Chickens

I always had such a wonderful impression of chickens, especially little red hens because of the children's story. That little red hen did everything for everyone while illustrating the process of making bread from a seed of grain! "Who will help me plant this seed?" "Not I!" "Not I!" "Not I!" You can't help but feel for the little red hen. She is so good! It's probably a tale about the evils of communism actually, but that's not what I'm writing about . . .


I recently read a short story by Sherwood Anderson about chickens. It blew my mind! Here is an excerpt from "The Egg" -- it is so depressing and comical at the same time. He details life on a chicken farm in the late 1800s. How awful but I've heard most chicken farms today are even worse.

I grew into boyhood on the place and got my first impressions of life there. From the beginning they were impressions of disaster and if, in my turn, I am a gloomy man inclined to see the darker side of life, I attribute it to the fact that what should have been for me the happy joyous days of childhood were spent on a chicken farm.

One unversed in such matters can have no notion of the many and tragic things that can happen to a chicken. It is born out of an egg, lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as you will see pictured on Easter cards, then becomes hideously naked, eats quantities of corn and meal bought by the sweat of your father's brow, gets diseases called pip, cholera, and other names, stands looking with stupid eyes at the sun, becomes sick and dies. A few hens and now and then a rooster, intended to serve God's mysterious ends, struggle through to maturity. The hens lay eggs out of which come other chickens and the dreadful cycle is thus made complete. It is all unbelievably complex. Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned. Small chickens, just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one up in one's judgments of life. If disease does not kill them they wait until your expectations are thoroughly aroused and then walk under the wheels of a wagon--to go squashed and dead back to their maker.

There is a small chicken farm near where I live in NJ. The farmer's day job is teaching art at one of the local elementary schools. The chickens make their nests in a variety of sculptures in his back yard. In the springtime, you can see the hens running to and fro, across the street -- risking their lives. Their tiny eggs sometimes roll onto the sidewalk. One really couldn't depend on these creatures for any sort of lively hood. It's a good thing he's an art teacher.