By Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns

*Easter Egg Hunt and Egg Gathering*

The association of a hen’s egg with Easter and Spring survives ironically
in the
annual children’s Easter Egg Hunt, for the origin of this ritual has been
largely forgotten.

Traditionally, the finding of eggs was identified with the finding of
riches.
The search for eggs was part of farm life, because a free hen sensibly lays
her
eggs in a sheltered and secluded spot. Today’s children hunt for eggs that
were
laid by a hen imprisoned in a mechanized building, most likely in a wire
cage.
The widespread disappearance of the home chicken flock in the 1950s ended
the
gathering of eggs laid by a hen in the place she chose for her nest.
Historian
Page Smith writes in *The Chicken Book*, “My contemporaries who have such
dismal
memories of chickens from the unpleasant chores of their youth had
experienced
already the consequences of putting living creatures in circumstances that
are
inherently uncongenial to them.”

Wilbor Wilson provides the background to this change in *American Poultry*
*History*. He writes: “As the size of poultry ranches increased, the chore
of egg
gathering became drudgery instead of pleasure. Rollaway nests with sloping
floors made of hardware cloth offered a partial solution, but the number of
floor eggs increased when the hens did not readily adopt the wire-floored
nests.
This changed with development of the cage system which left the hen no
choice.”

*The Hen as a Symbol of Motherhood*

In our day, the hen has been degraded to an “egg machine.” In previous eras
she
embodied the essence of motherhood. The First Century CE Roman historian and
biographer Plutarch wrote of the mother hen in *De amore parentis* [
*parental*
*love*]: “What of the hens whom we observe each day at home, with what care
and
assiduity they govern and guard their chicks? Some let down their wings for
the
chicks to come under; others arch their backs for them to climb upon; there
is
no part of their bodies with which they do not wish to cherish their chicks
if
they can, nor do they do this without a joy and alacrity which they seem to
exhibit by the sound of their voices.”

In Matthew 23:37, the mother hen is evoked to express the spirit of
yearning and
protective love: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often have I wished to gather
your
children together, even as a hen gathers together her chicks.”

The Renaissance writer Ulisse Aldrovandi wrote of mother hens in the 16th
century:

They follow their chicks with such great love that, if they see or spy at
a
distance any harmful animal, such as a kite or a weasel or someone even
larger
stalking their little ones, the hens first gather them under the shadow of
their wings, and with this covering they put up such a very fierce
defense
– striking fear into their opponent in the midst of a frightful clamor,
using
both wings and beak – they would rather die for their chicks than seek
safety
in flight. . . . Thus they present a noble example in love of their
offspring,
as also when they feed them, offering the food they have collected and
neglecting their own hunger.

*The Role of the Rooster*

The family role of the rooster is nowadays less well known to most people
than
the motherhood of the hen. The charm of seeing a rooster with his hens
appears
in Chaucer’s portrait of Chanticleer in *The Canterbury Tales*:

This cock had in his princely sway and measure
Seven hens to satisfy his every pleasure,
Who were his sisters and his sweethearts true,
Each wonderfully like him in her hue,
Of whom the fairest-feathered throat to see
Was fair Dame Partlet. Courteous was she,
Discreet, and always acted debonairly.

In ancient times, the rooster was esteemed for his sexual vigor; it is said
that
a healthy young rooster may mate as often as thirty or more times a day. The
rooster thus figures in religious history as a symbol of divine fertility
and
the life force. In his own world of chickendom, the rooster – the cock – is
a
father, a lover, a brother, a food-finder, a guardian, and a sentinel.

Aldrovandi extolled the rooster’s domestic virtues:

He is for us the example of the best and truest father of a family. For
he not
only presents himself as a vigilant guardian of his little ones, and in
the
morning, at the proper time, invites us to our daily labor; but he sallies
forth as the first, not only with his crowing, by which he shows what
must be
done, but he sweeps everything, explores and spies out everything.

Finding food, “he calls both hens and chicks together to eat it while he
stands
like a father and host at a banquet . . . inviting them to the feast,
exercised
by a single care, that they should have something to eat. Meanwhile he
scurries
about to find something nearby, and when he has found it, he calls his
family
again in a loud voice. They run to the spot. He stretches himself up, looks
around for any danger that may be near, runs about the entire poultry yard,
here
and there plucking up a grain or two for himself without ceasing to invite
the
others to follow him.”

A nineteenth-century poultry keeper wrote to his friend that his Shanghai
cock
was “very attentive to his Hens, and exercises a most fatherly care over the
Chicks in his yard. . . . He frequently would allow them to perch on his
back,
and in this manner carry them into the house, and then up the chicken
ladder.”

___________

*KAREN DAVIS, PhD is the President and Founder of United Poultry Concerns