkeys and camels into obedient draught animals, their natural instincts and social ties had to be broken, their aggression and sexuality contained, and their freedom of movement curtailed. Farmers developed techniques such as locking animals inside pens and cages, bridling them in harnesses and leashes, training them with whips and cattle prods, and mutilating them. The process of taming almost always involves the castration of males. This restrains male aggression and enables humans selectively to control the herd’s procreation.

I was in a temper fit to blow the lid off a kettle of boiling water. And who wouldn't be? Since sunup, I'd been doing chores. I'd milked the cow, hauled two buckets of water from the well, fed the chickens, and then fought the hens for their eggs. Now I was down on my knees, sweat-soaked and bug-bitten, yanking weeds from the vegetable patch. My hands were caked with mud, and my nose was burned as red as a strawberry.

[Speaking about chickens in their living quarters:] 'About that - seems one of them has caught fire, Master.' 'It's smouldering, and too brainless to care. If we wait we can dine on roast chicken for breakfastt. And which one laid that egg?' 'Hmm, a most gravid mystery indeed.' 'You may find this amusing right now, Bugg, but you are the one who will be sleeping down there. They'll peck your eyes out, you know. Evil has been bred into them, generation after generation, until their tiny black bean brains are condensed knots of malice-' 'You display unexpected familiarity with hens, Master.' 'I had a tutor who was a human version.' (p 274)

She kept her ears permanently tuned to the chicken voices outside, so knew immediately when a coyote had crept into the yard, and barreled screaming for the front door before the rest of us had a clue. (I don't know about the coyote, but I nearly needed CPR.) These hens owed their lives and eggs to Lily, there was no question.

Lukas grew more animated. “Yes! I also love Senpai High and Chicken, My Love.” Nya giggled. “I haven’t played the chicken game yet. Is it actually good?” “Yes! I’m playing it now, and there’s actually a really interesting plot about a chicken rebellion. I’m romancing the alpha hen, who takes no nonsense and pecks out the eyes of her enemies.

I'm a basic boneless chicken, yes, I have no bones inside, I'm without a trace of rib cage, yet I hold myself with pride, other hens appear offended by my total lack of bones, they discuss me impolitely in derogatory tones. I am absolutely boneless, I am boneless through and through, I have neither neck nor thighbones, and my back is boneless too, and I haven't got a wishbone, not a bone within my breast, so I rarely care to travel from the comfort of my nest. I have feathers fine and fluffy, I have lovely little wings, but I lack the superstructure to support these splendid things. Since a chicken finds it tricky to parade on boneless legs, I stick closely to the hen house, laying little scrambled eggs.

I never worry about how many legs my chicken has, about whether it can fly or not, about which cock was her husband; that my hen gives me eggs is enough for me!

...don't forget that a chicken cannot teach the hen.

but as the Hill Dwarves like to say, Hope is a hen that never lays.

Analogies drawn from the inspection of hen’s eggs foundered on the objection that man was not a chicken.

If you wish to rest, I will shield you from harm. If you want to fight, I will draw my sword beside you. If you want a hundred chickens, I will build you a hen-fortress.

The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn’t had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen’s sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite’s innocent gusto. Candy. Heaped on a smoking breast of rice. Each is given such a tidy hot breast, and Margaret is in a special hurry to muddle hers with glazed chunks; all eat well. Their faces take color and strength from the oval plates of dark pork, sugar peas, chicken, stiff sweet sauce, shrimp, water chestnuts, who knows what else. Their talk grows hearty.

The idea that human beings cannot logically recognize suffering in a chicken, or draw meaningful conclusions about how a human would react to the conditions under which a caged hen lives, is ridiculous. There is a basis for empathy and understanding in the fact of human evolutionary continuity with other creatures that enables us to recognize and infer, in those creatures, experiences similar to our own. The fact that animals are forcibly confined in environments that reflect human nature, not theirs, means that they are suffering much more than we know in ways that we cannot fathom. If they preferred to be packed together without contact with the world outside, then we would not need intensive physical confinement facilities, and mutilations such as debeaking, since they would voluntarily cram together, live cordially, and save us money. The egg industry thinks nothing of claiming that a mutilated bird in a cage is 'happy,' 'content,' and 'singing,' yet will turn around and try to intimidate you with accusations of 'anthropomorphism' if you logically insist that the bird is miserable.

He cocks an eyebrow. “Penny for your thoughts, Miss Hen?” He appears focused on his task, but there’s a sly glint in his eye. I flush. Oh, I was just imagining your hands traveling up my thighs and your teeth nibbling my breast.

Nancy taught two hens to help her sort flowers to make leis. She set them down by a basket of three colors of plastic flowers. One hen quickly pulled out all the red flowers, and another the white ones, leaving the pink flowers in the basket.

You ought to make something for Easter. You know. Eggs and stuff. Chocolate hens, rabbits, things like that. Like the shops in Agen." I remember them from my childhood; the Paris chocolateries with their baskets of foil-wrapped eggs, shelves of rabbits and hens, bells, marzipan fruits and marrons glacés, amourettes and filigree nests filled with petits fours and caramels, and a thousand and one epiphanies of spun-sugar magic carpet rides more suited to an Arabian harem than the solemnities of the Passion. "I remember my mother telling me about the Easter chocolates." There was never enough money to buy those exquisite things, but I always had my own cornet-surprise, a paper cone containing my Easter gifts, coins, paper flowers, hard-boiled eggs painted in bright enamel colors, a box of colored papier-mâché- painted with chickens, bunnies, smiling children among the buttercups, the same every year and stored carefully for the next time- encasing a tiny packet of chocolate raisins wrapped in cellophane, each one to be savored, long and lingeringly, in the lost hours of those strange nights between cities, with the neon glow of hotel signs blink-blinking between the shutters and my mother's breathing, slow and somehow eternal, in the umbrous silence.

More laying hens are slaughtered in the United States than cattle or pigs. Commercial laying hens are not bred for their flesh, but when their economic utility is over the still-young birds are trucked to the slaughterhouse and turned into meat products. In the process they are treated even more brutally than meat-type chickens because of their low market value. Their bones are very fragile from lack of exercise and from calcium depletion for heavy egg production, causing fragments to stick to the flesh during processing. The starvation practice known as forced molting results in beaded ribs that break easily at the slaughterhouse. Removal of food for several days before the hens are loaded onto the truck weakens their bones even more. Currently, the U.S. egg industry and the American Veterinary Medical Association oppose humane slaughter legislation for laying hens on the basis that their low economic value does not justify the cost of 'humane slaughter' technology. The industry created the inhumane conditions that are invoked to rationalize further unaccountability and cruelty.

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler's eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their homes, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, the cattle, and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children whoe would be stricken suddently while at play and die within a few hours. There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example--where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs--the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were not lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.

A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air. Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. “Who’s that?” he asked. “That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” said his neighbor. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth—we’re chickens.” So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.

Now, brooder is an interesting word. People who worry a lot in silence are known as brooders. But then again so is a hen sitting on her eggs. The more I get to know chickens, the more I realize half our language comes from chickens. Well, not half. But an awful lot considering this isn't Latin or anything. Cooped up. Egghead. Hatch a plan. Henpecked. Pecker. Cock. Chickenshit. Chicken-scratch. A lot of chicken words are meant to deliver attitude, which isn't surprising to me now that I have chickens. Chickens aren't background animals like fish or sheep or horses. Chickens are in-your-face animals. Chickens if you have them, come to bracket your days. The rooster hollers all morning, and then in the evening the hens have left you their mysterious gift of eggs. Silkies are said to be excellent brooders, to have a tendency toward "broodiness." This, too, is usually meant as a compliment.

Jephus Hardy?" Stunned. My jaw dropped when I saw Cephus Hardy walk up to me in the magazine aisle of Artie's Meat and Deli. I was admiring the cover of Cock and Feathers, where my last client at Eternal Slumber Funeral Home, Chicken Teater, graced the cover with his prize Orloff Hen, Lady Cluckington.

We drove out of New Paltz heading due north. Squeezed into my tiny hatchback, among our boxes and bags, were my dog, Nico, the hens, and the humming hive of bees, its openings covered over with tape. The dog eyed the hive, the chickens eyed the dog, and if the bees weren't nervous they were the only ones.

Bear with me a moment, now. Chicken-sexing. Since hens have a far greater commercial value than males, cocks, roosters, it is apparently vital to determine the sex of a newly hatched chick. In order to know whether to expend capital on raising it or not, you see. A cock is nearly worthless, apparently, on the open market. The sex characteristics of newly hatched chicks, however, are entirely internal, and it is impossible with the naked eye to tell whether a given chick is a hen or a cock. This is what I have been told, at any rate. A professional chicken-sexer, however, can nevertheless tell. The sex. He can go through a brood of freshly hatched chicks, examining each one entirely by eye, and tell the poultry farmer which chicks to keep and which are cocks. The cocks are to be allowed to perish. “Hen, hen, cock, cock, hen,” and so on and so forth. This is apparently in Australia. The profession. And they are nearly always right. Correct. The fowl determined to be hens do in fact grow up to be hens and return the poultry farmer’s investment. What the chicken-sexer cannot do, however, is explain how he knows. The sex. It’s apparently often a patrilineal profession, handed down from father to son. Australia, New Zealand. Have him hold up a new-hatched chick, a young cock shall we say, and ask him how he can tell that it is a cock, and the professional chicken-sexer will apparently shrug his shoulders and say “Looks like a cock to me.” Doubtless adding “mate,” much the way you or I would add “my friend” or “sir.

Destiny The chicken I bought last night, Frozen, Returned to life, Laid the biggest egg in the world, And was awarded the Nobel Prize. The phenomenal egg Was passed from hand to hand, In a few weeks had gone all round the earth, And round the sun In 365 days. The hen received who knows how much hard currency, Assessed in buckets of grain Which she couldn’t manage to eat Because she was invited everywhere, Gave lectures, granted interviews, Was photographed. Very often reporters insisted That I too should pose Beside her. And so, having served art Throughout my life, All of a sudden I’ve attained to fame As a poultry breeder.

She brought a chicken from the coop to the chopping block. She kissed the hen’s beak in gratitude, knowing the hen would nourish many youngsters through her sacrifice. After the blessing, Oota Dabun took an ax to the hen’s neck. The death was instant. Painless. Such is the mercy that comes from the slayer who knows one day he or she shall also be slain.

Lacking any scientific means of pinning down the soul, the first anatomists settled on generative primacy. What shows up first in the embryo must be most important and therefore most likely to hold the soul. The trouble with this particular avenue of learning, known as ensoulment, was that early first trimester human embryos were difficult to come by. Classical scholars of ensoulment, Aristotle among them, attempted to get around the problem by examining the larger, more easily obtained poultry embryo. To quote Vivian Nutton, author of The Anatomy of the Soul in Early Renaissance Medicine and the Human Embryo, analogies drawn from the inspection of hen's eggs foundered on the subject that man was not a chicken.

Of course no one will consider,” said Anisim, and he heaved a sigh. “There is no God, anyway, you know, mamma, so what considering can there be?” Varvara looked at him with surprise, burst out laughing, and clasped her hands. Perhaps because she was so genuinely surprised at his words and looked at him as though he were a queer person, he was confused. “Perhaps there is a God, only there is no faith. When I was being married I was not myself. Just as you may take an egg from under a hen and there is a chicken chirping in it, so my conscience was beginning to chirp in me, and while I was being married I thought all the time there was a God! But when I left the church it was nothing. And indeed, how can I tell whether there is a God or not? We are not taught right from childhood, and while the babe is still at his mother’s breast he is only taught ‘every man to his own job.’ Father does not believe in God, either. You were saying that Guntorev had some sheep stolen.... I have found them; it was a peasant at Shikalovo stole them; he stole them, but father’s got the fleeces ... so that’s all his faith amounts to.

Most chickens, though, grow fast – and are slaughtered at just six weeks old. When we eat chickens, they’re really just overblown, overgrown, big chicks. The ends of their bones haven’t even begun to turn from cartilage to bone yet. A single great-grandmother hen, back in the pedigree flock, can have an astonishing 3 million broiler-chicken descendants – who never make it to adulthood.

In the wet hay of leaking barns babies were born to women who panted with pneumonia. And old people curled up in corners and died that way, so that the coroners could not straighten them. At night frantic men walked boldly to hen roosts and carried off the squawking chickens. If they were shot at, they did not run, but splashed sullenly away; and if they were hit, they sank tiredly in the mud.

As we still ascend from shelf to shelf, we find the tenants of the tower serially disposed in order of their magnitude: gannets, black and speckled haglets, jays, sea hens, sperm-whale birds, gulls of all varieties -- thrones, princedoms, powers, dominating one above another in senatorial array; while, sprinkled over all, like an ever-repeated fly in a great piece of broidery, the stormy petrel or Mother Cary's chicken sounds his continual challenge and alarm.

Which is the true? a loving, caring father, or the grinding of cruel poverty and the naked exposure to heedless chance? How is it that, while the former seems the only right, reasonable, and all-sufficing thing, it should yet come more naturally to believe in the latter? And yet, when I think of it, I never did come closer to believing in the latter than is indicated by terror of its possible truth—so many things looked like it.—Then, what has nature in common with the Bible and its metaphysics?—There I am wrong—she has a thousand things. The very wind on my face seems to rouse me to fresh effort after a pure healthy life! Then there is the sunrise! There is the snowdrop in the snow! There is the butterfly! There is the rain of summer, and the clearing of the sky after a storm! There is the hen gathering her chickens under her wing!—I begin to doubt whether there be the common-place anywhere except in our own mistrusting nature, that will cast no care upon the Unseen.

Sprout looked through the wide-open door, focusing on the world outside. It had been a while since she’d had an appetite. She had no desire to lay another egg. Her heart emptied of feeling every time the farmer’s wife took her eggs. The pride she felt when she laid one was replaced by sadness. She was exhausted after a full year of this. She couldn’t so much as touch her own eggs, not even with the tip of her foot. And she didn’t know what happened to them after the farmer’s wife carried them in her basket out of the coop.

What Cecily would think of this place, who, as a child in the dust and stink of the chicken coop where thick light poured sideways from the chinks, reached under the hens for an egg, her filthy kitchen smock as her vestment, and, wearing her sternest face, swinging a bucket of ash for her censer, intoned gibberish in the girls’ play of Mass while cracking into Marie’s open mouth the egg still warm from inside its mother, the body and the blood mixed as one, and Marie crossed herself and could barely swallow the overrich viscous warm egg down.

A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air. Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. “Who’s that?” he asked.

all-too-familiar homes. There were at least a dozen people waiting at the meat counter, and the dairy case had already been emptied of the pound blocks of butter Grandma liked to use for baking. I tried not to get annoyed and made substitutions whenever I came across an item on my list that had sold out. It actually seemed appropriate somehow to have such a hodgepodge holiday. I had to settle for chicken instead of the traditional Cornish game hens that Grandma prepared for our Christmas feast. Low-fat eggnog because the regular cartons were already gone. Margarine substituted for butter. At the checkout, I counted the cash that Grandma

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard — and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence besides two good livings — and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on — lived to have six children more — to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself. A family of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are heads and arms and legs enough for the number; but the Morlands had little other right to the word, for they were in general very plain, and Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features — so much for her person; and not less unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of all boy's plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush. Indeed she had no taste for a garden; and if she gathered flowers at all, it was chiefly for the pleasure of mischief — at least so it was conjectured from her always preferring those which she was forbidden to take. Such were her propensities — her abilities were quite as extraordinary. She never could learn or understand anything before she was taught; and sometimes not even then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid. Her mother was three months in teaching her only to repeat the "Beggar's Petition"; and after all, her next sister, Sally, could say it better than she did. Not that Catherine was always stupid — by no means; she learnt the fable of "The Hare and Many Friends" as quickly as any girl in England. Her mother wished her to learn music; and Catherine was sure she should like it, for she was very fond of tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinner; so, at eight years old she began. She learnt a year, and could not bear it; and Mrs. Morland, who did not insist on her daughters being accomplished in spite of incapacity or distaste, allowed her to leave off. The day which dismissed the music-master was one of the happiest of Catherine's life. Her taste for drawing was not superior; though whenever she could obtain the outside of a letter from her mother or seize upon any other odd piece of paper, she did what she could in that way, by drawing houses and trees, hens and chickens, all very much like one another. Writing and accounts she was taught by her father; French by her mother: her proficiency in either was not remarkable, and she shirked her lessons in both whenever she could. What a strange, unaccountable character! — for with all these symptoms of profligacy at ten years old, she had neither a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome, and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions of tyranny; she was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house.

Anna rushed onward, past another row of homes, and found her way to the farm where they kept their chicken coop. She opened the netting to collect a fresh batch of eggs. "Morning, Erik, Elin, and Elise," she greeted the hens. "I've got to move quick today. Freya is coming!" She gathered at least a dozen eggs, closed up the coop, and carefully carried the bucket and the tea back to the house. An older man was pulling a cart with flowers down the street. "Morning, Anna!" "Morning, Erling!" Anna called. "Gorgeous blooms today. Do you have my favorite?" Erling produced two stems of golden crocuses. The yellow flowers were as bright as the sun. Anna inhaled their sweet aroma. "Thank you! Come by later for some fresh bread. First batch should be out of the oven midmorning." "Thank you, Anna! I will!" he said, and Anna hurried along, trying not to crack the eggs or stop again. She had a habit of stopping to talk. A lot.

The Fox and the Thorn Bush. A fox, to escape the peril of the chase, leapt into a thorn bush, whose thorns hurt him sore. Thereupon the fox, weeping in his anguish, said to the thorn bush, "I am come to thee as to my refuge, and thou hast hurt me to the death." Then the thorn bush said to the fox, "Thou hast erred, and well thou hast beguiled thyself, for thou thought to have taken me as thou art accustomed to taking chickens and hens. La zorra y el espino. Una zorra que corría y saltaba sobre unos montículos en el bosque perdió en un momento dado el equilibrio, y para no caerse, se agarró a un espino, pero sus púas le hirieron las patas, y sintiendo el dolor que ellas le producían, le dijo al espino: - ¡ Acudí a ti por tu ayuda, y más bien me has herido ! A lo que respondió el espino: - ¡Tú tienes la culpa, amiga, por agarrarte a mí, bien sabes lo bueno que soy para enganchar y herir a todo el mundo, y tú no eres la excepción!

The plea for ethical veganism, which rejects the treatment of birds and other animals as a food source or other commodity, is sometimes mistaken as a plea for dietary purity and elitism, as if formalistic food exercises and barren piety were the point of the desire to get the slaughterhouse out of one’s kitchen and one’s system. Abstractions such as 'vegetarianism' and 'veganism' mask the experiential and philosophical roots of a plant-based diet. They make the realities of 'food' animal production and consumption seem abstract and trivial, mere matters of ideological preference and consequence, or of individual taste, like selecting a shirt, or hair color. However, the decision that has led millions of people to stop eating other animals is not rooted in arid adherence to diet or dogma, but in the desire to eliminate the kinds of experiences that using animals for food confers upon beings with feelings. The philosophic vegetarian believes with Isaac Bashevis Singer that even if God or Nature sides with the killers, one is obliged to protest. The human commitment to harmony, justice, peace, and love is ironic as long as we continue to support the suffering and shame of the slaughterhouse and its satellite operations. Vegetarians do not eat animals, but, according to the traditional use of the term, they may choose to consume dairy products and eggs, in which case they are called lacto-ovo (milk and egg) vegetarians. In reality, the distinction between meat on the one hand and dairy products and eggs on the other is moot, as the production of milk and eggs involves as much cruelty and killing as meat production does: surplus cockerels and calves, as well as spent hens and cows, have been slaughtered, bludgeoned, drowned, ditched, and buried alive through the ages. Spent commercial dairy cows and laying hens endure agonizing days of pre-slaughter starvation and long trips to the slaughterhouse because of their low market value.

The last meal aboard the Titanic was remarkable. It was a celebration of cuisine that would have impressed the most jaded palate. There were ten courses in all, beginning with oysters and a choice of Consommé Olga, a beef and port wine broth served with glazed vegetables and julienned gherkins, or Cream of Barley Soup. Then there were plate after plate of main courses- Poached Salmon and Cucumbers with Mousseline Sauce, a hollandaise enriched with whipped cream; Filet Mignon Lili, steaks fried in butter, hen topped with an artichoke bottom, foie gras and truffle and served with a Périgueux sauce, a sauté of Chicken Lyonnaise; Lamb with Mint Sauce; Roast Duckling with Apple Sauce; Roast Squash with Cress and Sirloin Beef. There were also a garden's worth of vegetables, prepared both hot and cold. And several potatoes- Château Potatoes, cut to the shape of olives and cooked gently in clarified butter until golden and Parmentier Potatoes, a pureed potato mash garnished with crouton and chervil. And, of course, pâté de foie gras. To cleanse the palate, there was a sixth course of Punch à la Romaine, dry champagne, simple sugar syrup, the juice of two oranges and two lemons, and a bit of their zest. The mixture was steeped, strained, fortified with rum, frozen, topped with a sweet meringue and served like a sorbet. For dessert there was a choice of Waldorf Pudding, Peaches in Chartreuse Jelly, Chocolate and Vanilla Èclairs and French ice cream.

The sex trade is also flourishing under the patriarchal objectification of women, paid for by men who are willing and able to own or rent a girl (or sometimes a woman) for sex. Those who are exploited are comparatively powerless, and cannot refuse sexual advances or deny the wishes of those who pay (someone else) for their services. In these situations and many others, men own and control the bodies of women as they own and control the bodies of sows and cows and hens. Sexual exploitation of human females for the benefit of males is mirrored in contemporary animal industries. Men who control animal industries exploit females for their reproductive abilities as if nonhuman animals were objects devoid of will and sensation. Sows are treated as if they were bacon factories and cows are treated as if they were milk machines. Sows, cows, hens, turkeys, and horses are artificially inseminated to bring profits to the men who control their bodies and their lives. Women in the sex trade are similar to factory farmed females . . . . Even comparatively privileged women in relatively fortunate marriages can readily be likened to sows and cows. . . . The reproductive abilities of women and other female animals are controlled and exploited by those in power (usually men) and both are devalued as they age and wear out—when they no longer reproduce. Cows, hens, and women are routinely treated as if they were objects to be manipulated in order to satisfy the desires of powerful men, without regard to female's wishes or feelings.

Sancho asked the landlord what he had to give them for supper. To this the landlord replied that his mouth should be the measure; he had only to ask what he would; for that inn was provided with the birds of the air and the fowls of the earth and the fish of the sea. "There's no need of all that," said Sancho; "if they'll roast us a couple of chickens we'll be satisfied, for my master is delicate and eats little, and I'm not over and above gluttonous." The landlord replied he had no chickens, for the kites had stolen them. "Well then," said Sancho, "let senor landlord tell them to roast a pullet, so that it is a tender one." "Pullet! My father!" said the landlord; "indeed and in truth it's only yesterday I sent over fifty to the city to sell; but saving pullets ask what you will." "In that case," said Sancho, "you will not be without veal or kid." "Just now," said the landlord, "there's none in the house, for it's all finished; but next week there will be enough and to spare." "Much good that does us," said Sancho; "I'll lay a bet that all these short-comings are going to wind up in plenty of bacon and eggs." "By God," said the landlord, "my guest's wits must be precious dull; I tell him I have neither pullets nor hens, and he wants me to have eggs! Talk of other dainties, if you please, and don't ask for hens again." "Body o' me!" said Sancho, "let's settle the matter; say at once what you have got, and let us have no more words about it." "In truth and earnest, senor guest," said the landlord, "all I have is a couple of cow-heels like calves' feet, or a couple of calves' feet like cowheels; they are boiled with chick-peas, onions, and bacon, and at this moment they are crying 'Come eat me, come eat me." "I mark them for mine on the spot," said Sancho; "let nobody touch them; I'll pay better for them than anyone else, for I could not wish for anything more to my taste; and I don't care a pin whether they are feet or heels." "Nobody shall touch them," said the landlord; "for the other guests I have, being persons of high quality, bring their own cook and caterer and larder with them.

Though it’s best not to be born a chicken at all, it is especially bad luck to be born a cockerel. From the perspective of the poultry farmer, male chickens are useless. They can’t lay eggs, their meat is stringy, and they’re ornery to the hens that do all the hard work of putting food on our tables. Commercial hatcheries tend to treat male chicks like fabric cutoffs or scrap metal: the wasteful but necessary by-product of an industrial process. The sooner they can be disposed of—often they’re ground into animal feed—the better. But a costly problem has vexed egg farmers for millennia: It’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between male and female chickens until they’re four to six weeks old, when they begin to grow distinctive feathers and secondary sex characteristics like the rooster’s comb. Until then, they’re all just indistinguishable fluff balls that have to be housed and fed—at considerable expense. Somehow it took until the 1920s before anyone figured out a solution to this costly dilemma. The momentous discovery was made by a group of Japanese veterinary scientists, who realized that just inside the chick’s rear end there is a constellation of folds, marks, spots, and bumps that to the untrained eye appear arbitrary, but when properly read, can divulge the sex of a day-old bird. When this discovery was unveiled at the 1927 World Poultry Congress in Ottawa, it revolutionized the global hatchery industry and eventually lowered the price of eggs worldwide. The professional chicken sexer, equipped with a skill that took years to master, became one of the most valuable workers in agriculture. The best of the best were graduates of the two-year Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School, whose standards were so rigorous that only 5 to 10 percent of students received accreditation. But those who did graduate earned as much as five hundred dollars a day and were shuttled around the world from hatchery to hatchery like top-flight business consultants. A diaspora of Japanese chicken sexers spilled across the globe. Chicken sexing is a delicate art, requiring Zen-like concentration and a brain surgeon’s dexterity. The bird is cradled in the left hand and given a gentle squeeze that causes it to evacuate its intestines (too tight and the intestines will turn inside out, killing the bird and rendering its gender irrelevant). With his thumb and forefinger, the sexer flips the bird over and parts a small flap on its hindquarters to expose the cloaca, a tiny vent where both the genitals and anus are situated, and peers deep inside. To do this properly, his fingernails have to be precisely trimmed. In the simple cases—the ones that the sexer can actually explain—he’s looking for a barely perceptible protuberance called the “bead,” about the size of a pinhead. If the bead is convex, the bird is a boy, and gets thrown to the left; concave or flat and it’s a girl, sent down a chute to the right.

The real Dumas was imprisoned by Librans ages ago in an unlaid chicken's egg. I fed the hen to the alligators myself. Slow digestion in a cold-blooded belly was always said to be his fate. — Melchylor Slayd

The most widely marketed poultry—broiler-fryer chickens, turkeys, Cornish game hens, ducks, and geese—are all young, tender birds. For that reason, broiling, frying, and roasting are the preferred preparation methods.

There’s a story about President Calvin Coolidge and a chicken farm every evolutionary psychologist knows by heart. It goes like this: The president and his wife were visiting a commercial chicken farm in the 1920s. During the tour, the first lady asked the farmer how he managed to produce so many fertile eggs with only a few roosters. The farmer proudly explained that his roosters happily performed their duty dozens of times each day. “Perhaps you could mention that to the president,” replied the first lady. Overhearing the remark, President Coolidge asked the farmer, “Does each cock service the same hen each time?” “Oh no,” replied the farmer, “he always changes from one hen to another.” “I see,” replied the president. “Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge.

What matters in the end is how many times in this life we have said “I love you;” how many burdens carried by others we have offered to share; how many kind words we have bestowed upon children, the downtrodden and the elderly.

We hear them often in the night. Their wild yelping makes the hair on my neck rise, even as I am always compelled to go to the nearest window and fling it open to listen, despite the cold. You can hear them moving: nearer, nearer up the frozen creek bed, until they are just beyond the edge of the porch light, the moon a grinning wedge above the trees. And then they’re gone, racing up the valley into the dark. I can feel how they’re close now, beyond the meadow’s edge, somewhere in the woods there, maybe asleep or watching us with yellow eyes, alerted by our footsteps and the sharp, ringing singsong of my son’s eager voice. This is always the case: The line between us and the wild is slender, like the bit of thread I find coiled in my pocket. My fingers tease it, wanting to know how it’s wound. This is always the way. I always want to know. The thread is yellow and snarled and comes from the windowsill of the bedroom above the garage. I stuck it in my pocket this morning while tidying, meaning to throw it away. It was from tha same window that I saw the foxes last week. The ruckus of the chickens alerted me, and when I looked down, one was right below me in the snowy driveway, looking up. I pounded my fist on the glass and began to yell, but it didn’t run. Instead it just stared at me, not moving a muscle until I ran down and out into the snow without a hat or gloves or jacket, boots unlaced, shrieking like a madwoman. Of course it ran then, though not far at first—just to the top of the nearest field—and when I followed after, another joined it. They’d staked the chicken house out for sure. And even though they were a threat to our unwitting hens, I was sad when they disappeared among the white trunks of a stand of birches, and I can still feel the way my heart was hammering hard and raw in my chest after running through the snow, hair flyaway, clapping my hands. Their fur was rust-colored, and when they ran

Of all the animals raised for food, broiler chickens, layer hens, and pigs are kept in the worst conditions by a considerable margin. The only quantitative estimates of farmed animal welfare I’ve been able to find come from Bailey Norwood, an economist and agricultural expert. He rated the welfare of different animals on a scale of –10 to 10, where negative numbers indicate that it would be better, from the animal’s perspective, to be dead rather than alive. He rates beef cattle at 6 and dairy cows at 4. In contrast his average rating for broiler chickens is –1, and for pigs and caged hens is –5. In other words, cows raised for food live better lives than chicken, hens, or pigs, which suffer terribly.

They are not describing the number of animals killed for food. They are talking about animals who don’t even get the “benefit” of supposedly humane slaughter laws because they are so badly treated that they die before they ever get to slaughter. The numbers include caged hens pecked to death because they are unable to get away from their stressed, aggressive fellow prisoners; broiler chickens bred to grow so fast that their immature legs collapse under them, and they then die of thirst or hunger in the broiler shed because they cannot reach the feeders; and pigs, cattle, turkeys, and chickens who were alive when packed into transports but die from the stress that transport imposes on animals who have lived their entire lives indoors. Harish Sethu has done the sums for the United States on his website Counting Animals. The total number of animals killed in shelters each year is around 4 million, for fur 10 million, and in laboratories 11.5 million, making a total of approximately 25.5 million. Using conservative figures based on industry reports and scientific journals, Sethu estimates that 139 million chickens suffer to death annually. Adding turkeys, pigs, and cattle would increase this figure.

Then spake Jesus to the multitude, and to his disciples, Saying . . . O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate. For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of YHWH. (Matthew 23:1–2; Matthew 23:37–24:1)

She was ushered into a passage where the only light came from the tallow taper in the rabbi's hand. The house smelled of chicken soup. In the thousand miles she and Rosa and the children had traveled from Siberia, passed along like parcels from settlement to Jewish settlement, sometimes in houses, often in huts, that smell had been the one constant, as if they had followed its trail by sniffing, like dogs. However poor their hosts, a hen had been killed in their honor because hospitality demanded it.

We also kept hens for their eggs, which I was in charge of gathering from the chicken coop. I often amused myself by climbing up to the nest-box, where I liked to perch and cluck like a hen!  

Consider growing an eco-friendly lawn, instead of the conventional, perfect lawn, to keep your hens and soil their healthiest. Ecological seed mixes, which you can get at your local retail nursery or feed store, contain a variety of plant types, many of which might be considered weeds to a gardener who prefers a perfect monocrop of grass blades, but are an excellent, diverse source of greens for chickens to forage. An eco-lawn requires less maintenance such as mowing, and requires fewer resources like water and fertilizers. Clover, one of the most important plants found in eco-seed mixes, fixes nitrogen naturally in the soil and eliminates the need for fertilizers.

Atop the coop is a “green roof” covered with selected plants like sedums and hens and chicks (Sempervivum tectorum), and a nearby bog garden has carnivorous plants that eat any flies coming from the coop area.

Hens love to snack on sunflowers.

One of my favourite anecdotes is the first electric street lighting in one Nelson suburb that was powered by a small hydroelectric generator, in the hills above the city. To switch the lights on and off, a chicken run was added to the power plant. At dusk every night the chooks would go inside their coop and roost on a special hinged perch. The perch sank under their weight, and connected a switch which turned on the street lights. At first light the hens would leave the coop, the spring-loaded perch swung back and the lights went out again.

Then how did he come to learn that I was back in town?” Buster said. “It’s a small town, Buster,” Mrs. Fang answered. “When you got here, you had a grotesquely swollen face. It attracted attention.” When they first arrived back home, Buster, still adjusting to the high dosage of the medication he had given himself, woke in the van and demanded that they stop for fried chicken. “Buster, I don’t think solid food is a great idea yet,” his mother had told him, but Buster had leaned into the front of the van and reached for the steering wheel, saying, over and over in a strange monotone, “Fer-ide chick-hen.” The Fangs pulled into a Kentucky Fried Chicken ten minutes later and walked inside the restaurant. Buster swayed unsteadily as his parents directed him to a table. “What do you want?” they asked him. “Fer-ide chick-hen,” he said, “all-you-can-eat.” They left the table and returned a few minutes later with a breast, wing, thigh, and leg, a mound of gravy-soaked mashed potatoes, and a biscuit. Everyone in a five-table radius was staring at the Fangs by this point. Buster, oblivious, unpacked some bloodstained gauze from his mouth, picked up the chicken leg, extra crispy, and took a ravenous bite. He felt something come loose inside his mouth, his muscles stretched beyond comfort after so much time in atrophy, and he began to moan, a funeral dirge, dropping the leg back onto the tray. The barely chewed scrap of chicken fell from his mouth, stained a foamy red with Buster’s blood. “Okay,” Mr. Fang said, sweeping the tray off of the table, dumping it into the trash. “This little experiment is over. Let’s go home.” Buster tried to pack the gauze back into his mouth, but his mother and father were already carrying him into the parking lot. “I’m a monster,” Buster bellowed, and his parents did nothing to dissuade him of this belief. “Well, I’m not going to do it,” Buster said. “I think you should,” Annie said. Mr. and Mrs. Fang agreed. Buster did not want to talk about writing. It had been years since his last novel had been published, a spectacular failure at that.

Nest box curtains provide the hens extra privacy when laying. They can also help keep drafts away from the eggs and any baby chicks a mama hen might be brooding. In addition, nest curtains can help block the view and thus keep hens from fighting and harassing each other over a box.

For the first few years young chickens would frequently be found laminated to the blacktop, but some sort of natural selection appeared to be operating, or, if we may put it another way, flat hens don’t lay eggs.

how oft have I bgathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and have cnourished you. 5 And again, ahow oft would I have gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, yea, O ye people of the house of Israel, who have fallen; yea, O ye people of the house of Israel, ye that dwell at Jerusalem, as ye that have fallen; yea, how oft would I have gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens, and ye would not. 6 O ye house of Israel whom I have aspared, how oft will I gather you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, if ye will repent and breturn unto me with full purpose of cheart

That leaves the category of pasture-raised chickens. It seems they’re living the poultry dream—and, according to Jason, we could be, too. I nod as I take another swallow of beer. I don’t say that it sounds like an enormous amount of work or that we live in arguably one of the harshest climates in the continental United States. Nor do I point out that having spent our entire careers jockeying keyboards to make a living, we are not farmers. So while I don’t exactly tune him out, I become a passive listener. A very passive listener. Poultry isn’t exactly the foreplay talk I was hoping for, so instead I just enjoy the rhythm and cadence of his voice. I hear something about pastured hens for- aging on fresh grasses producing healthier, delicious eggs with less fat and cholesterol, something about the local food movement and its ability to remake America’s food system. I signal the server for a second beer and let it all wash over me with an occasional nod until an utterly un-ignorable statement pulls me out. “This is the kind of farm I want to start.” Now I’m listening. In fact, I’m listening so hard I realize that this particular corner of the restaurant is a convergence point for the piped-in music from two separate rooms, and they’re competing against each other like dueling mariachi bands.

At dusk, hens seek their coop. So reliable is this, there’s even a saying, an adage: Chickens come home to roost. It’s for warmth. It’s for protection. It’s hardwired. But our first shipment of nine hundred mature birds, just purchased from a commercial operation, stands on the field staring. They tilt and turn their heads to better align us with their side-placed eyes, as though await- ing instructions. Then, as darkness quiets the pasture, I get it. My hand on my lips, I mumble, “Oh, God.” These hens are out of sync with sunset because until today, they have NEVER SEEN THE SUN. While I’ve worried about many things going wrong with our unlikely egg startup, CHICKENS not knowing HOW TO BE CHICKENS was not one of them.

1 Listen to the voice of Jesus Christ, your Redeemer, the Great aI Am, whose arm of bmercy hath catoned for your sins; 2 Who will agather his people even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, even as many as will hearken to my voice and bhumble themselves before me, and call upon me in mighty prayer. 3 Behold, verily, verily, I say unto you, that at this time your asins are bforgiven you, therefore ye receive these things; but remember to sin no more, lest perils shall come upon you.

The president and his wife were visiting a commercial chicken farm in the 1920s. During the tour, the first lady asked the farmer how he managed to produce so many fertile eggs with only a few roosters. The farmer proudly explained that his roosters happily performed their duty dozens of times each day. “Perhaps you could mention that to the president,” replied the first lady. Overhearing the remark, President Coolidge asked the farmer, “Does each cock service the same hen each time?” “Oh no,” replied the farmer, “he always changes from one hen to another.” “I see,” replied the president. “Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge.” Whether

Romans introduced the practice of gelding to England, changing chickens into tender, plump capons. In The Castle of Health, William Elyot wrote, “The capon is above all other fowles praised for as much as it is easily digested.” The carving term for a capon was to “sauce” it, a much prettier term than some of the others for cutting fowl, such as “disfigure that peacock,” “spoil that hen,” “dismember the heron,” “unbrace the mallard,” and “thigh that pigeon.” Chicken with Wine, Apples, and Dried Fruit

The hens pecking about in the car park leave you in no doubt that the eggs are free-range and bring new meaning to playing chicken with the traffic.

When chickens or turkey hens are used to hatch duck eggs, they should be treated for lice and mites several days before their setting chores commence.

Man is the lone animal that devours without delivering. He doesn't give milk, he doesn't lay eggs, he is too powerless to even consider pulling the furrow, he can't run quick enough to get bunnies. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself. Our labour tills the soil, our dung fertilises it, and yet there is not one of us that owns more than his bare skin. You cows that I see before me, how many thousands of gallons of milk have you given during this last year? And what has happened to that milk which should have been breeding up sturdy calves? Every drop of it has gone down the throats of our enemies. And you hens, how many eggs have you laid in this last year, and how many of those eggs ever hatched into chickens? The rest have all gone to market to bring in money for Jones and his men. And you, Clover, where are those four foals you bore, who should have been the support and pleasure of your old age? Each was sold at a year old−you will never see one of them again. In return for your four confinements and all your labour in the fields, what have you ever had except your bare rations and a stall?

Let's recognize that wolves which are often hungry for chickens, will probably eat the chickens if allowed to carry the keys to the hen's house. For similar reasons the senile and the clumsy should probably not be allowed to walk freely around sensitive equipment. The protector of dangerous means such as nuclear weapons or other powerful decisions which may affect thousands, millions or billions of lives through a simple order or press of a button ought therefor be screened regularly, very thouroughly through a strict protocol regarding mental, physical, social and spiritual health/status. On top of this we are not fully aware of all the currently unknown dangers such as external manipulation of our own biology [as already witnessed in small scale with certain parasitic venoms in insects], the universe is colossal and there is almost certainly a few exotic, unseen and unexpected threats. Likewise, human psychology can in some ways be easy to predict, opportunity to soften otherwise perpetuated tragedies caused by the mismatch between individuals with certain characteristics and certain responsibilities. Let's also recognize that even if each of us were shipped with previously necessary primal flaws [which coincidentaly, may be highlighted as sins] also includes a very real ability to manipulate our biology and circumstances through various forms of voluntary discipline or exposure. Furthermore, while it is more comfortable to rely on our strengths perhaps we should also make an effort to explore our weakneses. Let's not forget that babies are all bundles of confusions, struggling to find their ways [and if someone has lost their love for babies they should be executed on the spot, or somewhere nearby]

She shaded in more of the tornado, a little fiercely, then turned back a few pages and let herself be pulled into the world of Carleen, the least popular chicken in her high school, pecked down by plumper hens and scorned by cocky roosters. Carleen's story wasn't hers. Amanda had been quite well liked in high school---mostly because she stayed resolutely in the middle of the road, dressing like everyone else, doing the things everyone else did. Amanda had made those choices thanks to Mae, who had already made all the mistakes. Unlike Mae, Amanda did exactly what was expected of her and not anything more. She was a good girl. Carleen was not a good girl. She was the dark chicken of her small town, pulling the other chicks in with her schemes and plans when they were young, then finding herself alone as a teenage chicken with a lot to prove and only her mysterious telekinetic powers, powers the others in the flock didn't share, to do it with. Carleen had been thoroughly rejected and cruelly humiliated by her peers, and would continue to be until she allowed the forces within her to burst free---at prom, of course, in homage to Carrie, one of Amanda's favorite books---and annihilate the chickens around her in a rampage of oil and flames. Carleen, Amanda thought, would end her prom night with a fried chicken dinner.

Ramana Maharshi’s message was clear—we must first seek to understand ourselves. Without knowledge of our superior spiritual nature, we will remain tied to the trivial and mundane. In our present bodily consciousness, our situation is like the eagle in the story below. An eagle’s egg was placed amid a brood of chickens. Thinking it to be one of their own, the hens lovingly hatched it along with their own eggs. Consequently, the baby eagle which emerged from it grew up in the company of little chicks. The result was ‘monkey see, monkey do’. The chicks would say, ‘Cluck, cluck, cluck’, and the baby eagle would also cackle along. The chicks would flutter their wings and hop clumsily on the ground. The eagle would do the same, unaware of its God-given ability to fly at altitudes of 10,000 feet above the ground. One day, an adult eagle flew by. The baby eagle looked at it with amazement, and exclaimed, ‘Wow, what a majestic bird! How is it flying at such a glorious height with so much elegance?’ ‘That is an eagle’, replied the chickens. ‘It is the king of birds; naturally, its abilities are far greater. We cannot do what it can do.’ The baby eagle believed the chickens’ sermon, and it continued its pathetic life, fluttering and cackling like them. What a pity! It was born to rule the skies but had become conditioned to flutter on the ground. Like the eagle, we too were fashioned to sparkle in the magnificence of our spirit but became illusioned to wallow in the mediocrity of bodily conceptions. As a poet said: phūla chunane āye the bāge-hayāt meṅ, khāra jhāra meṅ dāmana ulaphā kara raha gaye ‘We had come to pluck flowers from the garden of life, but in the ensuing hustle and bustle of human existence, we ended up entangled in thorns.’ On realizing our soul nature, what becomes our potential? The next section provides the answer. The

A victory is laid by the Hen, and the eggs of chickens.

Even so, the poultry industry and agribusiness generally worry that the public may come to perceive them as morally handicapped, as indeed they are. It is a sign of moral handicap to mutilate the mouth of a bird, cage her for life, starve her for money, and propose blindness as a "solution" to her suffering. It is a sign of moral handicap to force chickens and turkeys to grow so big so fast that it is painful for them merely to stand on their feet, to take away chickens' feathers, make fun of them, and force them to huddle naked together in their own waste waiting to be killed. The poultry industry is not only cruel, but obscene. It isn't only the masturbation and artificial insemination of "breeder" turkeys and increasingly of chickens, ducks, and geese, or the sticking of balloons and tampons in the uteri of laying hens and making them die a death that only a savage would conceive of. For thousands of years, human beings have violated the bodies and family life of birds and other living beings.

When your birds are three to six weeks old, place them on the kitchen floor and let them mill about for a minute or two. Then drop a hat in the middle of the floor. The hens will shrink down or run; the males usually lift their heads and look around. It’s their most basic protective instinct shining through.

Australorps are an Australian invention. Hailing from a heritage of Rhode Island Reds and Black Orpingtons, along with a few other high-production breeds, these black birds are serious about laying and have a reputation for high production and sweet temperaments.

One of the hens decided that a human standing still was an extreme threat to chickens everywhere and ran away, cackling in alarm