Chicken personalities (thanks Renee and Kal!)

I was fortunate enough to visit with Renee (gifted body work practitioner and artist) and Kal (very gifted artist) outside Hawi on the Big Island yesterday.  Their home includes a studio, farmland, and soon to be teepee for body work and artistic purposes.

Renee showed me her dinosaur kale (it was growing very tall with Hawaii's 12 month growing season!) and other greens as well as her critters.  They have VV (a weiner dog short for 'Vienna Sausage'), Copper (the orange cat), Mango (the soon to be ripe mango colored parrot), geese, turtles, and a whole host of all individually named chickens.  We spent quality time holding Misty, a chicken recovering from the Chicken Pox.  Renee reminded us that chicken pox were so named because the human ailment resembled the sores chickens can get on their combs.  Misty was recuperating in the house with Kal and Renee and apparently does a bang up job cleaning up spare spiders in the kitchen.

Renee shared the following video of their rooster guiding some of the hens to the remains of a bowl of oatmeal:

I also have the following video of the chickens playing from Renee.  Looks just like when my two cats, Lucky and Stitch, play and also looks a lot like...CHILDREN playing, too!

I share all of this because it harkens back to an earlier time when chickens were revered rather than contained.  In the chapter "What came first...the chicken or the egg" in the book Righteous Porkchop, Niman shares that an 1867 text (The Practical Poultry Keeper) insists "Fowls should not be kept unless proper and regular attention can be given to them; and we would strongly recommend that this needful attention be personal."

The attention Renee and Kal paid was personal, loving, and respectful.  The respect and acknowledgement they paid to each animal was commensurate to what was given to other humans, which is the way I believe it should be.

I'd like to end on a positive note, but the above video must be contrasted with the contemporary reality for most chickens (unless they live on the Hawaiian Islands in which case many roam free).  The rest of the chapter in Righteous Porkchop shares the story for many chickens on the mainland, including the profoundly restricted movement (even in 'cage free' enclosures) and profoundly manufactured (red dye added to food to color the yokes in the absence of exposure to sunlight for the chickens) lives of chickens raised for food.

Additionally, please contrast this video (original source page with more information here) with the video above from Renee.  Note that when the video on factory farming is played from Youtube, it comes with a warning that it may be "disturbing to some viewers."  Perhaps a disturbing truth is best seen and changed rather than avoided?  Mahalo, B.