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

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.

Autumn in the chicken yard

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.