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.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
animals and ethics
"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.
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.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken
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.
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.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Emergenc(e/y) of the First White Male
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.
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.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
spring? spring?
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.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
The Peace that Passeth Roosters
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)
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)
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