The chickens are laying! 

I've been away from the site a lot lately, and I think it's time to explain.  In addition to October's usual busy-ness of fetching firewood to last until April, putting up the season's harvest for winter, and doing the extra work I get from autumn vacationers, my neighbour up the hill is downsizing her flock of chickens.  Our September conversation went something like this:

Neighbour 1:  I'm getting rid of most of my chickens by the end of the month.  Do you want to take some?

Me:  Wow, if you'd asked me last spring, I'd have jumped at the chance.  But my coop is full with thirteen of my own, just coming into lay, and that's more than enough for me.  [logical voice]

Neighbour 2:  I wish I could take some, but I've so much on my plate right now, I wouldn't be able to get a coop ready before spring.

Me:  Hmm...Why don't I chicken-sit the ones you want over winter, until you get your coop built in spring?  [chicken-addicted voice]

So that's what I've been doing on top of everything else:  building a new coop and run for the world's ugliest half-feathered chickens, and settling the new birds in.  Figuring out how to keep them from bullying each other and pecking each other's feathers.  Making a make-shift coop for the two most-bullied birds.  Finding the right protein supplement so they grow feathers for winter.  And--they're rewarding me by laying eggs!

How did I, until recently a dweller in a chicken-forbidding city, come to have chickens?  On a different site, someone linked to a documentary on commercial battery-cage chicken rearing, and that was enough to tip me over the edge into doing something.  I'd had a dim awareness that most of the chicken and eggs we eat are from birds reared in dirty, crowded, inhumane conditions, pumped full of antibiotics because they are in disease-fostering conditions, so packed together they can barely turn around.  Not far from where I lived was a poultry-processing plant, and you'd see spent hens brought in by the truckload, ragged and filthy, crammed together in cages stacked the full height of the semi-trailer.  Something's not right with our food supply system, where it condones cruelty if it's mainly out of sight, demands crowding to maintain factory-style production using live product, and fills said product with antibiotics for "health's" sake, which should never have been necessary in a more natural setting.  It's much the same for all our commercially produced meat, but I don't have room for cows in my yard.  I have room for chickens.

Last spring, I ordered a batch of dual-purpose pullets (eggs and meat), sharing the order of 25 with a neighbour (whom I admit to pressuring to try raising chickens this year, instead of next year).  She chose her 13, and I kept the other 13 (the hatchery sent one extra, for those keeping track).  I have watched them grow for the past four and a half months; grow out of the brooder and away from the heat lamp, ready for the coop which I was still building by refashioning an existing shed.  Nothing like a deadline to motivate me!  Then they were ready for their run, that I was still building, set back by an injured knee.  I have watched them feather out, get big, grow wattles and combs which are now turning quite red, indicating readiness to lay.  Some do the submissive squat, indicating sexual maturity.  Eggs soon, eggs soon, is my mantra.  I have bags of layer feed in the spare room, in the kitchen...and in my bedroom.

These chickens are not pets, as such, and I can't really tell them apart, but I am satisfied knowing that they get a better chicken life being able to run around, climb stuff, fly a little, go in and out at will, get treats, and a little scratch on the back when they ask for one.  There will be thirteen factory chickens whose egg-laying and meat-producing services I will not require.  Thirteen chickens who will be humanely dispatched when the time comes, without any anxiety or pain for them.  There will be humanely-produced eggs available to neighbours, come spring, and increased awareness, in our neck of the woods, of the realities of commercial poultry operations.  I will encourage those who are wanting to raise poultry but are still hemming and hawing.  There will be, in this locality, a little bit of change, and a little less reliance on institutionalized cruelty.  And this is one of the ways I'm walking the Wiccan talk:  I'm attempting to reduce the amount of harm in the world, starting with what I personsally can change, and working outward from there.  Now, as long as I can keep the regional bylaw officers out of my hair--there's nothing specifically against chickens in my zone and I'm not going to ask for details--it'll all be fine.  They probably aren't conversant with "if it harm none, do what you will".

If you'd told me a year ago I would start acting like a grass-roots chicken activist....

EDITED TO ADD:  The power of positive thinking:  as I was writing this blog "The Chickens Are Laying" in the present tense, talking about my "eggs soon, eggs soon" mantra, one of the girls I raised from a chick, laid her first egg!  The layer didn't come forward, so there was a celebration with fresh lettuce, all round!