*By Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns*

*”Her love of her children definitely resembles my love of mine.” *
– Alice Walker

*”The emphasis has been on smaller, more efficient but lighter-weight *
*egg machines.” *
– American Poultry History

In our day, the hen has been degraded to an “egg machine.” In previous
eras, she
embodied the essence of motherhood. In the first century AD, the Roman
historian
Plutarch praised the many ways in which mother hens cherish and protect
their
chicks, “drooping their wings for some to creep under, and receiving with
joyous
and affectionate clucks others that mount upon their backs or run up to them
from every direction; and though they flee from dogs and snakes if they are
frightened only for themselves, if their fright is for their children, they
stand their ground and fight it out beyond their strength.”

The Renaissance writer Ulisse Aldrovandi described how, at the first sign
of a
predator, mother hens will immediately gather their chicks “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.” Similarly, in collecting food, the mother hen allows her chicks to
eat
their fill before satisfying her own hunger. Thus, he said, mother hens
present,
in every way, “a noble example of love for their offspring.”

I saw this love in action, when a hen named Eva jumped our sanctuary fence
on a
spring day and disappeared, only to return three weeks later in June with
eight
fluffy chicks. Watching Eva with her tiny brood close behind her was like
watching a family of wild birds whose dark and golden feathers blended
perfectly
with the woods and foliage they melted in and out of during the day.
Periodically, Eva would squat down with her feathers puffed out, and her
peeping
chicks would all run under her wings for comfort and warmth. A few minutes
later
the family was on the move again.

One day, a large dog wandered in front of the magnolia tree where Eva and
her
chicks were foraging. With her wings outspread and curved menacingly toward
the
dog, she rushed at him over and over, cackling loudly, all the while
continuing
to push her chicks behind herself with her wings. The dog stood stock still
before the excited mother hen and soon ambled away, but Eva maintained her
aggressive posture, her sharp, repetitive cackles and attentive lookout for
several minutes after he was gone.

Sitting on her nest, a mother hen carefully turns each of her eggs as often
as
thirty times a day, using her body, her feet, and her beak to move each egg
precisely in order to maintain the proper temperature, moisture,
ventilation,
humidity, and position of the egg during the 3-week incubation period.
Embryonic
chicks respond to soothing sounds from the mother hen and to warning cries
from
the rooster. Two or three days before the chicks are ready to hatch, they
start
peeping to notify their mother and siblings that they are ready to emerge
from
their shells, and to draw her attention to any distress they’re experiencing
such as cold or abnormal positioning.

A communication network is established among the baby birds and between
them and
their mother, who must stay calm while all the peeping, sawing, and
breaking of
eggs goes on underneath her as she meanwhile picks off tiny pieces of shell
that
may be sticking to her chicks and slays any ants that may dart in to
scavenge.
During all this time, as Page Smith and Charles Daniel describe in The
Chicken <http://www.upc-online.org/fall2000/chicken_book_review.html>
Book <http://www.upc-online.org/fall2000/chicken_book_review.html>, “The
chorus of peeps goes on virtually uninterrupted, the unborn chicks
peeping away, the newborn ones singing their less muffled song.”

During the first four to eight weeks or so, the chicks stay close to their
mother, gathering beneath her wings every night at dusk. Eventually, she
flies
up to her perch or a tree branch, indicating her sense that they, and she,
are
ready for independence.

Whenever I tell people stories about chickens enjoying themselves, many
become
very sad. The pictures I’m showing them are so different from the ones
they’re
used to seeing of chickens in a state of absolute misery. *The New York
Times*
restaurant critic William Grimes wrote of a beautiful black hen who entered
his
life unexpectedly one day, an apparent escapee from a poultry market in
Queens.
“I looked at the Chicken endlessly, and I wondered. What lay behind the
veil of
animal secrecy? Did she have a personality, for one thing?” His curiosity is
satisfied by close acquaintance with and observation of the endearing bird.
By
the end of his bittersweet book My Fine Feathered Friend
<http://www.upc-online.org/021009fine_feathered.html>, he and his wife Nancy
“had grown to love the Chicken.”

We have to start looking at chickens differently, so that we may see them as
Alice Walker described her encounter with a hen she watched crossing the
road
one day with three little chicks in Bali. In her essay, “Why Did the
Balinese
Chicken Cross the Road?” in Living By the Word
<http://alicewalkersgarden.com/2010/10/living-by-the-word/>, Walker writes:

It is one of those moments that will be engraved on my brain forever. For
I
really *saw* her. She was small and gray, flecked with black; so were her
chicks. She had a healthy red comb and quick, light-brown eyes. She was
that
proud, chunky chicken shape that makes one feel always that chickens, and
hens
especially, have personality and *will*. Her steps were neat and quick and
authoritative; and though she never touched her chicks, it was obvious
she was
shepherding them along. She clucked impatiently when, our feet falling
ever
nearer, one of them, especially self-absorbed and perhaps hard-headed,
ceased
to respond.

Let us with equal justice perceive chickens with envisioned eyes that
pierce the
veil of these birds’ “mechanization” and apprehend the truth of who they
are. In
*The Chicken Book*, Page Smith and Charles Daniel remind us, most
poignantly: “As
each chick emerges from its shell in the dark cave of feathers underneath
its
mother, it lies for a time like any newborn creature, exhausted, naked, and
extremely vulnerable. And as the mother may be taken as the epitome of
motherhood, so the newborn chick may be taken as an archetypal
representative of
babies of all species, human and animal alike, just brought into the world.”

This is What Wings Are For.

__________________________

KAREN DAVIS, PhD <http://www.upc-online.org/karenbio.htm> is the President
and Founder of United Poultry Concerns, a
nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful
treatment
of domestic fowl including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. She is the
author of Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern
Poultry
Industry, More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and
Reality,
The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities and
other
groundbreaking publications.

—
United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes
the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl.
Don’t just switch from beef to chicken. Go Vegan.
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