Apr 12, 2008
Chooks are stupid, - really stupid. They may gaze at you with one bright eye, and you may imagine that you detect in it some glint of mingled wonderment and curiosity, but in fact any glimmer of light is only an aberration caused by light entering their other eye and refracting a little as it passes through the void of their brainless skull.
We kept chooks for years in a yard under the blue damson plum trees. I suppose you could call it free range, though they rarely ventured as far as the back fence of it, preferring to mope about near the front fence, crooning piteously to themselves, and occasionally pecking at something that looked like a grass seed, but which wasn’t, or attacking some hapless slater who had thrown caution to the winds and decided to traverse a foot or two of open ground in broad daylight.. Having turned it on its back the fowl would stare at it in amazement for a moment, and might even venture another peck at it, but would more often wander off leaving it to its own devices. We fed them twice a day, with warm pollard mash in the morning and wheat in the afternoon, and on these occasions they would rudely shoulder one another aside in their greed to swallow as much as they could, but they could never bring themselves to believe that an unscheduled meal was not on hand. Hence their preference for hanging about near the front fence, because “you never knew”. Certainly they never knew.
Sometimes one of them, in a mad burst of reckless energy would scratch a hollow in the soil and take a “dust bath”, more of a dirt bath really, but that was the limit of their initiative, and even that was quite rare. Actually there was nothing to stop them flapping up into one of the plum trees and taking off over the fence to freedom, but such an ambition, with its requirement for planning and sequential procedure was well beyond them. They preferred to mope, and croon and feel unappreciated.
At the front of the yard was a little shed with a wire netting front in which the chooks spent the hours of darkness. It contained a broad shelf at about knee height, from which their excrement could be scraped to maintain some semblance of hygiene, and above it a long perch or roost, on which they would congregate at sunset, each with its head thrust under one wing, in the firm belief, no doubt, that in this attitude they were protected from the marauding tigers and dragons that were certainly pacing in frustrated bewilderment on the floor beneath them.
There were three nest boxes along one side of the shed, each lined with hay, and containing a china egg as an indicator of the purpose of the setup. In these each chook would deposit an egg every day or two, with appropriate fanfare of clucking and crowing. We gathered the eggs each day, because if left there, sooner or later one of the chooks would put a clumsy foot on an egg, and discover to its amazement that the contents were indeed edible. After that some chooks would come to regard all eggs as sources of nourishment to be broached and consumed. As it was they never seemed to notice that the number of eggs in the nests never increased. Perhaps counting up to two was too much of a mental strain for them. However after they had laid a dozen or so eggs, one or other of them would go broody and sit on the nest looking self important and waiting in joyful anticipation for the china egg to hatch. As we didn’t keep roosters none of their eggs were fertile anyway, but sometimes we would buy a dozen fertile eggs from a neighbouring farmer, and set the broody chook to hatch them, which they did, quite unaware that the offspring were no relations of theirs.
These days it is fashionable for teenage girls and others to get very worked up about hens being farmed in batteries of separate cages. Each chook has its own cage, about a foot square, with a grill to stand on so that excrement drops through onto a collecting board instead of remaining there to be tramped in by the chook. Past all the cages runs a moving belt containing a continuous supply of fresh food, and a water pipe with little holes in it, provides fresh water which cannot get mixed with the food. As each chook has its own cage, mites and lice that might infect one of them can not spread to the others, unlike the arrangement which we had where the chooks all huddled together each night on the roost and provided a perfect opportunity for the parasites to transfer from one to another. It is difficult to imagine a chook planning its own utopia, or anything else for that matter, but if it could, I think it would very likely come up with a battery system of some kind. Unlimited access to clean food and water, no mess, no fleas, no rain and no tigers, - what else could you want? Sure they rub the feathers off their necks where they endlessly reach through the bars for more food and water, but I doubt whether they are concerned about personal appearance. Ladies will of course protest that “You wouldn’t like it if it was you in the cage!” which is true, but then I am not a chook.
I once knew a lady who felt so strongly about the plight of battery hens that she bought a dozen of them at auction, and took them home in two cages to introduce them to the good life. As soon as she got home she took the cages off the truck and put them in a green paddock near the gate, and opened the doors. The chooks remained huddled in the cages. “Poor things,” she thought. “The wonder of it all has overwhelmed them.” So she went away to unload the groceries. But when she came back they were still cowering in the cages, so she picked up each cage and shook the chooks out of it, to give them a taste of freedom. When she came back next time they were back in their cages, looking out in terror at the dreadful landscape. She shook them out again and closed the doors of the cages, but when she came back next time they were huddled on the tops of the cages, still shrinking from the threatening world. Like I said, chooks are stupid, really stupid.