This is generally one of the first things that people who decide to keep hens learn, and is reprinted in nearly every homesteader/farmer magazine ever.
(that said, I'm surprised to find it on the front page of hacker news!)
Where I live in NH lots of small farms and people keep a few hens, and most of the smaller places will mention this to customers.
Eggs from these "home hens" definitely taste different, though I doubt it has to do with washing and much more to do with hen diet.
(And now it's mid noon here, time to go home and make eggs. Far more important than any local food movement, for me, is living within walking distance to work!)
I can totally vouch for having your own hens. I have three, and I'm planning on getting another three this weekend.
- The amount of work is fairly minimal - about as much effort as a pet rabbit - and you get eggs
- When you observe chickens up close, they're surprisingly attractive animals. And not as stupid as you would assume, either
- The eggs really do taste better. I think this is because a) they eat better, and b) they are much, much fresher
- You can feed most of your kitchen scraps to your chickens to recycle your waste. They're omnivores, so eat meat (although officially you're not supposed to feed them it).
> When you observe chickens up close, they're surprisingly attractive animals.
Wow! I kept 20-25 laying hens in yearly batches when I was between the ages of 13 and 18. I found them to be singularly repulsive, all having the same rude, avaricious, gluttonous personality, and all behaving in the most horrible manner possible. I'm not against eating chicken mainly because of this experience.
I also had several pairs of ducks during those years, providing an avian contrast. Ducks have different personalities, aren't nearly as vicious to each other or to their prey, and are generally good sports.
Everything else you say about laying hens is true in my experience. The eggs are indeed much, much better than supermarket eggs.
Actually, you're both right, you just had different experiences. With 2-6 hens, the flock is more centered around the human, allow themselves to be touched and hand fed, and exhibit recognizable personalities. With 10-20 hens, the flock is more "wild" and establish their own pecking order by being aggressive to each other (and grabbing all the food they can grab before the others). I had a flock of 12 and saw both kinds of behavior, though because we kept the roosters for a while, it tended towards the wild side.
Of course, chicken breeds, coop environment, and owner personality are huge factors in chicken behavior as well.
BTW, this is a great article in that it reveals a little about our industrial food chain. I suppose it's popular here on HN because it has a bit of the "How things work" vibe. There should be articles like this for every type of food sold in stores.
It seems very common with animals and humans alike that we tend to exhibit "mob mentality" when in larger groups. I picture the hens in a large group attacking each other over food to be similar to going out on "Black Friday" after the US Thanksgiving or a company with a broken employee culture. Not exactly the most attractive or positive examples of human nature.
Making generalizations from a single style of husbandry is a little like making generalizations about human children based on a single school. A year at many US schools might lead you to believe children are rude, avaricious, and gluttonous, but I don't think that's a fair universal characterization of kids.
A sibling comment mentions flock size as a factor, but there are many factors in chicken personality. Most farmers create scarcity across almost all resources, from food to grooming space, to running and flying room, to pasture time, and so on. Almost any creature, in constant competition for scarce resources amongst her peers, will develop a deplorable personality, sadistic or vindictive.
>I'm not against eating chicken mainly because of this experience.
I don't understand your reasoning there. To me, whether it's ok to eat an animal should depend on whether it can experience suffering, not on whether it has a good personality. I mean, is it ok to eat people who are jerks?
Jesus Christ what a dumbshit comment. You quoted him correctly, then failed to apply what you quoted, at all, to the words you wrote. Do you think bacteria suffer?
A lot of people respond to the "why is it ok to eat these animals" question with, "because chickens/cows/turkeys are dumb." Following that logic, it's ok to eat people with a low enough IQ, or mental handicaps, no?
People rationalize, so comments like "something that is dumb is fine to eat" is basically their mind trying to find something to say when they should had said "I do not know".
Maybe surprising (or not), but I find people who farm/hunt/fish to be the more intelligent kind of people when discussing food and ecology. Sure there are people who just want to exploit things for money, but many others do have a understanding for maintain a balance with nature.
One answer I have received to the question about "why is it ok to eat animals", was that the ecology balance in nature would break down if humanity suddenly stopped eating meat. Not only have we forced our self to be part of almost everything, but our actions have cemented us to a central position. Farmers has chased away predators to the point where hunters are needed to maintain balance in many forests. Some lakes are so polluted with nutrients, that you need to maintain fishing just to keep some species from extincting other less common fish species.
This doesn't address however why breeding animals for meat is fine. This is speculation, but some local farmers might say that as long the animal can live a happy life, then why shouldn't we eat them. The farmer job is to maintain a happy flock of chickens/cows/turkeys, and makes sure it stay healthy and in appropriate size. If they do that, then morality should be on their side.
maintain a happy flock of chickens/cows/turkeys,
and makes sure it stay healthy and in appropriate
size
is practically non-existent. E.g. even "free range/cage free" chickens:
- Have their beaks burned off because they live in crowded conditions where they will attack and main / kill each other.
- Are sorted male from female as chicks, where the males are then immediately killed in bulk. The 'industry standard' way to do this is to put them all in garbage bags to suffocate them, or to toss them all into a wood chipped en masse[1].
[1] Note: Even the chicks sold to people raising chickens in the city go through this process. E.g. in Portland, you can only raise 6 hens on your property. Roosters are not allowed.
Industry maybe. Local farmer, heck no. If they do, don't buy from them.
It might be added, that in Europe, farmers get subsidies from the European union, and thus can keep the flock in rather low size and still earn a living on it. It is still a rather small income however, so many local farmers now days only supplement their earning with cows/chicken/eggs/sheep, and their main income comes from something else.
Yes, local farmers. Even small farmers and people who have a flock in their backyard generally get there hens from large-scale facilities that routinely kill the male chicks within hours of hatching (usually in terrible ways).
Bootstrapping is an issue, but then I have no experienced of your scenario in the wild. Small farmers tend to collect/receive hens from other small farmers, often as barter or gifts. Small farmers have a common ground which each other, which is a primary part of personal networks. It was not an uncommon chain of events in my childhood to hear during parties complements of the color of the eggs/feathers/subspecies, and see a trade emerge. Sometimes with a bottle of something expensive changing hand.
Same goes for male chicks. Those that aren't eaten (keeping the flock happy and appropriate sized), are observed closely when they reach mature age. If they don't fit well with the flock, they get bartered with a other farmers with an male from their flock. This was often the first step in handling an fight between two males that fought aggressively over dominance of the flock.
Sure, there will always exist bad apples in the world, and people should try avoid those. In the past, it was a strong asymmetrical information problem for buyers. Hopefully, with more information sharing and systems where buyers can rate sellers, we might get improvements where local suppliers that treat their animals well are encouraged.
There is a certain inescapable problem even with small farms raising layer hens. I know exactly how this plays out large-scale and some idea on a smaller farm.
There are different breeds that are raised as layers and for meat. Layers have been bred to produce more eggs than normal, and meat birds to produce more meat than usual. Layers are not raised for meat. But farmers do need to fertilize and hatch a certain number of eggs to continue to get new generations of layer hens. Somewhere around 50% of those are males. If you're lucky, you can keep 1 rooster for 6 hens, and even that is pushing it. Those numbers just don't work.
I know that many small farmers and families with small flocks already get their hens from large hatcheries. I would like to know what happens to that minority of male chicks that are hatched on small farms though.
| In England the standard way is to gas the chicks
I'm referring to the US. Specifically, there was a case where an animal rights group (maybe PETA?) sued a farmer (in Montana?) for using one of those two techniques, and the judge threw it out as acceptable because it was standard industry practice.
| Killing off the males is a problem for dairy
| cattle too
My understanding is that, in the US, they send these males off to become veal (so technically people that are vegetarian for ethical reasons -- "I don't want to kill animals" -- are supporting animal killing anyway).
Dairy cattle males may not be suitable as commercial veal, like not all sheep breeds are suitable as meat sheep.
If they are suitable, then you've got to deal with either raising them from birth as white veal or, allowing them a bit more freedom in movement and food, as rose veal.
Just to add another animal to the mix, the same problem can be seen in dairy goat herds in countries where goat isn't consumed by the majority of the population.
Let's get to the softer side of Singer an the utilitarians. "It's alright to eat an animal if they were raised in a healthy and suffering free environment and killed with as minimal pain as possible, essentially giving them a life with more pleasure and less suffering than their life in nature. Plus, you get to eat them."
No, because even a highly handicapped person is capable of pieces of higher thought. They have an intact brain, after all. More or less the only way to remove them from the 'human mind' category is if they are completely braindead. In which case, sure it's okay to eat people that are already dead from natural causes.
Well we generally share susceptance to the same diseases and parasites as humans, so it's a bad idea to be eating them.
However, prepared correctly with enough heat, possibly also frozen beforehand (that's what works on pork), I hear humans can actually be quite tasty.
It's seen as a bit of a social faux pas in our society though, so you might want to find a different society first if you'd like to enjoy tasty humans.
>It's seen as a bit of a social faux pas in our society though, so you might want to find a different society first if you'd like to enjoy tasty humans.
Right, killing is what I was talking about. This thread started with someone mentioning the morality of "eating chickens", and I just copied that phrasing.
Well I can't really tell, I've grown up knowing that eating humans is bad. It's just the way it's always been.
I've also grown up knowing that cats and dogs are not for eating. And yet, even just a hundred kilometers away, I hear Italians eat plenty of cats and even consider it normal in some areas.
No. If you eat people that are different, then other groups of people might want to eat you because you are different, so an environment where eating any people is ok creates an environment where you might be eaten yourself.
The argument maratd gives thus is a justification for eating animals that are not smart enough to to look at our behaviour and decide whether or not we're fair based on whether or not we also eat animals.
But it explicitly rules out cannibalism (or eating intelligent aliens).
If I find a homeless person in an alleyway, ask him about his friends and family, and he tells me that no one knows or cares that he's alive, it's ok to eat him, as long as I don't tell anyone about it?
No. What the gp is saying is basically the categorical imperative. "It is bad to eat people because I don't want to live in a world where I could be eaten (me also being people)".
He's not saying it's okay as long as you don't get eaten he's saying "as a human, I do not want to get eaten. Therefore, I do not want to inflict this on other humans either".
But why is "human" the privileged class? We could use a subclass, like "human with an IQ above 100", or a superclass, like "animal". You're just restating where he or she is drawing the line, not explaining why that's the right place to draw it.
The privileged class is not human. The logic was handed to you, you just ignored it.
"smart enough to to look at our behaviour and decide whether or not we're fair based on whether or not we also eat animals"
Yes of course an IQ number is a ridiculous way to draw a line; moving on.
'Animal' is a logical measure but 1. who cares about sea sponges and 2. it's not universal, what if aliens show up.
Drawing the line at creatures that are intelligent enough to draw this same line is a very clean and clever solution to the problem. Anything with minimal critical thinking skills is saved. Any dumb brute is fair game.
Oh, I found a problem in your clean solution: nobody knows how to detect, in non-humans, the presence or absence of a mind sufficiently capable to pass your test. Or have you been interviewing all the animals you eat?
It's pretty easy to do some basic tests for intelligence in social animals. The test concept is quite sophisticated, so you can definitely rule out species. Humans raise a lot of dumb animals. Just don't ask me to eat dolphin.
The question you propose to ask is "can this species understand its own fairness to other species?"
That is absolutely not testable by our current means, not for any rigorous definition of knowledge. There are numerous instances, for example, of mothers of one species nursing the young of another species. Sometimes even of predator mothers nursing prey young. So, prima facie, assuming a reasonable definition of "fairness" it would seem that a vast number of species are capable of exhibiting this trait, including many of the ones you eat.
Second, it's also completely arbitrary. Why test for fairness? Why not ability to generate a profit on the stock market, or to do square roots, or tie shoes? It's a stupidly chosen metric that, at its heart, embodies circular logic -- choose a human trait, and then apply a human-centric test (which we don't even do by the way) to see if the species can be eaten. What do you expect the result would be? Even dolphins can fail this exam.
The bottom line is, your criteria is arbitrary and untestable. And it cannot even be applied consistently, as you would have to admit the consumption of severely encephalitic fetuses and the like -- which is something only a person arguing an abstraction could endorse. No socially well-adjusted person can seriously admit that they want such a thing to be permissible in their civilization.
Another way of going about it would be to allow/disallow in aggregate, not in specific cases. AKA all humans or no humans. In which case it wouldn't be allowed even with a braindead person.
There exist people who aren't braindead, but who don't have sufficient intelligence to have a concept of "being fair". I don't know where you got the idea that they don't exist. (You may counter that even the least intelligent person will get angry if you attack them, and that's largely true; but the same is true of any animal, so we must be talking about a more complex understanding of fairness than that.)
And you could say that being part of a species gives you special moral standing if other members of your species have the attributes required for it, even if you don't personally have them, but it would be a completely arbitrary thing to say.
They exist but they are far rarer than mere retardation. Rare enough that I'm just going to punt. The answer for them doesn't matter in the big picture.
Maybe not, but whether it's ok to eat animals does, and so does consistency. If the criteria you previously gave is really the criteria you believe makes it ok to kill/eat something, why aren't you willing to say it's ok to eat humans who meet the criteria?
This is some really terrible generalizing. I've spent a lot of time with a lot of different chickens (hens and roosters). If you spend a fair amount of time with them, you really do see individual personalities strongly emerge. I've known many chickens to learn their names and excitedly come running up when called. I've also known a few who enjoyed being held.
Now, I've also spent some time with ducks and I'm not going to do any sort of contrast like you have. Ducks can be just as pleasant to be around. They can also be horrible to each other. I knew one duck who was prone to getting picked on by his flock mates, who occasionally attempted to drown him.
I've gotta laugh a bit at your use of the word avaricious to describe a chicken. I'm not sure where that could even be coming from. I'm not trying to discount your experience, but it really doesn't seem to me that you spent the time getting to know the animals in any way. And using that as a justification to eat them. Well I've got some coworkers you might be interested in too...
Having kept both ducks and chickens myself, the ducks were a noisy undifferentiated mass of (delicious) hassle. The chickens were fascinating and all had distinct personalities; they were vicious to bugs and occasionally each other, but always friendly with people.
>Wow! I kept 20-25 laying hens in yearly batches when I was between the ages of 13 and 18. I found them to be singularly repulsive, all having the same rude, avaricious, gluttonous personality, and all behaving in the most horrible manner possible.
Get yourself some Silkies. They lay smaller eggs but have a very pleasant disposition.
Keeping hens alive is a lot harder than most people would predict however.
I mean it varies from area to area, but foxes killing hens is a stereotype for a reason. Cats will try too as will many other predators depending on area.
You leave that door open one night and expect to return to a garden of feathers...
when I lived in Portland, the problem was raccoons. They're a lot like primates - they're smart enough to pry open doors, plus they've also got sharp claws. Even the most experienced chicken keepers eventually lose their flock to raccoons.
Is it hard only because of predators?
I.e. if they're in a sturdily fenced enclosure, are you pretty much free from any risk? Or are other things like cold, diseases, etc. tricky to manage?
I love eggs, and have often thought about having my own chicken... although with my current urban living situation, it would be quite hard :)
We've had reasonably deep snow, and they've been OK (as long as you have more than one so they can keep each other warm).
In terms of diseases, there are some nasty ones like red mites that can suck their blood, but disinfecting the coop takes care of that (and I've never seen any evidence of it). The only thing my chickens have really suffered from is scaley leg, but you can get ointment for that.
I also find they decide to pluck their own feathers out at odd times due to moulting or broodiness.
Racoons are very sharp creatures and can open cages and pens that aren't designed well. If your wire mesh is too large and your chickens stay close to they edge they will lay wait and grab them thru the cage.
A comment on that page led me to read about guard llamas, guard donkeys and mini horses. I hadn't realised llamas could be used as guard animals at all.
- Being that dogs and coyotes are among the greatest predators of sheep, a llama can be very effective in alerting and protecting a flock of sheep against such predators. A good guard llama is very cautious and curious of these predators and will usually charge them, and if the predator does not retreat, kick and stomp them.
- One llama is capable of guarding up to 2,000 sheep in up to 300 acres, and can decrease the amount of predation in a flock up to 100%.
- Also, llamas ... often will protect birthing sheep and will alert producers to sick or hurt sheep.
On my dads farm one of our goats had babies (kids?), after a few weeks we allowed them to roam the pastures. For some reason the donkey had something against one of the kids and stomped it to death, then proceeded to throw its dead body around like a ragdoll for hours.
We've had chickens killed by animals that dig below the fence and by animals that climb over it and by birds that fly over it. If you cover those areas then yes they won't die, chickens are pretty sturdy. Or you can just buy/breed new chickens, it doesn't happen that often (may depend on your area though). One of the hens laid beautiful light brown eggs with a pattern dark brown dots. Sadly she died to a marten or fox.
Off the top of my head some of the culprits I have caught in the hen house:
* Snakes (sometimes, having a snooze still full of young chickens),
* Eagles,
* water rats,
* wild dogs,
* foxes,
* feral cats,
* neighbour's dogs,
* pigs,
* kids,
* and others I have probably forgotten.
Needless to say, keeping chickens alive can be a tricky task. Each time it happened the coop was locked. Also, I grew up in country Australia.
Agree. There was a reason why the outside yard of the hen house had a chicken grill around it, including a chicken grill "roof" for the yard. Even then, foxes and eagles ate more hens than we. The hens really like to sneak out of their yard and hen house.
Did not have any issues with snakes or water rats (Sweden), but we did have a issue with flooding. With water just a hand deep, one or two would sometimes drown (the rest would either sit on the sitting sticks, or roosting).
On a more positive side, I never had any issues with cats (even feral ones from what I remember) or dogs. there are no wild dogs where I lived, but we did operative a store right next to the hen house, and customers dogs (and kids) were often running around.
That is something I have never been able to understand, everyone I know who keeps chickens either has cats or their neighbours have cats. Why would the cats ignore the chickens?
Because chickens are strong and have sharp beaks, and even if they manage to overpower a chicken it will hurt. As long as the cat has enough food it probably won't try. A large rooster would be able to win a fight with a cat.
Also, cats usually won't go after anything that's willing to face the cat down, even smaller animals like rats. I have both cats and rats and the cats will watch the rats in fascination, and even sniff noses with the rats when I have the door to the cage open, but the rats show no fear to the cats, and will even rush the cage bars if they decide a cat is too much in "their territory" and the cats respect that. This has held true through 8 different rats so far, and like 6 or 7 different cats (mine and various roommates).
In general, to a cat, "runs away" == "prey" and "comes right up to me" == "equal and/or potential threat"
Partly perception - chickens are taller than cats and with wings spread out they can look quite large.
Partly aggression - chickens are/can be nasty and will attack other animals with sharp beaks. Combine this with the fact that they're flock animals, one cat isn't going up against multiple flying, aggressive, pointy ended foes.
I have been growing up with hens next to home and I can confirm they are far from being stupid at all. On the contrary, they are sharp animals who recognize people (if a stranger walks in they would run way from them, but if a familiar face shows up they stay calm) and have distinct personalities. And when you catch them, they become extremely calm and can be touched just like a cat or a dog, and end up liking it in the end.
All the above you said about better eggs and feeding them kitchen scraps is entirely true. Basically they "recycle" almost everything. They eat fruits, vegetables, nuts, bread and all. No waste.
BTW, I think all birds descend from dinosaurs. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird: "Paleontologists regard birds as the only clade of dinosaurs to have survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 65.5 Ma (million years) ago."
My city council just had a huge argument about whether people living in the city should be allowed to keep a couple of hens. After a year of wrangling, council ended up voting down a proposal to do a small-scale trial in just two wards where a majority of people supported the initiative.
It was as embarrassing as it was frustrating to see the quality of their debate over the health risks, which the city's public health department confirmed is no greater than the health risk of a pet cat or dog.
(that said, I'm surprised to find it on the front page of hacker news!)
Where I live in NH lots of small farms and people keep a few hens, and most of the smaller places will mention this to customers.
Eggs from these "home hens" definitely taste different, though I doubt it has to do with washing and much more to do with hen diet.
(And now it's mid noon here, time to go home and make eggs. Far more important than any local food movement, for me, is living within walking distance to work!)