Why chickens?

日本語

"Why do you raise chickens?" people ask me.

Sometimes they are genuinely curious, other times I can feel that their real question is "Why the hell would anyone want to do such unimpressive thing as raising chickens?"

I usually get away with quick answers like "because it's fun" or "I like chickens." (I am vegetarian.) But this is only part of the answer. I raise chickens because it's fun to watch them as they grow, but also because of some serious reasons that would make for a too long answer to a casual question.

But what if I had a listener who wouldn't be in a hurry and would want to hear a full, honest answer. What would I say?

I would probably start with a question:

Do you know when was the last time when you ate an egg?

If you can't remember, I can help you. It was probably today. But you probably didn't notice.

When thinking egg, we imagine a sunny side up or an omelette. But we eat eggs much more than that. In almost every piece of pastry, in a cake, a pudding and ice cream and in plenty of other foods and meals. We eat eggs but we don't notice. They are invisible.
If we don't notice, we can't give them a thought.

When was the last time that you thought of a hen when you were eating an egg?

Every egg, even the most invisible one who's presence can only be proved by reading the ingredients label, must have been laid by a hen sometime, somewhere.

What did the hen look like?

If you live in Japan like me, there's 99.9% probability that the hen looked like this:

(Click on the picture to enlarge.)

Alternatively, if the eggs were brown, it could have been this:

These are not random internet pictures. I took these pictures myself when I lived close to a "small" chicken farm with "only" 14,000 chickens. Nowadays an average size of a chicken farm (for eggs, not meat) in Japan is 52,000 birds (Data from 2013. Japan Poultry Association. 鶏卵をめぐる情勢 Retrieved on August 20, 2015)

These pictures do not fully communicate what it was like in the chicken house.

They don't show the constant noise of the birds' distressed cries, the air full of dust and the ammonia smell of poop piled up under the cages. Here and there there was a dead chicken in the cage, together with a live one:

It was not a nice place to be. Neither the chickens nor the worker in charge of them was happy. You have to become selectively emotionally numb to be able to work here every day, 6 days a week (All employees in this family farm had a 6-day workweek.)

For me, this experience was strong enough to decide that I will only buy eggs laid by cage free hens. As a personal choice, that's fine. But what else can I do? I am not an animal rights activist and I don't think that walking around showing people these pictures and telling them what to do is a good idea. This is what some overcommitted vegans do and everyone hates them.  People don't like being preached. I don't like it either.

What I can do is raise a few chickens myself in the way I wish all chickens in the world were raised, and supply their eggs to people who would otherwise buy the battery-cage ones. That would be my tiny contribution to compassionate and environmentally sustainable chicken farming.

***

If my listener was still be paying attention, I would continue.

Have you ever read Michael Pollan's book "Omnivore's Dilemma"?

It's book about eating, more precisely about 'America's national eating disorder,' but Pollan's observations apply pretty much to all developed world.
Pollan is very good in dressing his ideas in the right words (that's why his books are bestsellers), so I'd better borrow a few quotes rather than making up clumsy statements myself.

[T]he way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds. [...] What is perhaps most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures these relationships and connections.  [...] If we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat. (Omnivore's Dilemma, p. 10-11)

"Eating is an agricultural act,"as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world --- and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. 
(Omnivore's Dilemma, p. 11)

What we eat matters. That's why chickens.

To conclude with an appropriate scene, here are our chickens devouring their favorite summer treat: