The Circle

The birth of nine baby chicks was an accident, and a poorly timed accident at that. As you likely know, chicks are typically hatched in the spring. But these little guys came to life in August. Their birth was the product of a few factors (mistakes) coinciding. Life, like chaos, will find its way into any vacuum.

Factor(mistake)One: It was last summer, and all of us here at Papermoon were scheduled to go out of town… at the same time.  “No big deal,” we thought. “We’ll ask some friends to look after the animals for a few days.”

Factor (mistake) Two: Our rooster turned into a mean-little-snot after a critter got into the hen house the previous fall. He attacked everything and everyone who attempted to come near his girls. It didn’t seem to deter the foxes, raccoons and coyotes, but I’ll admit, it deterred me. And it must have deterred our friends, because when we came back to the farm we saw the feed had been hastily thrown on to the floor of the hen house. I cringed, imagining our friends throwing the feed down and running scared from a wild, screaming, flapping, pecking rooster.

A note: collecting eggs from hens is not usually very difficult. They rarely even seem to notice. But if you can’t come in to the hen house far enough to feed these little warblers, there is no way you can ever hope to collect eggs. Oh, and 14 hens in July will produce 8-15 eggs per day.

Factor (mistake) Three: We knew nothing about brooding. Until last year, we kept 4 hens in the backyard. No roosters. We collected eggs every day, and went along happily ignorant of this state called brooding.

We understand now that when a hen sees three or four eggs sitting in a nest for a few days, something in her will snap. Instincts take over and she’ll start to brood. In other words, she will sit her happy tail on those lousy eggs until they hatch. If she gets up at all it will be at most once per day to drink a little water. She gets very little nutrition, and no exercise. She will go into a trance. Her body temperature will rise. All of this is relatively harmless if the eggs are fertilized, and hatch in a timely fashion. The babies will be born, and she’ll snap out of it. However, if she broods on unfertilized eggs, she will sit there brooding herself to starvation and death.

So that’s fun.

Anyway, A led to B, B led to C, and in August we had nine baby chicks, and two broody hens that needed to be broken from their spell. All survived. Mamas and babies all pulled through. We kept the babies in the barn away from the bigguns, and under a heating lamp.  And they were so cute.

The last chick to be born, we hatched ourselves. 

We had friends bring their children over to chase them and hold them and guess which ones were boys and which ones were girls, while we eyed each other with foreboding knowledge. Sooner or later, the boys were going to have to go.

A note about roosters: they’re bastards. They occupy themselves in one of four ways: eating, sleeping, mating and fighting. A standard rule of thumb is that you need 12-13 hens per rooster, or your poor hens will never get any rest. The girls become tired and malnourished. They grow bald patches around their necks and wings from being constantly pinned down under beak. It sucks.  Oh, and one other thing: that god-awful crowing you can imagine? It becomes music to your ears once you’ve heard six adolescent chickens practicing while their voices are changing. Sheesh.

Our little guys became full grown roosters in the dark, frozen depths of winter. Incidentally, the custom meat processing centers around here, don’t really offer their services in said depths. This was a problem. We knew they had to go, and we knew we’d have to do it ourselves. As you can imagine, this is not a pleasant thought or job.  And we put it off. And we put it off. Until one day, one of the birds was a bloody mess, and we knew we couldn’t wait.

Here I’d like to change tack for a minute, because I’m going to spare you the gruesome details of slaughtering six roosters by hand. Instead, I’d like to take you back to a discussion we’ve repeatedly had within our family for years.

It goes something like this:

“These chicken breasts are HUGE! What kind of hormones are they feeding these things?!”

“I know! And they’re all full of water and gnarly and expensive!”

“I don’t want to give Purdue or Wal-mart any more of my money!”

“Remind me that I need to go buy chicken feed tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

All of that is then punctuated by us stuffing said store-bought meat into our mouths.

So we know we’re consuming product that we don’t want in our bodies. And we know we’re supporting corporate industry we don’t value. Why? Because we don’t want to get our hands dirty. We don’t want to kill ANYTHING. We don’t want to look a sentient creature (even a bird) in the eye and watch the light fade out. Truly, we’ve been hypocritical about this for years.

This time, when push came to shove, we walked the walk. It was a bitterly cold February afternoon. And we did have some help and guidance from a friend who not only had the experience we lacked, but who also felt a duty to honor the lives we were taking, and process these creatures as humanely as possible.

This process is difficult. It is disturbing and time consuming and really, very messy. We had a few missteps – confirming the old adage. 

But as I stood there, I accepted all of this. It IS a life, and snuffing it out SHOULD be difficult. The food we eat SHOULD be honored rather than devoured. The sacrifice should be respected. When I looked down at the blood on my hands, I thought, “that goes for vegetables too.”

We live in a society where food is readily available, where we can take it from a shelf without worrying ourselves over depletion. We passively assume the shelf will auto-populate anything and everything we need and want. Meat, grains, vegetables, cheese, milk, Ranch dressing, whatever.  But, of course, that isn’t true. We do know where our food comes from. We’ve all watched the documentaries and read the articles and listened to the horror stories. We have the information. We just don’t like to think about it, because it’s unpleasant and it makes us feel helpless.

I understand that it is not feasible for everyone to raise and process his or her own food.  However, we can all from acknowledge that everything we eat requires a process. Everything we eat has required some sacrifice. Life, time, growth, packaging, whatever. In doing so, we eliminate some of that complacency, and take back some of the power and responsibility for our consumption.

Looking into the lifeless eyes of those six roosters, it dawned on me, in a very real way, this farmsteading thing is not all sunsets and vine-ripened tomatoes. There is a hefty weight invloved, and death is a part of that. Our food, all of our food has a history that deserves to be honored.