Don’t be a Chicken. Seriously.

I grew up in the English countryside. My home was a tiny village taken right out of a Jane Austen novel. Seriously. Whenever the adults weren’t looking, the kids in my village would whisper about this one farmer and his shot gun, run in any field we found, pick apples straight from the tree, and collect fresh eggs every morning. The way we saw it, living on a farm meant living with nature. Not in a philosophical Thoreau kind of way. We didn’t hypothesize on nature’s beauty, we just lived it and enjoyed it. In the country, man and nature simply worked together. It was simply too perfect.

Then I moved to suburbia and took a class on environmentalism. After I corrected the teacher on the grazing habits of sheep (it seemed like a big deal at the time), I realized just how wrong my village mindset was. In the real, 21^st Century world, man and nature don’t work together. Man forces his will on nature and nature can either fight back or bow in defeat. Nothing illustrates this better than the plight of the chicken.

There is a reason ‘chicken’ means coward. As a rule, chickens don’t fight back. They run, hide, or crouch down. I spent many an hour chasing chickens as a kid. Whenever I put my hand on the back of one—whether it was old or young used to me or not—it would crouch down. I thought this was great as it let me pick them up and hold them. At the time I did not see the implications. The second I had caught up to the chicken it submitted to me, put its life in my hands. It never fought back, it didn’t know how. For the birds my grandmother kept, this was okay. They lived in the open air and got put in a big wooden hutch at night to keep the foxes away. They could always run and be chickens.

But this does not work for chickens outside my grandmother’s farm. In the twenty first century big, industrial farms are required to feed all the city folk. They are not bird-friendly like the farm I knew, they are corporate. Several years ago, I visited a moderately sized poultry farm. The first thing to hit me was the smell. It was disgusting. And I hadn’t even reached the shed where the birds lived. When I got near the shed, I noticed the noise. Imagine the most crowded stadium you have ever seen, make everyone nervous, half deaf, and half-yelling. It was like that. Hundreds and hundreds of birds were stuffed into one overheated metal building. They stood on each other and their own excrement in on massive, confusing mess. And that was considered a good poultry farm.

As time progresses, the food companies impose more rules on their poultry suppliers and the lives of the birds get worse. Now, a chicken will go its whole life without seeing the sun. That might expose the birds to wildlife diseases.

Now the birds are selectively bred to make the best meat. And what part of the chicken do we eat most? The breast. So, we want really fat breasts on our chickens. A lot of the newer breed of chicken can’t walk, the breasts are that big. A few years ago Freakonomics did an episode on turkeys. The hidden side of that bird, they said, was breeding. The breasts of a turkey had become so big it could not breed naturally, their breasts literally got in the way.

Now, the sheer amount of birds makes life difficult, too. Usually, chickens can function in a crowd of up to 90 birds, that way they can establish a ‘pecking order.’ But if you go over 90, then the order disappears and they just peck. Literally. Crowd hundreds of birds together and it will be one constant, nasty fight.

So the same birds that I used to chase under open skies as a kid now spend their lives sitting in a noisy crowd of up to 40,000 other birds, covered in their own filth (they can’t walk and are forced to eat a lot, so the idea of a toilet area does not really exist), and die before they see the sun. And we thought Guantanamo Bay was bad.

The birds aren’t the only ones suffering, though. The wardens of these prison pay the price of keeping their feathered inmates. When 40,000 creatures are stuffed in a room together and never allowed out, a disease can spread like wildfire. And with their captive lives, the birds don’t stand a chance at building up immunities. So if a disease is introduced to the brood, every chicken will likely get it. And with that quantity of organisms breathing out bacteria, anyone who walks by stands a chance of catching it. Even humans. Chicken farmers are discovering breathing near their chickens’ feces is giving them lung disease and endangering their lives. Poultry farmer Norman Woodward learned this the hard way when the coroner announced he had died of an ‘industrial disease.’

The future for both sides looks bleak. The chickens are consigned to a life of strained captivity, and their captors to deaths of industrial diseases. But there is another way.

Joel Salatin runs a huge farming operation in Virginia that does everything, from chickens to cows, organically. Most modern day poultry farmers want to hide the condition of their birds, but on Polyface you can walk around the farm and see the birds yourself.

These chickens enjoy living a free range life with their portable chick mobile.

The birds live in open air chicken coops. They can see sunlight every day, run around, establish a pecking order in their 75-bird broods, and overall just be chickens. Even better, Joel puts them to work. He keeps what he calls a ‘chicken tractor.’  First, Joel releases cows in a field to shorten the grass with their grazing. Then, he moves the chicken coops in. The birds get to dig for worms and bugs, eat the grass, and they even fertilize the soil (too much chicken poop burns plants away, but a day’s worth acts as a fertilizer). The end result is a healthier pasture and happy birds.

Joel Salatin’s chicken tractor noticeably helps in the management of his land.

Joel Salatin’s method requires more land and makes less money, but it differs from the current approach because it is ethical. Salatin does not lock his birds away from the sun, he does not bread them into being unable to walk, and he does not hurt animals— until he kills them for meat, of course. But he does that humanely, too. Salatin proves that you don’t have to be a vegetarian to care about what happens to animals. Even in a world of meat eaters, chickens can have a good life. They just need someone to stop and decide that they are worth the extra effort.