Project Cluck / Part One: Commitment

“I’ve already decided, but it takes Tim a little longer to get committed,” I heard my wife say on the phone to a friend this morning. Whether the central assertion of her statement is true or not is a question for the ages; my immediate need was to figure out exactly what I would eventually be committing to. “The coop tour was great,” she said next, “it was so fun seeing all the different kinds of chickens. It’s going to be really hard to decide which kind to get.” So I guess we’re getting some chickens.

A couple of Saturdays ago we spent about half a day visiting chicken coops, as part of a tour sponsored by Seattle Tilth (www.seattletilth.org). It actually was terrific fun, meeting proud chicken owners and seeing their gardens, coops and chickens…and dogs, cats, goats, etc. The appeal of the whole thing is undeniable. There’s something transfixing about watching hens scuttle about the yard, making funny little sounds; they appear quite self-actualized, especially when, based on how tiny their heads are, it’s not likely there’s a lot going on inside them.

In Seattle, you can have up to three hens (no roosters), plus one additional hen per thousand square feet of land. Because lots of people ask, yes, hens will lay eggs even if there is no rooster about, but said eggs contain no chicks. And –OK, this is odd – you can tell what color eggs a hen will lay based on the color of the feathers on their earlobes. There are a lot of things about the anatomy of the hen I’d rather not know, but it honestly never occurred to me that they have earlobes, let alone that the feathers on them mean anything. Also, other than color, there is no difference between eggs of different shades.

Chickens in America lay about 75 billion eggs a year, about ten per cent of the global total, and we consume over 99% of them here in the US. So each year, American hens (that is, hens living in America) produce roughly 250 eggs per person. Yikes. About sixty per cent of these eggs are used by consumers; the rest are used in processed foods (~30%) and the foodservice industry (~10%). Chinese chickens lay 390 billion eggs a year – about 293 per person. (I’ve heard but have not verified that General Tso’s chicken in particular lays very tasty eggs.) China’s chickens lead the world; I’m not sure if that’s on a per-hen basis or if they just have more chickens. My guess: American hens are the best educated, most productive ones on the planet.

(Click on this link to learn more about chickens and eggs: http://tiny.cc/iShDA. Two caveats: First, the videos are a bit disturbing – not in a PETA sort of way, so no worries there. There’s just something alarmingly earnest (Midwestern?) about the two laptop-toting “students” who guide us through Egg Facts 101, but the Introduction is a “must see.” Second, the American Egg Board, to whose site this link takes you, is not so concerned with the whole “which came first?” part of the conversation, so don’t go looking for that level of discourse on their site. The AEB are the people who bring you the “incredible edible egg” campaign. And we won’t be joining, unless we start buying up the whole neighborhood and tearing down houses – you need 75,000 layers to join. (Our little rambler sits on a 5,980 square foot lot; if we can only have one extra hen per 1,000 feet, we’d need another 15,000 lots at 5,000 square feet each – about 1,722 acres.)

But here’s the thing: based on what I’ve learned thus far about how many eggs a hen can lay in a year, there’s pretty much one hen out there for each of us. And so if there’s a chicken out there laying eggs for me, why shouldn’t it live in my backyard? Perhaps this is part of the appeal of the whole thing – talking to chicken owners; you get an overwhelming sense that having hens is just really satisfying. I wonder if it’s not partly because there’s this happy symbiosis between households and hens? It’s pretty cool, really. And that’s before you start thinking about the living conditions many hens endure, carbon footprint, and all the other stuff we’ve become conditioned to consider as consumers.

I’ll keep you posted on our progress.