Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet

Another augury

2011-09-02T10:43:00.001-04:00

This morning, waiting for our friends to come over for meditation, suddenly we heard a racket in the front yard. The older of our two roosters was standing out there, crowing his danger crow, alert and tall and alone. The hens were hidden in the foliage, except one hen who ran frantically to hide herself in response to his warning. I ran out, in my socks, onto the wet grass, as a small hawk flew right across my view to perch in front of me in our tall pine tree. Hence the rooster's crowing.

This is why we have roosters, we said to each other: to keep the hens safe. And this, just before the weekend when we had decided both roosters had to go . . . . They've ridden our hens so hard that several have no back feathers, and one has a bald head.

Pharmakon: that which cures but also kills; that which benefits but also harms. Kill the rooster and cure the hens; kill the rooster, and cure the hens only to have the hawk kill them. Practical ethics in the poultry yard.

spring changes

2011-04-09T13:43:00.000-04:00

Listening to Magnetic Fields ("If there's such a thing as love.") and looking out at my chickens on a still-too-wintry morning, I realize that there are signs of spring even among the chickens. It just takes a certain perspective to identify them. Four of our hens now wear discrete green and grey camouflage saddles: we were forced to this by our three roosters, who have been taking their responsibilities so seriously that the hens were in danger of having their backs rubbed raw. (I leave it to the reader's imagination to figure out how that might happen). Once there is raw skin then there can be a wound, and where there is blood, the pecking order swings into action. Chickens can be pecked to death by their fellows, all because they are hardwired to be drawn to (and curious about) the color red. It was actually quite a simple procedure. We decided to draw the line at actually sewing the saddles, though my chicken health handbook does have a pattern for them. (I realize others might have drawn the line a good bit earlier than we did!) Instead, we ordered them from an online site, and once we had them, we went into the hen house after dark to slip them, one at a time, over the hen's wings until they rested comfortably on her --- shoulders? ---leaving the wings to move freely. Remarkably, the hens adjusted instantly to the saddle. It's less clear that the roosters have. While I haven't seen one saddle get lost, I also haven't (yet) seen one be used in its adapted equestrian function. But that's one somewhat exotic sign of spring.

Another sign is less exotic: we have an Aracauna hen sitting on five different colored eggs, in the garden shed that we divided up to create a brooding space. They are supposed to hatch tomorrow, when my graduate seminar in the Gender and Science: Reproduction class comes over, along with seven students from the Center for Reproductive Biology and Health (between the College of Agriculture and the Huck College of Biosciences) and their lab head, Professor Joy Pate. My students shadowed Joy's students in the lab, or in the barns, or in the field, and tomorrow they will present the results of their shadowing to those they shadowed. And then (I hope) there'll be the opportunity for conversation and feedback from the lab scientists. What a great thing it would be to celebrate the event by having a hatch of chicks!

The final sign of spring for the hens and roosters will arrive in two weeks or so, though I ordered it yesterday. They are getting a new hen house, made by our friends Stolzfus in Madisonburg. It's splendid: on stilts,with nesting boxes that open from the outside, a number of roosts, and windows for aeration. The plan is to shift the birds to this as their summer house, so that we can then clean and air out the winter house, and clean up (of all the scattered shavings from the hen house floor) and seed (with oats or some other edible cover crop) the land all around the winter house. So: clean new home, another spring sign.

As my friend said to me, "So the obsession with chickens doesn't end when the book is published." Absolutely, evidently, not.

A Tale of 2 Chickens, a President, and Her Mother - Postcards - The Chronicle of Higher Education

2011-02-11T08:52:00.002-05:00

A case study to ponder

Imagine a university where the quirky love of chickens was part of the curriculum. Consider Pitzer, in California, and its president, Laura Trombley.

Although I have written on Virginia Woolf, while her focus is Mark Twain, we share a hermeneutics.

Not of the hermeneutics of suspicion (though we both suspect our object of concern is everywhere), nor the hermeneutics of faith (though we are definitely believers in our object's revelatory powers), nor even the hermeneutics of the subject (although we're both clearly prone to muddle the featherless bipeds of Plato and Diogenes).

No, we share the hermeneutics of chicken poop. We've learned from Latour, moreover, and we know it's not a case of fact. Of course chicken poop exists: on our shoes and boots, on our walkways, and definitely on the occasional egg that we bring in from the nest in the evening. No, for us, the hermeneutics of chicken poop is one of concern. What can it teach us, how do we learn it, from whom do we learn it, what is the importance of what we learn, and most of all why should we be open to learning it?

Take Laura Trombley's case study in the hermeneutics of chicken poop. Pitzer has a chicken coop, near its organic garden, behind the student center. Let's stop here to savor the wisdom in this: chickens to fertilize the organic garden, organic garden to feed the students (body and mind), students to feed the chickens and in turn to feed themselves (mind and heart). A visiting student (the messenger of wisdom from afar) emails President Trombley to tell her: Your chicken is sick. Can Scripps students know what Pitzer students do not? President Trombley swings into action, and consults an expert--their resident 'chicken whisperer,' who reassures the President, and she in turn reassures the student, that it's a simple case of dropping feathers. (Diogenes' chicken approximating Plato's man?)

The Scripps student challenges President Trombley, who is after all not her President. And she marshals facts to support of her case: two photographs taken at the scene of the coop, showing the runny butt of one chicken and the clean control butt of another hen. The hermeneutics of poop can now be employed, and President Trombley does so, at the staggering cost of one hundred dollars to "get the chicken fixed."

I draw two conclusions from this lovely story. Take it as a case study in knowledge production. It teaches us a number of things worthy of our concern: listen to outsiders, don't always trust experts, and above all don't assume that colleges (and college presidents) are above dealing with things as messy, runny, and hard to define as chicken poop.

Then take it as a case study in the gendered production of knowledge. Note that the president and her outside informant are both women, women who trust each other and trust the evidence right in front of their eyes, even when it contradicts expert opinion. The president even trusts her mother not to embarrass her when she comes for campus visits. Instead, she welcomes her mother, even letting her see her office and her computer, where those two photographs of chicken butts are displayed.

President Trombley clearly feels no contradiction between her little girl past and her presidential present. And why should she? She's comfortable with this foray into the hermeneutics of poop. As she tells her mother:"It's all part of being a college president."

Now if we can only get other college and university presidents to the same level of understanding. Just as studying chicken poop is part of being a college president, so studying chickens, and organic gardens, and the messy uncategorizable knowledges and practices tying them together, should be part of being a college student. Okay, a quirky one.

My letter to the Chronicle

2011-02-10T18:18:00.000-05:00

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Plea-for-the-Quirky/126185/
I am happy that the Chronicle published my letter protesting the closure of the Penn State STS program. I'm sad, however, that to date it has had few comments and no perceivable effect on the fate of STS at my university. I did, however, have a good conversation with a very committed and interesting young woman teaching STS, nearly as a one-woman show, at another university. I wish her all the best, and hope that together all of us can keep STS a viable option for education. It's not just that we who teach in STS need it. The students in our colleges and universities need it. In fact, in the wake of the Citizen's United decision, our democracy needs it.

STS and chickens

2011-02-10T17:58:00.001-05:00

Last night I had one of my recurring dreams. I discovered a barn full of chicks and chickens that were being terribly neglected: many of the chicks were dying or dead, and the chickens' feathers were matted and torn. Broken or frozen eggs lay buried in mounds of long-neglected bedding straw.

I spent a long time walking around the barn, gathering up the viable eggs, feeding the chickens that were still alive, and collecting the chicks and chickens that had died.

As I said, this is a recurring dream. I have had it during the years I was working on Poultry Science, Chicken Culture, and I have usually understood it as a signal that I was neglecting my writing, or another message from deep in my own unconscious (and like all such messages, overdetermined.)

What happens if I follow my own advice, though, and consider that dream as an augury giving me early warning of the endangered state of interdisciplinary programs like our own STS program. I've learned through keeping chickens that they do indeed come home to roost. And yet what if the roost itself, and the building that shelters it and the chickens roosting there, have been abandoned?

The irony of time

2011-01-24T16:52:00.000-05:00

How ironic and sad that my "STS book", Poultry Science, Chicken Culture, receives its first review while I am working flat out to persuade Penn State not to cancel the Program in Science, Technology and Society of which I am Acting Director. The kind of scholarship my book embodies is made possible by interdisciplinary programs like STS. I have been nourished, sustained, made joyful by conversations and collaborations with the faculty and students (undergraduate and graduate) brought together in this generative community.

January 23, 2011

Conspicuously Unconsumed

By Nina C. Ayoub

Pondering Poultry

Susan Merrill Squier answers the obvious question right away, in the introduction: Why chickens? Why, after mining biomedicine, reproductive technologies, radio culture, and, well, Virginia Woolf, did the scholar turn to fowl for her latest book, Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet (Rutgers University Press)?
One reason is a certain "agricultural amnesia" in cultural studies, writes Squier, a professor of women's studies, English, and science, technology, and society at Pennsylvania State University. With its focus on the "metropolitan," she says, cultural studies has largely ignored agriculture's centrality to our lives, societies, landscapes, and geopolitics. She derides the "bunker mentality" in academe that "distinguishes farm culture from scholarly culture, the country from the city, the body from the mind, and life from theory. ... "

"I gave myself the holiday of curiosity," she writes. The result is a quirky mash of essays on chickens and the interplay of biology and culture that manages to blend all of Squier's interdisciplinary interests. She ranges freely, from takes on chickens as subjects of photography and exhibition, playwriting, film, and children's and other literature, to musings on such public-policy issues as risk management, the avian-flu scare, and the societal costs of industrial agriculture.

"Chickens are good to think with," writes the author—her own flock included.

To our benefit as readers, Squier ignores the counsel of E.B. White, writer, grammarian, chicken fancier: "Don't try to convey your enthusiasm for chickens to anyone else," advice he gave in an introduction to a 1944 poultryman's primer on chicken raising. Squier is sanguine. "I risk my own share of withering glances to admit that I am very partial to chickens—and what we can learn with them, from them, and about them."

At the time of writing, we find out, Squier's own flock numbered 34 hens of various breeds and "three splendid bantam Seabright roosters." Her brood, past and present, tracks busily through the book, adding pleasantly to the lore that leavens the theory.

Poultry Slam

2010-12-04T15:56:00.000-05:00

Well, Ira Glass and his crew on This American Life have for several years been providing company--even fellow-feeling--as I have researched and written about chickens. That experience continues now that my book is in print. My "Culture" chapter compares the chicken portraits of Jean Pagliuso's show "Poultry Suite" (a show at the Marlborough Gallery in New York) to the genre of breed portraits stretching from Charles Darwin's colleague Tegetmeier to the American Standard of Perfection (the handbook for chicken exhibitors).

I wasn't completely surprised, then, to find that this year's Poultry Slam also considers the poultry portrait. In one of the four stories, Ira Glass interviews Tamara Staples, a poultry photographer from Chicago. Glass's commentary explores different perspectives on that classic text of chicken exhibitors, The American Standard of Perfection. Give it a listen: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/

During that same story, Ira interviews a chicken breeder. "In the country, among the chicken breeders, you think about a lot of things you never get to in the city," Ira opines. And then the eighty year old chicken keeper tells Ira about how he treated his own cancer by using "the root of the dandelion." "He's got no hard scientific proof that this really works" Ira acknowledges. Well, looking for "hard scientific proof" of old folk remedies is another one of the epistemological backflips industrial pharmaceuticals are rounding back to, just as industrial poultry farming is has decided to return to producing the so-called "natural" chicken. See the new product from Cobb-Vantress, the "Cobb Sasso 150": http://www.cobb-vantress.com/Products/CobbSasso150.aspx

In Global Nature, Global Culture, Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey explore the power that "nature" holds as what they call a "shifting classificatory practice." They are talking about rhetorical power, among other things. This is the persuasive power packed into the term "nature" that can lead a major pharmaceutical company to prospect for potential new products in the jungle (see Londa Schiebinger's Plants and Emllpire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World). Or Cobb-Vantress to launch their new product line, the "Cobb Sasso 150" specifically bred, they explain, to meet the consumer preference for "slower growing, colored chicken."

Classification is at work in other ways in the Cobb-Vantress website. Note the choice of the label "chicken" in the phrase above. Despite their claim to honor "traditional free range and organic farming," their commitment to the creation of a quality controlled product is showing here. Slower growing, and 'colored' perhaps, but nature still seems to an elusive property of this new breed, which they categorize not as chickens, the species, but as chicken, the category of meat. Nature denatured, as they observe in GNGC: an intentional object always already denatured through its industrial production.

And of course there is the fact of human intervention in that shifting classificatory practice known as breeding. Here is one of my current favorite chickens: the Giant Cochin that Murray McMurray sent me as a "surprise chick."She truly is as much bigger than the other birds as she looks in these photographs. The "Biology" chapter of PSCC tells the tale of the boom-and-bust impact produced by the the importation of Cochin chickens from China in the nineteenth century.

STS and chickens

2010-11-23T09:30:00.001-05:00

In today's Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeanine Carr writes about how her experiences raising Rhode Island Red hens persuaded her to leave the role of Department Chair to enjoy the slower pleasures of faculty life. http://chronicle.com/article/From-Department-Head-to/125431/
I've just spent five years writing a book on chickens while being a full time faculty member. My book is due out from Rutgers Press this month, and I'm feeling nostalgic for those years in which I shared many of the experiences Jeanine writes about: the pleasures of sitting with the chickens in the morning sun, the challenge of an egg-bound hen, the novice's notion that you have to put the birds back in the hen house at night. (Mine were free to go wherever they wanted during the day--on the lawn, in the fields, in the woods--but after the first night when I tried to shoo them into the henhouse at dusk wielding a broom, I soon learned that they came home all by themselves, lining up in their preferred order on the roosts.) In fact, I enjoyed sitting home with my birds so much, I was really reluctant to step in as the Acting Director of our STS Program. I'd already done administration--been Associate Provost at another university--and was sure I would hate every moment of my return to "the dark side." Instead, I have discovered that I am thoroughly enjoying this brief stint back in the administrative trenches, for much the same set of reasons that I hugely enjoyed writing my book on chickens. Our STS program includes a collection of young faculty members whose interests are as varied as the plumage of my birds: disability studies, food security, sustainable agriculture, embryology, bioethics, Alzheimer's and other cognitive dementias, the history of military technology, climate change, and more. They are united by their conviction that the relationship between science, technology, medicine and society matters, that it shapes our human societies just as we, in turn, have shaped the tools and technologies that conform us as users. These diverse commitments and engagements were also (I am now realizing) what drew me to writing my book on chickens, which I organized as an ABC book so that in each chapter I could explore another aspect of the scientific and cultural interrelationships between human beings and chickens. From Augury, Biology and Culture, to Gender, Hybridity, and Inauguration, I used my focus on chickens to draw me out into the world. And that's just what I am enjoying now about this brief year of directing our STS Program: the engagement with the world in all its complexities that the program's faculty and students share.
So thanks to Jeanine Carr for suggesting another way that chickens help put life--administrative life, this time--in perspective.

animals and ethics

2010-11-22T10:59:00.004-05:00

"The Main Course had an Unhappy Face" is the headline of Ariel Kaminer's article today on learning to butcher her own turkey. The nod to a familiar vegetarian principle--"I don't eat anything with a face."--may have been coincidental, but the anthropomorphic identification between turkey and Times reporter is undeniable. The Bourbon red hen turkey Kaminer has selected for Thanksgiving does "not seem happy. Instead, with her almond eyes downcast, her subdued manner suggest[s] a kind of forbearance." Affect and empathy seem to be flowing back and forth between them: "Perhaps she sensed I was not there to make friends. In truth, I was there to kill her."

Kaminer's position on this curious new transaction--selecting both the bird for your Thanksgiving dinner and the butcher who will teach you to kill it--is wryly affirmative. She sees it as "all part of the broader cultural effort to escape the climate-controlled, linoleum-lined artificiality of supermarket shopping, in which meat magically appears all ready for your oven and animals are characters in children’s storybooks." Her point makes good sense to me, having spent some time rereading childrens' storybooks when I was writing Poultry Science, Chicken Culture--from the bird's eye perspective on the natural year in Elmer Boyd Smith's exquisitely illustrated tale Chicken World, to the gender-charged Little Red Hen tales of my mother's childhood and my own, and finally to a different kind of globalized vision with disturbingly neoliberal after-effects, in One Hen. In fact, I'd push Kaminer a bit on where the responsibility ends. Just as no bread shows up in the oven without someone to pick the wheat, thresh the grain, lug the grain to the miller, knead the dough, and form the loaves (Little Red Hen taught us that), no turkey arrives on the Thanksgiving table without someone doing the work not just of killing it (which Kaminer did) but of scalding, plucking, and dressing the bird.

We learned this first-hand the day after I finished my book. I was gazing out of the window just in time to see a hawk swoop down from the big tree and kill my Buff Orpington hen. (Yes, she was a little red hen.) I ran out yelling, and found the hawk just sitting there, claws into feathers, staring at me sideways until I ran straight up and forced it to flap up and away. The hen, her neck broken, was floppy, soft, and still warm. (In fact, since chickens have a body temperature of 110 degrees, I mean very warm.)

Now that the hawk had done the deed, it felt wrong just to throw the body of our red hen into the garbage. Stranger in a Strange Land, a book I've never much liked, came back to me: I wanted to grock her fullness (or at least that is the silly sounding phrase I remember from the book all those years ago--kind of a paying tribute by incorporation to a being whose life had worth and import).

So, we decided we would try to prepare her for that ceremonial meal. Having watched our own poultry processor Eli Reiff do the same cone-and-knife procedure that Kaminer learned with her butcher, we knew that we should cut the hen's head off and hold her upside down until the blood drained out. So we did that: Gowen did the cutting, and we tied her legs with twine to the railing of our front deck so that the blood could drain into a bucket below. And then we put a very big pot of water on the stove to boil, while we reread the section on butchering chickens in our Country Guide. Once the water comes to a boil, and hits the right line on the thermometer, you dunk the bird in (holding her feet) and bob her up and down for about 60 seconds to loosen the feathers. So we did that, and then put her on the floor (which we'd covered with a sheet laid down over some garbage bags to keep water off the wood boards). The plucking itself was surprisingly easy; the feathers came off almost as if we were zipping her out of a chicken suit. The 'dressing'--gutting her and pulling out the inner organs, and cutting off the head and feet--came next, and I found that much harder. As he pulled the innards out, we were both shocked when out came a cluster of eggs, from tiny yellow balls to full-sized eggs with shells already on them. I stood near by, but protected by the camera lens, and documented the event while Gowen accomplished it. Result? After the visual shock of the brightly colored innards, the very familiar image of a cleaned and dressed chicken all ready for the freezer.

We stewed the hen, with morels and red wine and onions, and the delicious dinner felt very meaningful, even (I thought at that time) ethical. Yet I return to that now by way of an essay I have been reading written one of my personal heroes--the biologist and epigeneticist C.W. Waddington--in his book The Ethical Animal. Waddington's approach to ethics has a strongly biological basis, yet not in the reductive sense of so much contemporary sociobiology. Instead, he gives us biology in terms that resemble Donna Haraway's essay "Situated Knowledges: The Privilege of Partial Perspective."

"Like all other products of evolution, [the human intellect] has been moulded [sic.] by the necessity to fit in with--or rather, to put it more actively, to cope with--the rest of the natural world. Its function is not to produce a God-like vision of the human situation seen from some stand-point above and outside the turmoil of actual life. The intellect is an instrument forged--perhaps by a rather rough and ready village blacksmith, let us confess--for the specific purpose of coming to terms with things. The situation with which we find ourselves confronted, a world of social-economic revolutions, of wars, of mass scale technology, is the basic raw material by which the intellect is challenged. To discuss subjects such as ethical theory without specific reference to such problems is to run away to an ivory tower. [ . . . ] What is demanded of each generation is a theory of ethics which is neither a mere rationalization of prejudices, nor a philosophical discourse so abstract as to be irrelevant to the practical problems with which mankind is faced at that time." (my italics, Waddington, 1960)

The intellect as a tool, and ethics as a situated theory, rather than a God-like vision from some abstract and unsituated standpoint: this sounds to me like a remarkable anticipation of Haraway's own critique of both standpoint feminism and positivist science, with its "God's eye view from nowhere." Strikingly, at the end of the introduction to The Ethical Animal, Waddington actually suggests that the very word "ethical" might better be replaced with the word "wisdom" which, he says, "remains . . . an aspiration and not an achievement."

Which brings me back to Kaminer's story in the Times. The rueful tone of her conclusion suggests that she has had a brush not with the clarity of ethics, but with something more like Waddington's notion of wisdom. "For those carnivores who are truly at one with the world, killing your own meat might feel almost like a spiritual act, a way to participate in every step of the life cycle. That’s not how it went for me. I found it upsetting and, on some very basic level, gross."

Despite Kaminer's fantasy that an unconflicted wholeness is available to some lucky carnivores, we know that very few people--meat eaters or vegetarians--attain the spiritual elevation of being "truly at one with the world." In its complexity and imperfection, her troubling experience with butchering her Thanksgiving turkey, like our response to the hawk butchery of our little red hen, situates us solidly in the upsetting, even gross, "turmoil of actual life" (to borrow a phrase from Waddington.) To my way of thinking, that's a position well worth our collective thanksgiving.

Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken

2010-11-20T14:10:00.011-05:00

I was talking on the telephone with a friend in the comics community, and happened to mention I'd just finished a book on chickens. I've known Michael for a number of years, but somehow I'd never mentioned that I was working on this book. When he broke into loud laughter, I replied (with somewhat injured dignity) that E.B. White diagnosed it years ago: to work on chickens is to set yourself up to be laughed at. But then Michael said I simply had to watch "the best power point in the world," and he insisted on staying on the line while he emailed the link to me, and as I watched it. I now pause this blog for anyone reading it to return to the title, and click on it to play the youtube video. I'll be back later with some more words about it.

Tomorrow afternoon we are throwing a pre-Thanksgiving party tomorrow in honor of the Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture, PASA. This local organization helps small farmers to learn to grow food more sustainably, and to market their produce and livestock via the Buy Fresh, Buy Local campaign that they created. It also puts on a large conference every February that draws a national audience, remarkably right in the backyard of one of the major agricultural colleges in the Big Ten.

I've attended several of the "field days" that PASA puts on throughout the year. At one I met farmers who raise pastured chickens for eggs, and who came up with the great idea of "adoptiing out" newly hatched chicks to families over Easter, with the proviso that they must take good care of the birds, which go back to the farm after Easter. The adoptive families can then visit "their birds" at the farm, and while they are visiting, pick up some free-range eggs. At another field day, I joined a group of people interested in learning about a Mobile Poultry Processing Unit created by a local poultry processor. He explained how to do humane poultry processing, minimizing the stress and pain to the birds before their ultimate demise, and then he demonstrated. The group attending the field day ranged from other poultry farmers and would-be poultry farmers to a couple working to create terraced poultry farming in a tropical island which because of the unfavorable balance of trade has become a food desert, where all meat must be shipped in from the USA. PASA has been a real resource for all of us (farmers, foodies, and fellow travelers) in central PA, and it felt like time to do our bit in return.

But that brings me back to that youtube clip my friend Michael emailed to me. By now I hope I'm not spoiling the fun if I say Doug Zongker's "Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken" was presented at the AAAS--The American Association for the Advancement of Science--in the Humor panel. This parody of academic power point presentations comes complete with indecipherable graphs and insider-identity-confirming special language that to outsiders seems like gobbledegook. Little wonder that the audience received it with uproarious laughter.

Did I feel insulted by this email message, my husband asked me later that evening? Far from it: to me, the clip illustrates exactly the point E.B. White made years ago: people find chickens funny."Talking about chickens is a risky thing," he confided. To his city friends the chicken was "a comic prop straight out of vaudeville." What are the risks entailed in talking about chickens? Or, to turn the question around, what institutions and practices are at risk when we pay attention to the everyday, ordinary chicken? That's exactly the point I was exploring in Poultry Science, Chicken Culture, and the primer or alphabet that resulted is defiantly partial in both senses of the term: in the sense of being partial rather than epistemologically complete (one of the primary goals of academic research), and in the sense of being affectively connected, partial rather than objective (the other goal of academic research). Working on my book, I felt a mixture of absorption and a kind of joyous levity: risky pleasure indeed.

Emergenc(e/y) of the First White Male

2010-11-17T18:39:00.005-05:00

Well, the tall skinny white hen with the striking red comb and the Aracauna-like beard has finally come out of the closet, and she's a rooster. I had suspected as much: her stance was too upright, her tail held too high, her run too vigorous and direct, her profile narrow rather than beamy. And yet she never crowed, and she didn't seem to be interested in the other hens.

But this morning, when I went out in the high winds of this grey November to let the birds out of the hen house, he flared his wing like the flamenco dancer he clearly is, and immediately began to tred a willing hen. No crowing yet, but he is definitely rooster number 2 in my flock of only 22 birds. The other rooster is a year older: a beautiful cross between a Salmon Faverolle and an Australorpe that we acquired from a breeder in Belleville who swore she had sexed them all. Humph. I'd be happy to have two roosters, but they won't be happy to share the hens and the feed and the space in the hen house and yard. The last pair we had fought til they were bloodied, and then finally the younger dispatched the older. I don't want these birds to repeat that experience: it was too hard to watch. And yet I'm attached to both of them. We'll see what emerges. In any case, the emergence of this particular White Male marks a moment of closure, reminding me of Ruth Ozeki's story, "The Death of the Last White Male," which she wrote in dialogue with one of my earliest pieces for the book, "Chicken Auguries." Very fitting realization--of the existence of my First White Male--on the day I've just learned the first copy of PSCC is on its way to me. [The book title is too long: it'll have to be an acronym in this blog, but at least an acronym without the violent overtones of the defense intellectuals' acronyms in Carol Cohn's brilliant essay, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals." There, the acronym served to distance human beings from the material horrors of nuclear war: here, the acronym merely helps me get past texuality to the actual materiality of my living, maturing, changing birds.]

Violence does loom in my hen house, but I can't abstract it into an acronym.

spring? spring?

2009-03-26T21:18:00.001-04:00

We're waiting for spring here. It's cold, its damp, and the chickens are wandering around in the leaves searching each day for a new place to lay their eggs. So for me it is a perpetual cold, damp, rather athletic easter egg hunt, as I clamber up and down hills and search under leaves and in little gullies and crevices. Tonight later I plan to go into their hen house and grab the next-door-neighbor-rooster, who has adopted our hens and our hen house as his own, and throw him OUT, though not roughly. Then I'll be able to keep the hens in for the next several days of cold rainy weather, and retrain them to lay their eggs where they are supposed to, at home! I am particularly interested in making sure these eggs are fresh and good, because I'm bringing them to my friend Marie, who is having chemo every three weeks. Her taste has been off since the chemo, and what with the nausea and the general malaise, she says that the hardboiled eggs I brought her were among the only things she'd been eating. She'd wake up at night and eat an egg. I know that she'll be feeling better as the chemo wears off, and that her tastes will continue to change as she goes through the next chemo cycle, but I'm determined to have good fresh eggs for her as long as she wants them. It's as much for me as it is for her: it's something I can do.

Wordle on chicken culture

2009-03-26T13:24:00.000-04:00

The Peace that Passeth Roosters

2008-11-12T13:40:00.008-05:00

Well, we now have a peaceful home. No roosters, and just the sixteen hens pecking their way across the lawn, running under the big tree every time a leaf falls and scares them, and (we hope) going back to their routine of laying eggs. Sleep isn't disrupted any more (ahhhh--we needed that after the disruption of the Obama election, wonderful as that was).

My Buddhist thought for the day seems to apply: "The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve." - Buddha.

I do believe hens think, after their own fashion, and they are thinking now about grain, leaves, bugs, high winds (what IS that buffeting feeling?), but not any longer about roosters. Dominance and sex no longer serve as the sieve to their thoughts--just the need for food and perhaps the pleasure of each other's company.

And yet I miss the roosters. Darwin brought them back to me, as I was reading The Descent of Man this morning: "Male birds . . . possess special weapons for fighting with each other. They charm the female by vocal or instrumental music of the most varied kinds. They are ornamented by all sorts of combs, wattles, protuberances, horns, air-distended sacks, topknots, naked shafts, plumes and lengthened feathers gracefully springing from all parts of the body. The beak and naked skin about the head, and the feathers, are often gorgeously colored. . . . On the whole, birds appear to be the most aesthetic of all animals, excepting of course man, and they have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have. . . . In man, however, when cultivated, the sense of beauty is manifestly a far more complex feeling, and is associated with various intellectual ideas." (Darwin, The Descent of Man, XIII)

Chicken Soup for the Chicken Soup Maker's Soul

2008-11-09T14:25:00.002-05:00

What is chicken soup to the soup-maker's soul?

We took the splendidly beautiful little bantam roosters to Eli Reiff's Poultry Processing Plant on Friday, because six roosters crowing all the time, and jumping the hens, was simply too much.

The hens are happier for it, and I imagine we will both be happier for it, but right now I'm more unsettled and jumpy than happy. As I told G. when we were out putting the door back on the chicken shed after giving them a new small trapdoor (to hold the heat in the house during the winter winds), I feel "like someone lit a fire under me."

Ahh--thank you unconscious.

In the kitchen, a big pot of my chicken soup is bubbling on the gas flame, with three of my roosters in it. G. says it tastes delicious already.

Chicken soup is . . . anything but the bromide those stupid books make it out to be. I hate those titles.

Inauguration

2008-11-08T15:10:00.019-05:00

I HAVEN'T WRITTEN on this blog for a long time, because I've been busy finishing my book on chickens. I thought I HAD finished it : only the introduction and conclusion were left to write when the semester started, and I've started back to work on my next project, giving a talk at the ASBH on graphic narrative, illness and disability.

HOWEVER: I know now that I need to contribute one final chapter to my book, Auguries, Biology, Culture: Notes toward an ABC of Chickens. The chapters that exist so far are: "Auguries", "Biology", "Culture", "Disability", "Epidemic", "Fellow-Feeling", "Gender", and "Hybridity", and I'd been planning to end there, with just a final chapter, "The Zen of the Hen," to get the concluding Z in there. I still think I will write that chapter, which will be on "just sitting" among other things, but first I need to write one final chapter, "Inauguration." Why, you might ask, other than the fact that like everyone else in the world (it sometimes seems) I've been obsessed with the campaign to elect OBAMA, and am now in that zombie-like-zone after the election that the Onion satirized so well?

ALL ALONG I've been thinking that this campaign has seemed to have endowed chickens with more than the usual amount of political significance. I've seen stories on Jeremiah Wright titled "Obama's Chickens Come Home To Roost," noticed the sudden proliferation of "Why did the chickens cross the road?" jokes that featured John McCain and Sarah Palin, been appalled by those "OBama Bucks" created by the racist southern California volunteer (was she a staffer of the RNC or merely a local party stalwart) that featured fried chicken and watermelon on a "food stamp" dollar with Obama's picture on it. But this morning when I checked my RSS feed I found three stories that have pushed me over the edge, and forced me to contemplate yet one final chapter.

FIRST, THERE WAS THIS STORY filed on "Political Punch," the blog of ABC News Senior National Correspondent Jake Tapper, on October 31, 2008, at 9:49 pm.
(See http://blogs.abcnews.com/politiclpunch/2008/10/house-gop-leade.html ) Pulled by Tapper from the student newspaper of Miami University of Ohio (bless their neophytic journalistic chops!) was the report that House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio had called Senator Obama "chickenshit" for voting "present" on house votes. As Boehner put it, "In Congress, we have a red button, a green button and a yellow button, alright? . . . Green means 'yes,' red means 'no,' and yellow means you're a chicken****. And the last thing we need in the White House, in the oval office, behind that big desk, is some chicken who wants to push this yellow button." As a student present in the audience, Sophomore Laura Heins, put it, "To hear this man call this man a chickens*** in front of an audience was absolutely appalling. . . . . It angered me that he would go that low in order to promote his own candidate."

NOT ALL READERS of the blog found the "chickens***" label appalling, however. As one irate respondent put it, "Obama is a chicken and it is about time that more and more of his colleagues called him out on not voting as a State Senator or a US Senator . . . . What is he going to do as Commander-in-Chief? Play chicken . . . when the going gets tough?????" And as another reader put it, "Obama is a chicken. He is like the wimpy bully that pushes people around as long as his buddies are standing behind him. His campaign is built on lies and intimidation." A third reader returned to a familiar folk saying when he concluded, "Our chickens are coming to roost. Mr. Wright has called Mr. Obama a liar. Mr. Obama in return disowns Mr. Wright only after Mr. Wright suggested that Mr. Obama is a liar. Mr. Obama is a serial liar." And a final reader, "Clintonites for McCain," cautioned, "Chicken is a big word. My only concern about Obama is that he seems to stand (I am not saying hangs out with) a lot of punks--like Rev. Wright, Ayers, Kahlidi."

TO CALL SOMEONE A CHICKEN is, as that reader points out, "a big word." The term has been an insult since Diogenes responded with the gift of a plucked chicken to Plato's definition of man as a "featherless biped." The wordless gift said it all: human dignity could not support being compared to a chicken. It was crucial to differentiate between person and poultry. Thus rebuked, Plato added to his definition the additional stipulation: "Having broad nails." (The rejoinder is almost a gag line, for the insignificance of the stipulated detail suggests that in every other way the two life forms are as close as twins . . . )

BUT NOTE THAT Obama isn't just called a chicken, and thus by implication accused of cowardice and avoidance. He is also linked explicitly to the color yellow, which extends the connection to cowardice while broadening this to a racial slur against all people of color. (Suzanne Langer has a great rereading of Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" that makes this point, for anyone who is sceptical.) And such racism explains the image of Obama as a wimp who rules by intimidation, the fear that the "chickens" will "come to roost," revealing Obama's buddies to be not only Jeremiah Wright, but also William Ayers and Rashid Kahlidi (seemingly "bullies" for their advocacy of the rights of people of color at home and abroad). Finally, Obama is described as chickenshit, an excremental curse that compactly conveys not only abjection, but powerlessness, insignificance, impotence, and even backwater rurality.

AS I WAS PONDERING THESE POSTS, I FOUND THE FOLLOWING, from "John Kelly's Commons," a blog at WashingtonPost.com:

Inaugural Balls: For the Birds?

"The upcoming inauguration of Barack Obama allows us to have a quick lesson in Roman history. Though its precise etymology is disputed, "inauguration" is generally believed to come from the Latin for "directing the birds."

Birds were very important to the Romans for foretelling the future and discerning the moods of the gods: the way birds flew, what they ate, how they ate. (It was considered a good sign if food dropped from the beaks of the sacred chickens as they were fed. Yes, there were sacred chickens.) You still might say, after some mishap, "This doesn't augur well." Or, you might say that if you were, like me, kind of pretentious. To inaugurate means to prophesy about the future, something the Sunday morning pundits love doing.

Frankly, I know more about Roman augury than I do about American inaugurations. I think that's because inaugurations aren't really the province of the non-political native Washingtonian. They're for the party faithful, the monied supporter, the hopeful office-seeker.

Or are they? The balls might be tough to get into but anyone can watch the inaugural parade, right? Won't this particular inauguration draw all sorts of interest among natives and outlanders alike? [ . . . ] I haven't decided yet what I'm doing. I'll keep my eyes on the sky--and on the sacred chickens. What about you?"

KELLY'S FINAL COMMENT SAYS IT ALL. We still need to keep our eyes on the sky, and on the sacred chickens, in order to figure out what the future augurs. Or, as I argue in the first chapter of my book, "Auguries," the kinds of knowledge we can get from watching chickens are still a potent part of our cultural imagination. They've just expanded their prognostication potential, to include the realms of biology, culture, disability, medicine, economics, and yes, even politics.

CHICKENS CAN EVEN ILLUMINATE the strategies of Obama's transition team, or so this final article I found on my RSS feed suggested to me. Chickenmuseum.com posted this great advice for "Introducing the New Birds on the Block."

"Adding new breeds into your peaceful and comfortable neighborhood of chickens can put quite a rumble between the old and the new. Admit it, nobody likes newcomers. . . . . Fret not, for this kind of attitude and feud lasts only for a couple of days. . . . There are numerous peace-making strategies to help both parties adjust with each other. . . . .

"One very good strategy is to let them see each other without having any physical contact. How? If you have a run . . . you could put your old chickens there and then put a border (chicken wire) between the run and the coop. Put your new chickens inside the coop. This way, they are able to see each other minus the harm. Be sure that both parties have access to sufficient food and water. You can do this for about a week.

"As transition day comes, . . . you can now 'join' them in one arrea. You can transfer the newcomers to the resident flock's territory during the night when all the birds are sleeping. Upon waking up, the old chickens will notice the new ones and they will . . . try to start a fight but will not because they are too groggy to initiate it.

"Distraction techniques are always effective in some way. This can alleviate tactics of war coming from the resident chickens. . . .
"Some of the distracting techniques are:
a. Cabbage heads can do the trick. By hanging a piece of whole cabbage just above their head, chickens will reach it until everything is finished. That is, if they don't get exhausted by jumping to it and reaching it.
b. Make the pursuit an obstacle for the pursuing party. . . .
c. Let them run around at a wider and freer range. The oldies will be so thrilled . . . they wouldn't even notice that there are newcomers roaming around."

GEORGE W.'S HEAD has always seemed quite "cabbage-like" to me. But I don't think the Republican party needs him as a distraction technique. They already have Sarah Palin!

Chick Sourcing and Hen Schlepping

2008-04-04T16:17:00.005-04:00

First, an answer to Greta, who asked me where I find my chicks, but whose question didn't permit an individual answer.

We live in Boalsburg (small world) so we have gotten chicks from the poultry auction at Belleville. It happens on Wednesday mornings: you show up around 11:00 at the Belleville market, and look for the poultry building (around behind the livestock barn). The auction will start around noon, if I remember correctly. They auction off a wide range of birds there: not just chickens, but guinea fowl, ducks, geese, rabbits and guinea pigs (honorary birds because of their size and edibility), peacocks, and I have even seen a beautiful macaw. As far as chicks go, there are three kinds usually available: large numbers of standard hybrid meat birds, bantam hen and chick combinations, standard size farmyard hens of no particular type with a clutch of chicks, and (very occasionally) pullets. I was once lucky enough to find three beautiful Buff Wyandotte pullets that had been hand raised by the 4H daughter of the cashier at the auction house. They were wonderful: tame, friendly, smart, and they laid gorgeous brown eggs. Another time I found a pair of Silkies, that went on to lay beautifully, but not at my house because my other roosters had it in for the Silkie rooster, so I had to give them away to a more peaceful home.

They also sell roosters there, and beware, if you see a box of chicks that aren't hybrids, they will often be the result of a chick-sexing wizard who has figured out which the males are in a clutch of chicks and is off-loading them before the pose a problem. Too bad, but much better than just dumping the chicks in the landfill, which is what apparently many of the industrial producers do.
At least those roosters have the chance of life, and ideally not as fighting cocks (though I know some of them do go for that.)

Now, on to a very late report on my own chickens. Last spring, we bought fifty White Wyandotte female chicks from Murray McMurray: our second year of raising our own chickens and staying at least to some extent off the grid. (Or at least knowing exactly what kind of a life our birds had: roaming outside, eating grass and bugs as well as scratch corn, and learning about life.) There is a lot I could say about this experience--for example, the poignant discovery that incubator-raised chicks who come en masse to your brooder have no clue how to deal with the basics of life. At the same time in my chicken yard I had two bantam-hen-and-chick families, and it was actually painful to see the difference in the chicks who had mothers, and those who were raised in the circle of the corrugated cardboard brooder. I did my best--warm lights, clean shavings, food and water always fresh--but they were no more educated into the world than puppies are who are raised in a puppy mill. . . .

In any case, fast forward to this spring. Most of those chickens are in our freezer, though we have eaten a fair number, as coq au vin, or roasted, or stewed. They lived for 18-19 weeks, which is longer than standard, and it really hurt to take them to our Butcher, Eli Reiff. But as I have already written, he is a gem: kind, careful, quiet, and very fast. Only two of the White Wyandottes remain--there was a third, but a raccoon got into the hen house and killed one of them. And that's when the strange new era started for our last pair of hens.

The murderous raccoon had done the killing, but then had not left the hen house. Instead, it curled up in one of the nest boxes and fell asleep. This scared the remaining chickens so badly that when my husband opened the house in the morning they came tearing out--leaving the sluggish sleepy raccoon behind them.

Now, they won't spend any time in the hen house voluntarily. (Can you blame them? I can't!) Instead, they wander around our garden, fields, woods and driveway, happily eating whatever they find and scratching for bugs with absorption. When it begins to get dark, they head into the garage, where we find them settled in for the night on a bookcase. Because we don't trust the garage to be predator-free, we have to pick them up and carry them out to the chicken house, which we carefully check for raccoons etc., and then put them on their perch.

This has become a nightly ritual. And since I'm in New York City most of the time, writing my book, that means that when my husband gets back from a day of seeing clients (he is a psychotherapist), he has to go into the garage, pick up the two sleepy chickens (one under each arm) and deposit them in the chicken house for the night.

And to add insult to injury, we can't find where they are laying their eggs now!

Just a report from the trenches.

Urban Chickens in London

2007-10-30T08:43:00.000-04:00

Natalie Steed has posted on urban chickens in London. http://nataliesteed-lcc.blogspot.com/While I'm there this week, I want to meet up with her, and to investigate the urban chicken culture there. Are there organizations like MadCity Chicks (in Madison Wisconsin) or the Seattle and Portland chicken movements? Natalie writes about the Suffolk avian flu outbreak: I need to learn what kind of flu it was--low path I presume, but what was its type? And I need to talk to poultry people in London, Oxford and the environs.

Al Gore

2007-10-12T08:56:00.000-04:00

the indecency of bioethics

2007-10-11T11:59:00.000-04:00

The horrible news has just come out that Dr. Daniel Gunther, who with a colleague performed the highly controversial (and in my view completely inappropriate) hysterectomy and breast bud removal on Ashley X, has committed suicide.

We will certainly have time to mull over the many perspectives on what it has meant to the lives of all involved. But we may not do so, if we let bioethics once again be deployed in its callous "sound bite" function to stamp "Sealed" on an episode that is anything but sealed. When Arthur Caplan once again performed the role as 'go-to' spokesman for the bioethics world, his response claimed the experience as a debate between pediatric medicine and disability activists:

"You just can’t know what leads people to suicide,” said Art Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania bioethicist and MSNBC.com columnist.

But it’s certain that Ashley X’s case caused a seismic wave throughout pediatric medicine and the world of disability. It raised difficult and challenging questions about what’s in the best interest of children and young adolescents with disabilities. The controversy is going to continue to go on and I think that Dr. Gunther’s voice will be sorely missed.”

This comment is chilling, not only because of Caplan's insider position (salaried, one assumes) as MSNBC columnist and thus party to the press feeding frenzy, but because his disingenuous refusal to consider the role of the press, bioethicists, disability activists, and medical practitioners in the social context for Dr. Gunther's suicide casts depression (and other mental disabilities) as beyond knowledge, beyond commentary, beyond concern. "Those" suicidal people somehow aren't granted the same bioethical scrutiny as are the Ashley Xs of this world. And yet the tragedy of this awful story also belongs to Dr. Gunther and to his family if he had one as it does to Ashley X and her family.

What would happen if we actually opened up the whole question to discussion, rather than closing it down? If Arthur Caplan had asked simply, "What do we know about suicide?" rather than "You just can’t know what leads people to suicide,” we might actually have given ourselves space to consider how institutions of all kinds (press, bioethics, pediatrics, parenthood, the law) let something crucial escape their deliberative machines. And perhaps we would be able to step outside the tidy institutional structure of the dominant model of bioethics, whose procedures risk framing situations with such linear clarity that all the disturbing ambiguity escapes.

As we can see if we look at the parodic Goofus and Gallant cartoons in the latest Atrium, procedural clarity is not always the best, or even an adequate, response to the increasingly complex questions facing us as we live our liminal lives. That is why comics are so useful for bioethics. Rather than being linear and procedural, they are spatial, often ironic, even chaotic. They hold open space for multiple voices, rather than ceding all comment to the dominant voice, a bad state of things even when that voice speaks for bioethics. http://www.bioethics.northwestern.edu/atrium/atriumissue4.pdf

The new butcher

2007-10-11T10:49:00.000-04:00

I take my chickens to Eli Reiff, in Mifflintown, who is a very savvy local poultry processor. He gives talks at the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture conferences, has a mobile poultry processing station that he can bring to the small farms to process their poultry thus reducing the heat and travel stress on the birds, and he can talk a mean game about the problems with big poultry without romanticizing the difficulty of chicken farming or food production. I am sure there are many other small-scale butchers in this country, but they are a diminishing lot as the large processors stake their claims to whole areas of the country where travel is cheap and easy. In rural Pennsylvania, for example, the area around Lancaster is well served by large processors (well-served may be an inaccurate description given what happens in large processing plants, so let's just revise that as monopolized by those large processors), but the northern, more hilly tier of the state has precious few butchers. The onus on the small processor is to make his or her work known to the new crop of poultry growers as well as the existing small farmers. An example of how this is being done is below: the HomeGrown Poultry company got a mention in an article in the Boise Weekly on keeping chickens as unusual pets, and when I went to their website, I found this explanation for precisely why small poultry processors in our local area are so crucial in this new food system.
***************************
HomeGrown Poultry prides itself on being the first state-approved poultry and rabbit processor in the state of Idaho. Poultry processed in our new 1920-square foot facility can be resold anywhere with the state of Idaho. We are pending approval from the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare to resell rabbits within the state. HomeGrown Poultry has been in business since 2003, owned and operated by experienced poultry growers.

We believe growing food for yourself and your family is true food security.

We believe locally-grown food is more nutritious, saves fossil fuel, and supports local farmers. It is true homeland security.

We support local food systems - all the processes that go into producing and distributing food - whether they've developed haphazardly or with careful planning - from breeding crop seeds, to fishing, to raising cattle, to processing food, shipping, storing and selling it.

We support sustainable agriculture - growing food and fibers in a ways that don't compromise the ability of future generations to do the same.

The food supply chains we depend on have been growing longer and more complicated - and this has created new vulnerabilities. Food does not just pass from farm to market to table anymore. The links of these chains pass through more hands, more labs, more companies, more processing facilities, more countries, etc. Too much of this stretching food supply chain is out of sight, and out of public control. We either need to shorten the food supply chains by buying more locally produced food, or do a much better job of overseeing and managing them through all their twists and turns. We believe HomeGrown Poultry has an important role in this system.

******************

Rhetoricians could make much of this passage, because it is such a good example of how the rhetoric of terrorism is being adapted (productively, one hopes) by local foods activists. Of course, that is if you can call keeping your own chickens activism, as I think Grace Lee Boggs might well do: in a recent interview with Bill Moyers she talked about drawing her hope for the future as an activist from the upsurge of local gardens she saw being created.

Autumn in the chicken yard

2007-10-10T13:47:00.000-04:00

I've been collecting news about chickens thanks to various RSS feeds, but now that I'm back with my own chickens, I'd rather write about what's happening right here in my chicken pen.

The White Wyandottes are much bigger than they were the last time I saw them (about two weeks ago). They also seem to be in a moult, no doubt a result of the very unseasonably hot weather. When they fluff up their feathers, which they do after dust-bathing to get the mites off, their small inside feathers drift to the ground. Yesterday one hen shook herself and a small feather fell into the water pan, where it sailed about like a fairy boat, until the same hen stopped by later for a drink and gobbled the feather right up. People are always so appalled to think that hens will eat anything, but here's an instance. (And of their cannibalistic tendency, too. . .)

The four bantam chickens have now come into maturity, and they are three lovely roosters, with black bodies and golden brown mantles and tails, and one modest golden little hen. The emotionally-tinged language just seems to fit them: the roosters are all display, the hen all inobtrusive speed as she gleans our garden. One of the roosters has started crowing--the lovely one with the black spangled feather-headdress spiking out from his red comb--and it's been so funny to listen to him try to find his particular song. At first it was just like a teenage boy whose voice was breaking, but now he has his riff down, with its distinctive quaver and semi slide down several notes toward the end. I'll see if I can listen and find a way to annotate it. The other day, he was practicing so loudly that he woke me up, about 5:30. I went outside, sure that he was in the garden shed annex to our hen-house because it sounded so loud I thought it was echoing. But no sign of him there. . . Instead, he startled me by flying out of a tree behind our garage just as I was passing beneath it. I looked up, and the other two roosters and the hen were all up there, teetering on a thin maple branch. I'm trying to get them to come into the garden shed so that once winter comes they can find water and food there, but so far they're reluctant to get anywhere near the other chickens (with their large turf-protective Barred Rock-Bantam Crossrooster). So the chicken flock stays in the hen house, to be let out in the morning & closed in at night, while the four bantams range at their pleasure across our lawn, fields, and even garden.

They do visit the chicken coop for food and water occasionally, though. I was sitting out there the other morning, communing with the chickens in my own form of meditation, when the four bantams came in to drink from the red dog bowl of fresh water I'd put down. I'd just seen The 3:10 to Yuma, and it reminded me of the scene in which Ben Wade's gang come into town. The White Wyandottes clucked and clustered, but they along with all of the rest of the 'town' chickens stayed away, while the little Bantam rooster had a dust-up first with the Big Barred Rock/Bantam, and then the tough mama Barred Rock who has seniority in the chicken-yard. After the gang of Bantams, so obviously built for speed and independence, took what they needed from the chicken yard, they cleared right out.

In fact, the chicken community reminds me of what I missed in the film: strong older women. It's not to fill a category that I want this, but because the chicken community shows so clearly that the foundation of a community requires not only male elders and legislators but fearless older women as well. I think of how our old Barred Rock hen patrols the food and water, keeping chipmunks away, and of how the elderly beared Bantam mama who has chosen to stay in the chicken yard vehemently keeps the other intruder Bantams away from food, water, even scattered vegetables that I bring in from the garden. There is a tight sense of belonging each group has, as well as a clear sense of the other's outsider status. The only thing that challenges this is, predictably, the exogamy mandate. Though of course the chickens don't know it as such--they just manifest it as the little Bantam tries to mate not with his mother in the alien foursome, but with the much larger White Wyandottes from the other cohort. However, he can't accomplish that, because she really is a good four inches taller than he. So in the end he turns to his indignant, squawking mama. (And so, of course, seniority only goes so far in the chicken-yard.)

I think these chickens are about three to four weeks shy of their slaughter date, a phrase I somehow hesitate to write here. Why: because the admission that I will kill them puts me in a camp that to many readers may make me the outsider? Not a vegetarian. Not dedicated to the life-long welfare of my hens and roosters. Not the wonderful chicken rescuer I read about in a Minnesota newspaper. . .

I'm interested in this: somehow it has felt important to me to work out a relationship with my chickens that acknowledges the fact that they're going to feed us. They've been well cared for, with affection and good food, water and roaming room, and pretty soon it'll be their time to go. I'll be taking them to Eli, the Mennonite Butcher in the next valley who does the butchering for all of the small farmers in the area. He's careful, gentle, quick, and the most interesting talker I've come across in a long time. When I first met him I decided that he was actually a life form in need of protection, since the small-scale butchers have pretty well vanished from central Pennsylvania. I stand with the chickens as he butchers them, having brought them to him following his careful instructions: no stress, crates covered with a blanket if the air is cold or the wind is harsh. But I'm still wondering how I'll feel after knowing these birds since May 31: we've planned on them as our dinner for the winter & spring, but I'm sorely tempted to keep at least one hen out, as a layer and friend. There's the curious one with the dark red comb and wattles . . .

Mortality: my chickens face it as my friends are facing it, and my mother (who's just fallen, and is increasingly frail), and I all face it. Autumn brings it all right out in the open: the warm, soft, mellow approach to the killing frost.

Chick sexing is worth contemplating

2007-09-24T09:15:00.000-04:00

So much knowledge about chickens is disappearing as the chickens themselves go inside--into the large corporate poultry hatcheries and grow-out houses, and into the zone of technical expertise rather than commonplace know-how. But here is one instance in which the very knowledge itself is a product of technical innovations. At one point we didn't need to sex day-old chicks, because we weren't sending them through the mail as sexed lots of pullets. We'd just sex the chicks by observing them: we'd notice whether their behavior was starting to indicate cockerels, as for example when two lanky chicks go head-to-head in the daring stare down and head bobbing ritual I've seen so many times. Or we'd realize that the tail feathers on a chick were starting to arc out and down in the beautiful fountain characteristic of roosters, as opposed to the stubby, rounded tail of a hen.
http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=T&ct=us/0-0&fd=IG&url=http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article%3FAID%3D/20070924/OPINION04/709240309/1035/OPINION&cid=0&ei=cLf3Rur7EaSE0gHB8KWmDw

The Underwire - Wired Blogs

2007-09-21T19:14:00.000-04:00

Well, just as I wrote A. that I was ready to kick back and have a glass of wine, here came this lovely story over the wires from WIRED. I must say, that's one beautiful poultry hutch. It rivals the poultry tractors we created to house our white wyandottes. They seem to have Rhode Island Reds in there, though they could also be heritage Buckeyes, or even the red hybrids whose name I can't quite remember. In any case, here is just one more bit of evidence that chickens are the source of all wellbeing. (Though I must admit to being shocked that Philip and Bonnie are selling eggs. I think they should be giving them away, and encouraging people to keep their own urban chickens. That's what I do. . .
The Underwire - Wired Blogs

exhaustion

2007-09-21T18:41:00.000-04:00

I've been writing non-stop for two weeks, it seems. But I've finally finished. The question of parody still is up in the air, and I can't figure out how to compress the power point to send it to Aspen, but at least the essay is finished, the power point is finished, and luckily I'm not quite finished. This isn't exactly the high-life in the big city, but maybe I'm at least en route to the wisdom my chicken expects from me.

But until I get to it, here's one tidbit from the talk I've just finished:

I have been talking about medicine here, but let me push on that category a bit As Howard Brody has pointed out, the challenges posed by feminism and disability studies call on us to redraw the boundaries of medicine, to realize that issues of gender, race, and ability are crucial in our framing of medical issues. We’ve discussed race and gender, but it’s crucial to extend our understanding of medicine to encompass disability as well. Scholars distinguish three models for conceptualizing disability: the moral model, which sees disability as the result of a moral or spiritual failing that triggers stigma; the medical model, which understands disability as the result of an illness or injury that it is medicine’s task to cure or ameliorate, and that triggers pity; and the social model, which holds that a physical or mental impairment only becomes a disability when society refuses to accommodate it, and that triggers self-actualization.

Though disability studies scholars consider these modes roughly chronological, earlier perspectives on experience can persist even within later ones, imperceptibly shaping what can be thought, as philosopher of medicine and microbiologist Ludwik Fleck demonstrated in his brilliant study of syphilis.[i] So, in these comic books, the moral model of disability (with its stigmatization and sense of moral failing) persists even into the medical model, with its attention to adherence to the doctor’s regime for managing chronic illness.

[. . . ]
What have we learned about communicating medical information from the comparison of these four comics instructing children in diabetes management? We have learned, first, that we need to consider intersectionality when we do patient education, building attention to gender, race, ethnicity, and ability into every text we create. Second, we shouldn’t actually be writing the texts in the first place; the patients should write them, speaking for themselves about the challenges they are facing first hand. Third, and finally, we must understand that realistic, mimetic representation is not our only option. Popular genres like fantasy and science fiction, and popular media like comics and hypertext, may even be more suitable, if they leave open spaces for counter voices. So one more application for Butler's important strategy of performativity: the act of holding space open for the performance of different roles, voices, identities and images, whether as parody or in earnest, is a politically effective way of re-imagining health care.

[i] Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. [1935] Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

VIDEO: Director of the documentary "Mississippi Chicken" John Fiege (independentfilm.com)

2007-09-20T07:52:00.000-04:00

Here is a brief trailer for Fiege's wonderful documentary, mentioned in the previous post. When it was screened to a group of scholars working in animal studies, the audience focused primarily on the opening scene in which the pig was butchered, and a later scene on the killing floor of the poultry processing plant. However, the overwhelming power of the film lies in its exploration of the emotional and social death suffered by illegal immigrant poultry workers in Mississippi. The shadow of Tyson Foods hangs over this documentary, reminding us of the corporation's multiple indictments for smuggling of South American workers into the USA to work for substandard wages at its poultry plants.
VIDEO: Director of the documentary "Mississippi Chicken" John Fiege (independentfilm.com)

Isthmus | The Daily Page - Collecting MadVideos -- A teaser trailer for Mad City Chickens

2007-09-20T07:44:00.000-04:00

Check out these trailers for MadCity Chickens. There is a whole genre of chicken videos out there, spanning reports from the urban chicken trenches that advocate for the obvious--the pleasures of city chicken raising--to broad-ranging documentaries that use the chicken industry as the focus for an analysis of the conditions facing immigrant workers in the US South. I'm thinking particularly of a wonderful little documentary film entitled Mississippi Chicken. More on that soon, except to say that this film was made by an erstwhile geography student now activist artist.

Isthmus | The Daily Page - Collecting MadVideos -- A teaser trailer for Mad City Chickens

Isthmus | The Daily Page - Collecting MadVideos -- Mad City Chickens to hatch in 2008

2007-09-20T07:40:00.000-04:00

Isthmus | The Daily Page - Collecting MadVideos -- Mad City Chickens to hatch in 2008

2007-09-20T07:14:00.001-04:00

Thinking about performativity, and how it happens on all scales, from the familiar and obvious human scale to the invisible sub-cellular. Can there be performativity in the subversive sense without intention? Consider the pluripotential stem cell and how differently it performs depending on its 'stage': the changed form of the neural crest when duck cells are transplanted in to quails, or vice versa. (More about this in the future.)

As I write this, I am interrupted by an NPR report that scientists in New York have found stem cells that are 'just as promising' that don't start with an embryo. A researcher at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and his colleague at Weill Cornell Medical College have just found how to use GPR-125 to distinguish one set of viable stem cells from others in testes. They've done this in mice, but can they do this with human cells? "One of the more grandiose uses might be to take a testes biopsy, coax them to develop, and use them as any cells they need," a researcher explains. But can they get volunteers to donate testicular cells? the reporter asks. Nervous laughs ensued from the researchers in the lab. Now that would be a reparative form of gender performativity.

2007-09-17T22:45:00.000-04:00

What a week to think about disability.

First I saw the stunningly awful "Removable Parts" with A. and S. The evening was appalling, excruciating, and ultimately (thankfully) fun. But the fun came only at the very end, during dinner, and even then was laced with frustration.

It wasn't fun to make our way through the remote hallways to the locked elevator leading to the impossibly steep ramp into the theater, where no acceptable spaces for wheelchairs awaited, so that S. and A. had to park themselves right in the front of the house, just to one side of the first row, at an uncomfortable position raised about a foot or so above the rest of the seats behind them. And it wasn't fun to watch the two performers--the singer and pianist--respond with discomfort to our stark presence right in front of them, as they performed a series of appalling song-and-dance routines about a psychological or psychiatric disorder resulting in self-mutilation that they persisted in characterizing as something other than a disability. It certainly wasn't fun to sit furious in the first row during the post-performance talk-back while the four members of cast and crew (all white and able, as far as I could tell) made the distinction between disability (which they viewed as certainly worthy of pity) and BIID, which was worthy of scorn, merely crazy and absurd. No acceptable choice, the one between pity and scorn! And while it was fun to take notes during the performance, in the excellently lit first row, getting many of the most disturbing lines from the performance close to verbatim to their evident discomfort, it was not fun trying to educate people so profoundly unaware of the multiple ways they were being offensive and cruel.

And no fun at all was the experience I had when the talk-back concluded. The audience had filed out. As A. , S. and I prepared to leave as well, the singer-songwriter-author of this dismal spectacle reached out and touched me on the arm, thanking me. He distinctly did not do the same to S. and A. It felt like a mark of complicity: you and I, it seemed to suggest, aren't like those two people in wheelchairs. We're both normal, and on the same side. I felt tainted and offended, for myself and for A. and S. Yet, tell the truth. During the performance in addition to being angry and appalled, I had also felt sympathy for the writer and pianist. I imagined their discomfort with us in the front row. I pitied them during the talkback, as we (even so gently) took issue with their ideas, and pointed out ways in which they should rethink the performance. Those emotions of pity and sympathy mark my liminal position in the whole encounter. Visibly able (though smarting inside at their scorn for those who struggle with psychiatric issues, as I have and do, and angry at their visible discomfort in the presence of my friends) I still experienced a kind of 'ability privilege' akin to white privilege. Simply by being seemingly intact, I earned the performer's sympathetic touch, acknowledging our kinship. A kinship I don't want, and don't feel.

Our dinner was much more fun, even though it didn't start out that way. Here we were at one of the four most accessible restaurants in NYC according to the NY Times (or could it have been one of the minimally accessible restaurants with the best food?) but the ramp had to be fetched (which took time) and required bracing before S. and A. could maneuver their chairs up it (with some frightening backslides and skids). Our dinner conversation was an uproarious relief as we trashed the performance and talk back, and the food was ample and delicious. But at the end of the meal there was still the difficulty of negotiating the trip to the bathroom next door (the small indignity of having to announce one's need to use the toilet, one of many such smaller and larger indignities) and then the trip up the broken pavement and inadequately curb-cut intersections of the West Village.

Tonight I went with M. and B. to see The 3:10 to Yuma, and found still more DS issues worth mulling over. The father in the film is a gimp--wounded in the Civil War where he fought for the North--and his missing leg is a plot point throughout the film. Shown first as cause for his son's disdain, then later as the reason he signs up for the impossible mission of bringing the criminal to the train to justice, the loss of his leg is finally invoked to express the incommensurability of disability and restitution. "I was paid the one hundred seventy five dollars and forty two cents not so I would leave the Army, but so they could leave me." Both men in the movie have been abandoned, in short: the soldier by the army which frags him and then deserts him; the criminal by his mother, who abandons him to a useless Bible. There's something going on here about a non-nurturant State and non-nurturing mothers: how both disable, the former physically and the latter morally. But I can't go farther into that question now: I've been writing about comic books, chronic disease management, and power all day, my legs ache after walking to and fro the Writer's Room, and my eyes are closing.

My wise chicken wonders what this has to do with the book I've promised her. It'll come. It'll come.

2007-09-17T16:29:00.000-04:00