Celebration of Nature

I've noticed that, at least in my time and place, people tend to pick up the philosophical principles according to which they run their lives as pre-fabs, without much thought. Maybe this has been true for most people most of the time from when humans were first able to think about running their lives according to anything other than instinct.

Since I dislike inelegant sledge-hammer types of technology, people often mistakenly assume that I am against all forms of advanced technology. They also mistakenly assume that I am a vegetarian and a supporter of liberal politicians (liberal as in the modern USian usage of the term). If I tell them I do not give blanket support to the Democratic Party, they assume I like Republicans. And so forth.

One of the things people tend to assume about me, since I enjoy spending time away from the city and since I like to try to work with nature rather than against it, is that I am a tree-hugging nature-lover. I don't so much love nature as appreciate its amazing complexity. I work with it rather than against it out of laziness and the desire for efficiency. One thing I know about the way nature works: every contestant in the game of life is fighting a dangerous, constant battle. Rich city people can thank advanced technology for their ability to forget about the fight for days, weeks, even lifetimes. By rich, I mean anyone who can afford a constant source of electricity, clean water, temperature control, food, and medical technology. Rich people can pay someone else to fight the battle for them.

I am a rich person, by the above definition. There have been periods in my life when I was not rich, when I was not completely sure I'd have enough food, when I could not afford to pay for medical help, when I did not have an entirely secure shelter from the rain. The periods when I was not rich were real eye-openers with respect to nature.

The grasshoppers that have devastated my country garden are a reminder, and I've just had a particularly gruesome reminder due to misplaced trust in a building contractor.

This man, who came highly recommended and whom I trusted, recently built two chicken pens for me. After the first one was built, I noticed there was a gap at the top of the pen. The contractor used a method similar to the one I used at Altamira when I built pens and pole barns, except that I attached the wire to a wood frame on the outside of the poles, so there was no gap between the wire and the roof of the pen. The contractor had his men attach the wire directly to the poles and cross pieces. This leaves a gap at the top of the wire, large enough for my cat to crawl through.

I pointed out the gap to the contractor, and asked him to be sure and not leave a gap on the second pen, and to fix the gap on the first one. He told me he would. This is where I made my big mistake: I trusted the contractor when he said the work was done and did not climb up to inspect the tops of the pens with my own eyes.

Relying on the contractor's word that the pens had been properly constructed, I put 4 mature hens, 10 pullets, two roosters, and 17 half-grown guineas into the pens. When I arrived at Tilmon last night, I caught a possum and a raccoon enjoying chicken dinners, inside the second pen. These two, plus probably all the other small predators in the neighborhood, killed all 4 mature hens, 8 of the pullets, both roosters, and all the guineas.

I've buried the bodies to get rid of the death-smell, and sent an email to the contractor with photos, to give him a graphic demonstration of why I asked him not to leave gaps at the tops of the pens.

The scene last night, viewed by by flashlight, was worthy of a horror movie. Here are a few photos of Nature in Action. Imagine seeing this in brief, disjointed glimpses in the beam of a flashlight while breathing the odor of decaying flesh. Dark cavities with ragged edges, wet with blood serum. Maggots like glistening, squirming grains of rice. I wanted very much to run away and never come back. But I stayed to clean up the mess. It was still horrible in the morning, but not nearly as bad as it was at night.

It occurs to me that what a good horror movie does is make the viewer see what it would be like if one were dropped into the jaws of Nature, without the protection of human technology. Of course, the slaughter of my birds was not really completely natural, since if they had not been penned, they would have been roosting high in trees instead of on roosts that possums and raccoons can reach with ease (in the trees, owls could have been added to the list of potential predators), and absent their association with humans, the birds would probably have had sharper instincts. But still ...

Feeling Sad

I have seven too many roosters in my small flock. They have reached the age where they're making life miserable for the hens, so the time has come to begin eating them. I killed the first one this evening -- he is becoming tortilla soup.

It's been a while since I killed an animal. I feel sad about ending the rooster's young life, even though the soup smells delicious. Eating meat is something one has to accept if one raises chickens for eggs, or cows (or goats) for milk. There are always too many males, and you can't just turn them out into the streets.

When I lived at Altamira, I used an ax to kill chickens -- chop off the head in one swift blow. I used the "broomstick" method this evening, because I left the ax in San Antonio and don't trust my skills with a knife. The broomstick method (I actually used a wrecking bar) seems quite gentle, compared with the ax. The bird relaxed for a moment, then went into the usual death spasms. One can never say for sure, but I got the impression that it was a painless death. I've noticed, when I've been in accidents, I don't usually feel pain as the injury is taking place, only later. I would guess that death by guillotine or neck snapping is painless.

At least when I kill chickens myself, I know they had a very happy life up until the last moment, and that their deaths are quick. If I were to buy chicken meat from a store, I could be pretty sure that the bird had an unhappy life, and the last moments could have been really horrible.

35,000 Free Range Chickens

How can people have (or pretend to have) such tunnel vision?

These photos say it all -- factory-farm "free range" and truly free range . Can you guess which is which?















Warehoused chickens photos from: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/01/23/free-range-chickens.html
Pastured chickens photo from Grass Fed Farms http://www.free-range-poultry.com/flock-welfare.html

An article on Discovery News online reports that caged chickens are healthier than free range chickens. Free range chickens peck each other more. They tend to have more problems with bacterial infections such as E coli. Why could that be?

From page two of the article:

Flock size was part of the problem, Fossum said. Cages held a maximum of 10 birds. But free-range flocks sometimes contained as many as 35,000 chickens. Even though these chickens had the freedom to hop outside and roll in the dirt, they were more likely to bump into each other, fight, and share diseases.

Thirty-five thousand chickens confined in one static space? Walking around in feces-laden litter? I've read elsewhere that "free range" chickens of this sort are often not let outside until they have become too old to try new things. Newly hatched chicks will accept whatever world they find themselves in, but as they grow older, they become set in their ways. If management doesn't open the gates to the outside early enough in the pullet's life, she may never go outside. What would be the point anyway? Even when chickens do go outside, it's not as though they find green grass to graze and rich soil where they can scratch for insects. The best they might hope for is a dust bath that's already been used by thousands of other chickens.

There's a young woman here in Lockhart who sells eggs from "free range" chickens she keeps in the yard at her home. I bought a dozen from her and was very disappointed to find the same thin shells and pale yolks one sees from factory-farm hens. The young woman mentioned that the hens were eating purchased feed. I suspect she was keeping a fairly large flock of hens in a relatively small space. The hens had probably killed all the grass, and the soil was probably toxic from too great an accumulation of manure. In other words, these were not truly "free range" hens. The eggs themselves tell the truth. There's a great photo here: http://urbanhennery.com/2008/01/21/free-range-vs-cooped-up/ of ten eggs, all from the same hen. Some of the eggs were laid when the hen was outside eating grass and insects, the others are from when the hens were penned.

Back to the Discovery article -- what blows my mind is that a "study" was required to convince people that it's not healthy to keep thousands of hens cooped up together. I have to wonder if these people have ever bothered to learn the conditions required to have a truly healthy hen.

The most disturbing thing to me about this article is that it is confusing to the point of being deceptive to someone who has never raised truly free-range, healthy chickens. The unfortunate creatures packed into warehouses with outdoor "runs" that make the worst state prisons look like palaces are NOT free range chickens.