Trauma Farm (28 page)

The average North American has not tasted a real chicken for years. Earlier, I wrote about the egg layers, their feed, and the growing conditions. The world of meat chickens is equally harsh. Just as the choice of laying breeds is narrowing, the remaining hatcheries offer an increasingly more limited range of meat birds. The current commercial meat birds are almost entirely descended from the feisty Cornish cross. Their offspring, the Cornish giant, has a tendency to grow as fast as a cancer, and its heart can just explode as the bird waddles over to the feed trough. But the Cornish giant is merely the grandfather of the new standard hybrids—the sickly Hubbard and the misshapen Arbor Acres, which, like the turkey, was bred to have bigger breasts and smaller thighs because that’s what the market demands. I couldn’t raise Arbor Acres and sleep at night. They require a controlled environment and enhanced feed to survive. They’d die if kept in the open air and fed traditional grains.

The Hubbards were bred to be raised indoors. Put them in a pasture and they’ll catch cold. Up to 20 percent will die after a few rainy days. The Cornish giants can still survive on a lower-protein scratch diet, which slows their unhealthy growth speed. Unfortunately, too many “free-range” farmers raise them on the recommended pellets. Cranked on this stuff, these overbred birds get a heart disease called water chest and fall over or have spectacular heart attacks, suddenly somersaulting into the air and turning purple. They’re dead when they hit the ground. They also grow faster than they can produce bone-building calcium. An unforgivable number of the poultry in “free-range” factories turn into Quasimodos, all bent up with twisted legs and inflamed and calcified joints. Yet North Americans have become so habituated to the Jell-O-like quality of meat in supermarkets that they recoil upon first facing the denser, darker meat of a real chicken. After a few bites of our old laying fowl, long simmered with sea salt, or one of our authentic free-range broilers barbecued on a grill, they understand what they have been missing.

We raise only a hundred meat birds twice a year, in spring and summer, fifty to a coop and field—one behind our bedroom and one alongside the entrance driveway. We’re still legally allowed to do this because we raise fewer than two hundred chickens a year, the current limit before you must buy a quota and become a factory farm. That’s also a good number for us to raise healthily.

WHEN I BEGAN WRITING
this history, both domestic and wild birds were being called a worldwide threat during a viral panic ignited by the apperance of avian flu. Electronic communication has the ability to create these panics, mostly because modern corporate media thrives on fear and uneasiness. A potential international epidemic is hotter news than tales of feisty hens in the hen yard. Epidemics are natural to human populations, and they often arrive with the interaction of species in crowded, unhealthy conditions. Sometimes a virus or a bacterium makes a jump to a new host—such as us. This is the fear with avian flu. The difficulty is that transnational agribusinesses, utilizing their enormous lobbying powers and alliances with agricultural ministries, are pushing the world’s governments toward eliminating all free-ranging domestic fowl and thus ending our long natural history of living with birds, while the factory system creates disease vectors.

As far as can be determined, according to Andrew Niki-foruk in
Pandemonium,
the avian flu originated in a cluster of filthy factory farms in Guangdong province in China, where chicken sheds intermingled with pig sheds. Pig biology is close to human biology. The enormous volume of manure created at these animal factories was sprayed over the ponds of fish farms, providing high-protein feed to the fish sold in restaurants and grocery stores in many countries. This practice made those ponds an infection point for migratory bird populations, which rapidly spread the disease around the world.

Rather than dealing with the underlying causes of this potential pandemic, governments are considering banning chickens from the open air. Already in Canada, the factory farms are complying with a “voluntary” policy of keeping poultry in biosecure, closed systems with filtered, screened air. The government is kind enough to supply the specifications for the appropriate “voluntary” bird factory. This fits in exactly with the agenda of the giant agribusinesses (whose inhumane chicken factories have been increasingly undermined by the growing success of the slow-food and organic movements). They would like to see traditional farms regulated out of existence.

Almost as dangerous as the diseases are the panics that follow them, and our subsequent overreactive behaviour. In British Columbia 19 million birds were slaughtered in the Fraser Valley in 2004, to stop the spread of a milder variation of avian flu that wasn’t fatal to humans. I talked with bird lovers in the valley afterwards, and the carnage was disheartening. Hired amateurs gassed chickens badly. Lost truckloads of dead birds were abandoned to rot. Chicken factories were flooded with firefighting foam, suffocating the birds. This was so successful that many of the killers are advocating that all chickens be foamed to death. They also invaded yards and butchered family pets. There were reports of guys in white suits chasing ostriches with machetes. Rare and endangered varieties of birds being nurtured for their contribution to the gene pool were indiscriminately slaughtered, even those known to be not susceptible to the virus.

At the height of the hysteria there was foolish talk of killing all waterfowl in England in the name of bio-security. The authorities in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, began poisoning their pigeons and wild birds. Holland banned all domestic chickens from the open air, and Germany did the same, though that order was later rescinded after the uproar from organic poultry enthusiasts.

While agribusiness and governments conspire to eliminate real free-range poultry around the world, they are ignoring the fact that their systemic inbreeding of domestic fowl has damaged the birds’ immune systems. Combine this with overcrowding, stress, and processed diets, and they’ve created exquisite breeding conditions for disease. That’s why, although droves of wild birds have died, their percentage of fatalities is less than for birds in factory farms, where up to 80 percent of flocks of sixty thousand birds can die in a few days. The health authorities should be banning the raising of
more
than two hundred chickens in one location, rather than punishing those who grow two hundred poultry or fewer in a traditional manner. But since corporate agriculture has the greater influence, that alternative is unthinkable. More crucially, it is uneconomic in today’s world, and would lead to chaos and famines if done abruptly. Our sole choice today is to develop a hybrid system of factory farms and revived traditional farming, and then move gradually back to the future of traditional farming.

MEAT CHICKENS ARE REGARDED
as dumb creatures. I’m nervous about considering any animal dumb. One year we had a variant flock of Cornish crosses—intrepid, smart, strong-boned. They weren’t the usual slow, fat, and stupid meat birds. They were as lively as layers, and they took to roosting on the perches, which most modern broilers can’t do because they’re too fat and weak. Everything looked good, except they kept shaking their automatic watering dish loose. It would fall onto the floor and flood the coop, so I quick-fixed it with a football-sized rock on top of the pipe to steady it and prevent the chickens from roosting on the board holding the pipe, and then I forgot to properly repair it. One day I went out in the early morning after Sharon had gone to work and checked the coop’s feed and water. They’d gummed up the water dish again, somehow unscrewing it.

With farm tasks you can go beautifully blank as you perform them, intent only on the task—the moment farming you. Fiddling with the dish, I was suddenly struck on the head, and I blacked out. I awoke lying on my back in the shit and the shavings, stunned. The chickens were gathered around me like ghouls at a funeral, or were they sizing up my eyeballs? I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed, and the pain was excruciating. I’d been struck just above the forehead, and blood was running down my face and the back of my skull. I couldn’t organize my thoughts until I saw the big rock lying beside me. Oh no! They’d still managed to roost on the pipe and had loosened it so that when I fiddled with the water bowl, the rock came down on my head. I heaved myself up to a sitting position, scaring the chickens back for a moment. I don’t doubt that if I’d lain there unconscious for longer, they would have been at me. I was reminded of the story my dad told me when I was a child—about a farmer who fell into his cement pigpen, and all they found was his boots.

I crept to my feet, my head throbbing, blood pouring down. As I staggered out I realized that even raising chickens can be a fatal operation for the stupid, especially if your chickens are trying to kill you.

LIKE MOST FARMS, WE
keep dogs for flock protection and herding, and cats to check the rodent population, though the cats sometimes develop a taste for songbirds, which causes us anguish. Still, every farm needs a barn cat, although they can be more trouble than they’re worth. Blame it on the Egyptians. Four thousand years ago a smart farmer by the Nile noticed that mice disappeared when
Felis silvestris libyca
showed up. Otherwise known as the Libyan wildcat, this sharp-witted and needle-clawed feline soon had the farmers offering plates of milk and fish. It’s been like that ever since. Cats became regarded as manifestations of the god Bastet, which caused one wit to remark: “In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods. They have never forgotten this.”

We named our latest tom the Emperor Wu. As imperial in manner as his name, he’s a dynamic, graceful predator. One night, when we had laying hens, I ventured out to lock up the coop. In the dark I started counting the heads on the roost because we’d been having raccoon trouble. There was one head too many. This is not common, as anyone with chickens will agree. I muttered and counted again. Then I realized the extra head belonged to a cat, Wu—or, as he soon came to be known, “He Who Sleeps with the Chickens.” Chickens will huddle on their small, round branch perches, keeping warm and emotionally comforted by the touch of their neighbours. Wu had joined the crowd once he realized that rats had bored a hole into the coop and were sneaking in at night to raid the grain feeder. The last thing the rats saw was a “chicken” leaping into the air with its claws out.