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You Got to Know Your Chicken.
21st September, 2004

Last weekend we bought chickens. The landlord and our neighbours on both sides have finally got their shit together and come to an agreement about replacing the boundary fence, which is kind of about time, since last month a woman walked up to our front door and asked if she could take the pile of rotting wood from our driveway for a party she was having where she was going to make an "old-time western" façade for her bar or something, and the pile of rotting wood was pretty much half of our fence - the half we'd piece-by-piece gently removed from the bonnet of Anna's car where it had fallen once the lavender bush that was holding the whole thing up had been cut down. Okay, so there was heaps more still-upright fence wood all the way down to the back of the backyard, but there's some mighty gaps all the way along. Chicken-sized gaps, if you get me.

So we get a phone call from the estate agents saying they're going to replace the fence at the end of the month, which is great, because they've been promising to do it since we move in last November. Anna and I pull out Jackie French's Chook Book and the issue of Gardening Australia with the how-to chook run article and giggle a bit. Then we drive down to Castlemaine for the weekend to see our friend Katherine and on Saturday afternoon the three of us drive to Ballarat and visit my parents so that Dad can take us out to this battery farm on the outskirts of town that sells their chooks for four dollars each. He and mum rescued four battery hens a few years back and Anna and I have always said if we're going to have chickens we should save a few of the poor abused souls from an evil egg factory. So that's what we did.

We drove up the driveway and pulled in beside the large pre-fab corrugated iron bunker that stank of burnt chicken shit. There were a few dazed-looking women standing around, working a bizarre conveyer belt contraption that used suction cups to put eggs into cartons, and then a guy came out of the back room and Dad asked him about the chickens. He said sure, but when we asked if we could come back and pick them, he was all, "no, I can't let you in there". He snuck behind the door marked "STAFF ONLY", opening it just wide enough to squeeze through and we caught sight of shelves with rows and rows of brown shapes stacked side by side. The shed went back almost two hundred metres. We stood around and watched the industrial-sized bug-zapper incinerate flies at a rate of one every ten seconds.

The guy came back with five chickens, holding them by the legs, three in one hand, two in the other. Katherine bent down to say hello to them, talking to them like pets, and the guy looked at her like she was nuts. The chickens didn't look great. Their skin was pale, their combs were the colour of strawberry milk and their feathers were missing in great patches. One had no feathers at all on its neck and another had a bare breast - you could see the gooseflesh dimples on the pale skin where the feathers should have been attached. Their wings looked strange. The feathers were so sparse that you could see the shafts of their pinions. They looked like the skeletons of wings. Their beaks were short and stumpy - they'd been unevenly clipped so that some of them looked like they were pouting. The guy dumped the chickens into the box we'd brought and we draped a sheet over the top. Dad told him about the ones he'd bought earlier, saying that they were the nicest, friendliest chooks he'd ever had. The guy looked at Dad like he was nuts.

Mum and Dad had said that within a couple of weeks their feathers would grow back, and they'd develop into normal, healthy chooks. The rescued hens at their place are amazing. One follows dad around the garden, and another jumps up into his lap when he sits down. They've even followed mum into the house a couple of times. It takes so little effort to make chickens happy, it's amazing to me that anyone could be bothered being cruel to them at all.

We drove the chooks back to Castlemaine and let them out of the box. It was hard not to anthropomorphise the whole situation, not to cast the chooks in the role of rescued prisoner on their first day of freedom as we lifted them out of the box and watched as they stared around at their new home. I swear two of them were staring at the sky as if to say "where's the roof? what's that blue thing up there?" (are chickens colour-blind? I don't know) In our minds everything was a first for the chickens. Their first time with dirt underfoot. The first time they could walk as far as they wanted. The first time they could stand apart from other chickens. Their first encounter with grass, with trees, with insects that weren't nasty fucked up blowflies.

  
                            Before                                                          After                 

The rooster that Katherine had been given by her neighbours the week before watched the proceedings with interest. It took the hens about five minutes to start walking hesitantly away from the box that we'd sat them down beside. One of them had a limp. We thought it looked like their combs were developing a healthier red colour. It was obvious that they had never really exerted themselves physically - they could only walk a short distance before needing to sit down again. Some of them started flapping their wings, stretching them out like kite-frames, which we saw as a major victory. When they started scratching in the dirt, we cheered.

That night we made sure that all five hens were locked inside the main coop with their rooster. When we went in to check on them they were all sitting on the ground underneath the perches. We picked them up and sat them gently on the perches so they'd get the idea, but one day out from the factory their feet were too weak to hold onto the perch and they all lost their balance and fell off. We sat them on the plank beside the laying boxes instead, which is more like a raised bench than a perch. Hopefully as they eat more and exercise more they'll get strong enough to perch by themselves.

We left all five hens in Castlemaine for the time being. Once the fence at our place is fixed, Dad's coming up for a working bee and we're going to build a chook shed underneath the figs. Then we're going back to Katherine's and bringing three of the hens home. Anna already has a name for one of them: Ethelred the Unready.

We went out to look at them one last time before we left, and in the straw by the door we found a single, warm egg.

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