I see us grateful for these extraordinary companions.
I see our lives rich with animals. I see us with many animal friends. I see our cities sprinkled with wild places, shorelines, parks, ravines, and creek-canyons, where wild creatures can live. I see all life-forms working together in harmony, cultivating the full potential of the planet.
I see us appreciating the different needs, different kinds of intelligence, and different responsibilities of the various animals. I see us sensing the unique ways in which they feel, they think, they suffer, and they love.
I see us learning to treat with respect those who are, in the greater scheme of things, but our younger brothers and sisters. I see us realizing they, too, are expressions, in their individual ways, of the universal life force. I see us acting from the knowledge that it is the same GodForce that gives us all breath.
I see us realizing that all God’s critters have a place in the choir.
Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.
—BRADLEY MILLER
The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
—GANDHI
Like most people, I would like to minimize the unnecessary suffering in the world. I want to eliminate needless violence and pain, and I give my support, wherever I can, to a positive approach to this goal. But like most people I never gave much of a thought to the impact my way of eating had on the world. Sure, I knew animals were killed for meat, but isn’t that the way of nature? Isn’t that the way of life’s food chains?
But I’ve learned that the animals used for food in the United States today are not just killed; something else happens to them. And finding out about it has changed me forever.
The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve felt that if people knew what really goes on they would make major changes in their food choices. Major changes that would go a very long way, not only toward improving their own health, but toward reducing the suffering in the world as well.
Let’s start with chickens. In order to understand what happens to these animals, it helps to have a feeling for what kinds of beings they are. Unfortunately, most of us have rather stereotyped visions of them.
The word “chicken” is often used as a synonym for “coward.” But that is a human moniker. Chickens, while high-strung and quick to startle, are anything but gutless, timid creatures. Roosters are renowned for their pride and ferocity and the adamant assertion of their power. Many cultures have exploited this fact in the so-called sport of cock fighting. And throughout the world a wide variety of cultures have acknowledged the potent spirit of the cock by using his name as a synonym for the male penis.1 In languages all over the world the word for the male chicken is also used to signify human male sexual potency.2
Female hens are likewise not the craven creatures we’ve been conditioned to think they are. They can be absolutely fierce in defending their little ones, even against terrible odds and much larger predatory birds. A scientist who studied chickens for years, E. L. Watson, watched a mother hen defend her little chicks against the awesome attack of the dreaded raven.
I have known one little old hen who reared chicks on the far western coast of Scotland near cliffs where ravens built their nests. On ordinary occasions, ravens are the terror of domesticated fowls, that fly to shelter at the first sight of the black wings. They dare not face beaks so much stronger than their own. (But) this little mother of a brood of ten would stand her ground with her hackles up, eyes glaring defiance. Such was her courage that she lost but one of her brood when two ravens came against her. 3
Chickens are not the fearful creatures we have been conditioned to think. And the generally agreed-upon idea that they are stupid is equally ungrounded in fact.
Now, I’m not saying that chickens are the most brilliant of animals. But I do know that our understanding of what constitutes intelligence is utterly relative. If an aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, for example, all of Western civilization would probably flunk. We have a very convenient and self-serving way of defining intelligence. If an animal does something, we call it instinct. If we do the same thing for the same reason, we call it intelligence.
Personally, I wouldn’t be too quick to try to define the intelligence of chickens. I’d be afraid of judging them by standards that are irrelevant to them. For the more I’ve learned about the kinds of creatures they are and what they have been known to do, the more I’ve been impressed by their unique kind of intelligence.
One naturalist gave a chicken hen 21 guinea fowl eggs he had found, just to see what would happen. These small, hard-shelled eggs are a far cry from a chicken’s eggs. But the hen took the task to heart and somehow managed to tend to all 21 of the eggs without a sign of protest. As a product of our conditioned conventional notions about chickens, I originally thought she did this simply because she was too stupid to notice they weren’t her own eggs. When the chicks hatched, she didn’t seem at all perturbed by the fact that they weren’t chickens. Their small partridge-like appearance and unfamiliar ways evidently presented no problem to her. Again, I thought she was simply too stupid to notice they were not chickens. But I was wrong. She was far more tuned in to reality than I knew. After a few days of brooding the little guinea fowl, she took them away out into the cover of some bushes. Instead of asking them to feed on the ordinary mash that was given the chickens, she scratched in some ants’ nests for the white pupae. Chickens don’t eat such food, but guinea fowl do! The little ones took to it with instinctive relish.4
How could she have known? What form of intelligence was she displaying? Was she perhaps sufficiently tuned in to have received some sort of message from their collective psyche? That’s more than man can do!
On another occasion, a naturalist gave a chicken hen some duck eggs. She tended them and hatched them as if they were her own, yet wasn’t fazed at all when ducklings emerged from her labors instead of chicks. Utterly undaunted by the situation, she proceeded to do something neither she nor any other chicken in the area had ever done before. She walked up on a plank bridging a stream. Then, clucking, she invited the little ducklings into the water.5
It is a mystery to me how these mother hens knew what to do for the babies they hatched who were of another species. But somehow they did. It appears that when we speak of being taken under someone’s wing we are correctly referring to a remarkably caring and sensitive kind of nurturing.
Living as divorced from nature as most of us unfortunately do, we may not have much personal experience with chickens anymore and so may not know what wonderful mothers they are. But throughout recorded history the hen has been a supreme symbol of the best kind of mothering. In fact, the Romans thought so much of the maternal qualities of the hen that they frequently used the phrase “son-of-a-hen” to mean a fortunate and well-cared-for man.6
Naked amid the Ruins
Although the experiences and memories most of us have of chickens are colored by ill-founded biases, it is hard to forget the feeling of seeing freshly hatched baby chicks, their little yellow heads pushing out from under their mother hen’s feathers, their tiny yellow beaks just beginning to peck about. To many of us, freshly hatched baby chicks are the very picture of innocence and adorability. Yet perhaps they also speak of something deeper, something inspirational. In pecking their way out of the egg, they can seem as well to symbolize our ongoing need to outgrow old limitations, our deep need to push against and expand beyond boundaries that have served a needed purpose but that now must be left behind. In this, the little ones stand for the very opposite of the gutlessness we have been conditioned to think of as “chicken.” They stand for courage. They peck their way out, not knowing what will await them. And when they emerge, they stand naked