There was an actual, historic chicken that ran around like a chicken with its head cut off. In the 1940s Mike, a Colorado rooster on his way to the dinner table, survived an incomplete decapitation that left enough of his brain stem intact that he remained partly functional and could run around. During the eighteen months he lived in this condition, his owner toured the United States and exhibited him as a sideshow attraction. In Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them, Tove Danovich describes Mike sympathetically but says that he “wasn’t great for the reputation of the chicken.”
She says that chickens are smart and soulful, and she regrets that people make fun of them. Philip Levy, the author of Yard Birds: The Lives and Times of America’s Urban Chickens, feels the same. He says, “One of my goals is to make people think twice before laughing at chickens.” Some immutable principles of humor work against this goal, however, because chickens are humor, in a sense, and even their long overuse to get a laugh will not discourage people from using them to get one. And in fairness to comedy, some chickens were bred for it. One of Danovich’s chickens is a Salmon Faverolle, a breed with “a large, fluffy white beard that would impress any mall Santa…. People often refer to [this] breed as ‘barnyard comedians.’” Another backyard chicken keeper, Gina G. Warren, says in her book Hatched: Dispatches from the Backyard Chicken Movement that Silkies, a popular breed, are too small for eating, have head feathers like “spherical halos,” “are unreliable egg producers,” “run like drunk dinosaurs and are infinitely more hilarious than useful.”
According to people knowledgeable about chickens, the egg came first. An animal not very much like a chicken produced an egg containing an offspring more chicken-like than its parents, and by mutation the process kept happening through the ages until an egg emerged containing something that was indisputably a chicken—ergo, the primacy of the egg. Humans domesticated some of these animals 3,000 or 3,500 years ago. The red jungle fowl, the chicken’s ancestor, still lives in the wild in Southeast Asia. After having been caught (the hard part), chickens are readily portable, and humans in their wanderings took them all over. They were in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, making the story about the rooster crowing after Peter’s third betrayal of Jesus at least not physically impossible. A pope ordered that churches put images of roosters at their highest point as a reminder of our frailty—hence the rooster weather vane.
Through crossbreeding, many chickens lost their original jungle-camo colorations and became white or white-and-black checked. This is the color scheme of the Plymouth Rock and the Dominique, popular barnyard breeds in the US in the early 1800s. Then in the 1850s a craze called Hen Fever hit Boston. The city’s whaling fleet was bringing back from the South Seas colorful breeds of chickens that this hemisphere had never seen—Malays, Bengallers, and Chittaprats. A breed called the Shanghai (now known as the Brahma) stood taller than other chickens and had thick fur-like feathers, even down its legs to the ends of its toes. Herman Melville described the Shanghai as like an “oriental king in some magnificent Italian opera.”
Fashionable Bostonians lived in houses with yards where they could keep the new exotics. Acquisitiveness set in. Hen Fever spread to other cities, raising chickens in backyards caught on, and cities allowed it within their limits. When the fad died down, wandering chickens became associated with poor and immigrant city neighborhoods, where people kept them for the eggs. After scientists discovered that diseases were caused by germs, urban dwellers worried about sanitation and saw chickens as part of the problem. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, city after city passed ordinances against keeping them.
People in the US did not eat much chicken—only about ten pounds per person a year—until 1940. During World War II, the government wanted red meat for the troops and rationed it for civilians, who were encouraged to eat chicken and eggs instead. By 1943 US consumption of chicken had risen to sixteen pounds a year, and it continued going up after the war. Soon chickens in the aggregate were no longer just a barnyard animal but an egg-and-meat-producing industrial engine. The chicken business moved from New England south, first to the Delmarva Peninsula and then to parts of Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Alabama, where the weather was warmer and the rocky soil in the hill country wasn’t good for much else. A low-income, nonunionized southern workforce raised chickens for eating, known as broilers, and chickens for laying eggs, called battery hens because they were confined in groups of about nine to a cage, or battery. The vast hangar-like industrial spaces where all this continues at increasing scale can in no way be called barns.
One of the biggest moments in chicken history—maybe in history, period—came in the fall of 1983 with the introduction of the McNugget. For McDonald’s restaurants, which invented it, this new menu item made sense because health guidelines had said that eating too much red meat was bad for you. Beef consumption had begun to fall, and McDonald’s needed something else to sell besides hamburgers. The boneless nugget, composed of processed, mostly white meat—combined with stabilizers and then breaded, fried, frozen, and reheated—transformed chicken from something that was carved and eaten at a table into finger food that could be eaten anywhere. The McNugget showed that chicken could be sold more profitably in processed form, as patties, wings, strips, or fingers, all made tastier (and less healthy) in the processing. McNuggets have twice as much fat per ounce as hamburger. McDonald’s sold hundreds of tons of them, more fast-food chicken places sprang up, and by 1992 chicken had surpassed beef as the most-consumed meat in the US. By 2023 Americans were eating about ten times more chicken than they’d eaten in 1940. Today chicken, most of it processed, is 45 percent of all the meat that Americans eat.
The chicken-ification of cuisine has been global. Colonel Sanders of KFC, which has more than 27,000 restaurants outside the US, rose to the status of an international celebrity. Chickens are now the most populous terrestrial vertebrate. At any one time, about 26 billion chickens occupy the planet, as 65 billion are slaughtered annually and billions more hatch. The next most populous bird, the house sparrow, numbers a mere 1.6 billion. According to a study of the biomass distribution on Earth, chickens and other poultry comprise 70 percent of all birds by weight. Chickens are the most numerous farm animal. As a global tribe, human beings could be called the People of the Chicken.
In the 1980s and 1990s the fad of keeping chickens as egg-laying pets in urban and semiurban backyards returned. Martha Stewart featured her pet chickens in her publications as far back as 1982. The revival began less than a century and a half after Hen Fever. Industrial chicken farming relies on only a few customized breeds, just as the Big Ag giants rely on genetically engineered monocrops like corn and soybeans. The backyard chicken movement goes the opposite way, toward variety. It has room for all kinds of breeds, many of them exotics like the Shanghais/Brahmas that were brought here during Hen Fever. Small-flock chicken raising gives a new chance to breeds that might otherwise have died out.
Danovich says in her book that her grandmother grew up on a farm in North Dakota where her mother raised ducks and White Leghorn chickens and used the money she made from them to pay for extras like a piano and piano lessons. Danovich started raising chickens herself after she and her husband moved from Brooklyn (she’s a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times) to Portland, Oregon, which she picked because she had read that it has the most dog parks per capita of anyplace in the country. Her instinct was sound; Portland also turns out to be the place with the most backyard chickens. She ordered her first baby chicks through the mail, as chicken fanciers in the US have been able to do since 1918. Because newly hatched chicks are still living on nourishment from their yolk sac, they don’t need food or water for forty-eight hours and can survive for at least that long while being bumped around in the mail. The place where she bought her chicks offered her eighty-seven types to choose from.
Later she visited the Murray McMurray Hatchery and was almost knocked out by its size, heat, noise, and smell. Urban places generally don’t allow the keeping of roosters, and half of the chickens that hatcheries hatch are of course male. It’s very hard to tell rooster chicks from hen chicks. Most birds (except waterfowl) don’t have penises but breed by joining their cloacae. The cloaca is an orifice that combines the functions of anus and birth canal in females and anus and sperm conduit in males. The only reliable way to tell the sexes apart is by the presence of a small protrusion in the cloaca of the male. People who know how to do this, called chicken sexers, hold the chicks upside down, squeeze open their cloacae, and look inside them. A 90 percent accuracy rate is good, though no chicken sexer is perfect.
At commercial hatcheries supplying the egg industry, male chicks are sent to a macerator, which grinds them up alive, as Danovich (and the reader) is sorry to learn. Around the world, six billion male chicks are killed every year. Roosters are of only limited use to the meat or egg industries. A cow needs a calf, and therefore a bull (or artificial insemination), to produce milk, but the hens who are laying eggs for the world’s breakfast don’t need roosters at all. And the broiler chickens, raised for eating, are both hens and roosters, but all are slaughtered at about six weeks old, before their adolescence, which makes the roosters’ maleness beside the point.
Roosters are just too much for the modern world. Even their name is a euphemism, based on their habit of roosting up high. In mixed company in the eighteenth century nice people didn’t want to say “cock,” so they started calling the males “roosters.” Roosters sometimes fight one another unbelievably fiercely to the death, which some people like to watch but most people abhor, so holding rooster fights has long been illegal in most states. When the authorities confiscate fighting roosters, they often kill them. Almost no effort is made to reintegrate them into society. Most backyard chicken fanciers can’t rescue them, because of laws against them. You can’t have crowing at 4:00 AM if you want amity among neighbors, so the rule is, “If it crows, it goes.” As a woman working at a chicken sanctuary tells Danovich, “Roosters are totally screwed.”
I found Danovich’s identification with her chickens moving. She writes:
Since I was a teenager, I’ve struggled against depression and anxiety. I have to manage my mental health in the same way that, now that I’m getting older, I have to stretch every day or risk discovering aches and pains popping up like Whac-A-Mole throughout my body. I take medication and drink herbal tea and exercise and take breaks from work to deal with frequent burnout. But it still seems like either things are going well or my brain is telling me that nothing will ever be good again. Spending time with the chickens, which, yes, means going outside into the fresh air and sunlight too, puts me in a rare middle ground. Everything gets quiet. When I’m with the chickens, I can just be, too.
During the Covid lockdown, watching her chickens was her main hobby. From a group that rescues chickens she adopted two hens that industrial egg farms had immiserated. Battery hens lay eggs all year round and usually are considered “spent” after about a year and a half, at which point they are gassed and composted or dumped in landfills. Rescue organizations sometimes persuade the factories to give them a few of these doomed creatures instead. Danovich names her “ex-bats” (as such chance survivors are called) Thelma and Louise, but they lack the spirit of their namesakes and at first are like apathetic chicken zombies. In time they become friendlier and more responsive as they realize they are no longer living miserable lives.
Egg-laying factories cut the chickens’ beaks so they won’t peck at one another in their close quarters (although they still do). Thelma’s top beak has been trimmed so far back that she can’t peck with it at all but must eat her food pellets out of a bowl by using what remains of her lower beak as a shovel. Danovich describes how the bird drinks water:
Thelma had learned to compensate for her ruined top beak…. When she drank, she brought her head up so quickly that a stream of water arced from her mouth like a girl doing a hair flip in the ocean. It was almost graceful.
You can see how anyone who observes chickens this closely and lovingly would object to their being thought of as cartoonish nitwits running around with their heads cut off.
Philip Levy, in Yard Birds, keeps only one chicken, and when an unknown predator takes it from its coop at the beginning of the book, he moves on. He’s more interested in the change in fashion that has brought pet chickens back, and in the “fickle hipsters” who have decided, on a whim, to keep them. He sees this as a symptom of our age of inequality. Some of the winners in the national redistribution of wealth are trying to make their pampered lives more real, he believes, by choosing this hobby that takes them back to the land but not too far from places selling craft beer.
After laying out the history of the backyard chicken from the Hen Fever days, through the antichicken sanitation retrenchment, through Martha Stewart posing with a chicken on the cover of People magazine in 1995, Levy gets to the bigger subject of “chicken consumerism.” About twenty-four cities in the US offer the equivalent of home-and-garden tours for fans of backyard chickens. These “Tours de Coops,” many of them designed for people touring on bicycles, let visitors into the yards to show off the owners, chickens, and equipages. Chicken accessories are what you might expect (diapers, lace tutus) and not expect (toenail polish). There are architect-designed chicken coops that cost tens of thousands of dollars, although the toniest chicken palaces tend not to be on the tours.
In Detroit, which has turned many of its acres of empty lots into urban farms and gardens, he visits a Belgian artist, Koen Vanmechelen, who has traveled from country to country breeding chickens in what he calls the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project. By the time Levy meets him, Vanmechelen has created a new globalized breed and is exploring how it can be added to Detroit’s urban agriculture scene. Then in Ybor City, Florida, Levy goes to a public park filled with unhoused people and semiwild chickens. The Ybor City chickens’ ancestors came originally from Key West with the cigar business when it moved north. Both cities have decided to let the chickens alone (neither city can catch its street chickens, anyway) because, basically, the birds are kind of cool, and tourists like them. A bossy, loud-crowing rooster in the Ybor City park has been killed by somebody. Other than that, the park, the unhoused people (who somehow endure the “weaponized” salsa music apparently intended to drive them out), and the uncatchable chickens coexist in the crazy, unpeaceful American peace we’re familiar with nowadays.
Levy concludes his chicken-related travels in Brooklyn, where Orthodox Jews kill chickens during Yom Kippur as part of the kaparot atonement ritual every year. The practice dates to when families living in shtetls kept chickens. From your coop you chose a bird for each member of your family, passed it over the person’s head, prayed, let it take on the person’s sins of that year, and then killed the bird for atonement. The ritual, now performed on the streets of Orthodox neighborhoods, results in the sacrifice of almost a hundred thousand broiler hens every Yom Kippur. The shtetl tradition was to give the birds to poorer neighbors, but in Brooklyn, hundreds of sacks of dead chickens are left for the trash collector.
Protesters show up during kaparot and object to it on humanitarian and sanitary grounds (e.g., the blood in the gutters and running down Brooklyn’s drains). Levy notes that chickens carry the salmonella bacteria. In fact, with their vast numbers, chickens represent the largest reservoir of salmonella on the planet. About 1.2 million people in the US catch salmonella every year, and about 450 die of it. The Centers for Disease Control warns against even cuddling or kissing chickens. After the Covid virus hit, Levy says, more of the kaparot participants and more of the protesters began wearing masks.
Because of Covid, and in the interest of food security, he says, raising chickens in the backyard makes sense beyond any considerations of fashion or consumerism. Chickens are fun to have around, and you get eggs. To the question of whether chickens belong in cities, he says, “The proper response is yes, this is a city—and that is why there are chickens here too.”
In Hatched, Gina Warren sees raising chickens as an act of resistance—of people “reclaiming autonomy and agency within their consumer identities.” She goes on a Tour de Coop in Silicon Valley, where the chickens’ domestic arrangements would back up Levy’s claims that the hobby is part of the nation’s inequality crisis, and she doesn’t shrink from judging; she refers to one well-heeled and -dressed participant only as “the suit.” For comparison she goes into the cruelty of commercial egg-laying and broiler-raising operations: “Of the 8.5 billion broilers that are brought to slaughterhouses annually, somewhere between 10 and 39 million die on the way.” A critic she quotes calls the broiler industry the greatest example of human beings’ cruelty to another animal.
Behind the lucky backyard chickens lurks the horrible fate of almost all the other chickens on Earth, who live in a Dantean hellscape, if one can imagine the Inferno’s tortured souls as somehow also eventually turning into something delicious to eat. But even in that scenario, a certain number of commercial chickens are truly lost, because the US throws out 30 to 40 percent of all the food it produces. Usually the backyard chickens are spared being eaten because they’re considered pets, and people don’t eat their pets. As Warren says, “Most backyard chickens are pets first, productive livestock second, and dinner never.”
Her own approach is less sentimental. She raises chickens with the intention of eating not only the eggs but eventually the chickens, too, and her book follows them through the pet stage and the egg harvesting all the way to the butchering and the meticulous preparation of the different parts. Establishing a more conscious consumer identity, as she demonstrates, is serious business from which one mustn’t shrink. Of the three books, hers is the only one that describes the wrenching experience of slaughtering your chicken dinner yourself. She describes a session during which she shows a group of students how to quiet the chickens, slit their throats, bleed them out, scald them, hang them on a clothesline, pluck them, eviscerate them, and separate their heads and feet into one labeled freezer bag, their heart, liver, and lungs into another, their intestines into another. The first chicken of her flock that she kills is the one that trusts her the most and comes most readily to her hands. Afterward the whole experience makes her cry suddenly at night and in coffee shops. It hurts, but it’s supposed to. It’s not like harvesting vegetables. She wants to be an “ethical omnivore,” a term she does not find oxymoronic. The decision helps her to “sidestep (at least partially) capitalist forces and do less evil.”
Her point has nothing to do with fashion—it’s entirely political and environmental. She writes:
Anything that reminds us we have agency is worthwhile. This, if nothing else, is one of the simplest lessons of the backyard chicken movement: Individuals can raise livestock and produce eggs just steps from their kitchen….
Backyard chickens are a way out. They are a small act of resistance, a slight but meaningful shift, a mainstay against the separation of production and consumption in America’s food systems.
I used to walk all around the Bronx, and I sometimes saw chickens doing what I was doing: exploring the neighborhood and hoping for some interesting finds. To watch a chicken emerge from the loading bay of a mattress store and police the sidewalk for pieces of pizza crust always perked up my day. The sound of roosters crowing (illegally; you can be fined up to $2,000 for keeping them) in the daytime enlivens a place, somehow makes it seem more storied and civilized.
Not long ago I was driving on a frantic four-lane road in eastern Arkansas when a chicken truck passed me. By the look of the cargo, it was carrying broiler hens from the mass prison where they’d been raised to the factory where they would be slaughtered. They were in wire cages stacked one on top of the other. The birds looked like individually sorted white feather hats on their way to the bargain basement. Their cages were designed to be too small to allow them to stand up, so they would not fall over and injure themselves during stops and starts. In the few moments the chickens and I were aligned, I looked closely at them. They all faced forward, and they kept their heads down. They journeyed uncomplainingly toward whatever development awaited them. They looked almost heroic to me.
English (US) · 