on Life, Death and Chickens Part I

Earlier this year, my boyfriend and I decided it was time we added chickens to our backyard garden.  We spend the better part of January and February building our A-frame mobile coop which is technically suited for 5 hens.  This was something I was thinking about doing for a long time, for a lot of reasons, and certainly we have already reaped the benefits of more eggs than we know what to do with.

But one major part of this experiment was to settle an ethical dilemma I've had since I accidentally left a worm on a sun-baked stair case and later returned to find it crispy; is it ethical to kill? 

There are meat eaters who abhor seeing a dead animal.  They want to remain unaware of how the slice of steak got on their table.  That is their own journey complete with their own moral reasoning.  For all I know they have already had this internal dialogue with themselves, acknowledged that meat means killing, are okay with that, and simply find a carcass stinky or otherwise simply don't like the aesthetics.  Who can say. 

I am not one of those people though.  I need to make sure I fully comprehend what I am doing when I eat meat, or eat anything, or do anything in general!  I want to make sure that every time I choose to eat meat, I am making a fresh cost benefit analysis, lest my decision making process be abandoned in lieu of rote behavior. 

And this is part of the reason why I wanted to get chickens; to determine if I can physically kill a being for my consumption.  If I can't, I am of the mind that I should probably become a vegetarian again.  I am not a person who is easily disgusted.  I often clean out the coop with my bare hands.  (Don't worry, I wash my hands before eating... sometimes :-P)  If the only thing preventing me from eating meat is that I cannot kill it, then there is no rational reason for me to say that I should eat meat, as the mere act of doing so is what is causing the killing to occur. 

If I have an emotional reaction, sympathy, for example, then why should I not have a similar reaction to the chicken whose fluffy butt has not been running around my yard?  I am doing the chickens no favors by supporting the propagation of large poultry houses.  In addition to being killed they are horribly treated for all of their short lives.  I am favoring the propagation of the Cornish Cross breed, a breed so anthropologically genetically selected that when a backyard chicken enthusiast like myself tries to raise them, they will at minimum get a 30% pre-slaughter mortality.  This is a breed who has been bred to grow so fat so quickly to be made for the pot that they have heart attacks and die before the 6-8 weeks needed to go to slaughter are up. 

A chicken still dies.  I need to make sure my rational, holistic knowledge of that fact is included in the cost benefit analysis, and killing my own meat is the best way to not forget any aspect of that fact.

We are not strangers to death in our flock.  It should be noted that we have had two taken by hawks; one of them was still a chick and had a little chick fluff left.  Then a week ago, one of our hens dropped dead.  We still aren't sure why, but we are suspecting that she was egg bound (where an egg/egg pieces get caught in her reproductive tract and block everything else.)  We weren't forcefully sad about the event.  My boyfriend keeps saying he is disappointed, not sad, that the chicken didn't make it to our dinner table.

But I am not wholly convinced by either of us.  Sometimes we bring it up, saying simply, "poor Not-Penguin". 

That being said, chickens are mean creatures.  Not-penguin, the term we used to differentiate this barred rock who died from the other two, was one of two chicks we purchased after the first hawk victim was taken away.  Because at that time the two of them were still babies while the other four were full fledged pullets (hen form, not laying eggs yet), they were really picked on.  The Penguin  and Not Penguin could be seen running through the yard together, often wing and wing touching.  After Not Penguin collapsed and died, the first chicken trying to peck at it and eat it was The Penguin.  So much for being butt buddies.

Is inter-chicken cruelty a good reason for why it is okay to kill these creatures?  Is the selfishness of the species what makes it okay to take away the one thing all creatures desire to do (survive)?  I am kind of banking on it.  How they view the world is clearly different from how humans view the world.  They are driven by instinct and outside events.  Death is what will happen to them, in any scenario, and they will never be authors of it.  That I have given them a good life while they are here is payment for the fact that I will profit from being that author.

Then again, sometimes I think, if a bunch of teenaged girls were locked in a high school, with ice cream, cheeseburgers and other treats in abundance to eat around them, would it be okay for us to kill them because they keep making fun of the ugly one and all they think about is shoes?

There will be a part II to these ramblings after our first slaughter.