the roosters aren't the problem

we are (and how we can find our way out)

Animaux de basse-cour, Angelo Maria Crivelli, early 1700s

Last week was our annual rooster harvest. Too many roosters is the natural consequence of allowing hens to hatch out their own chicks. One never knows what will come of that. Some years we are ripe with hens, our future egg layers, to take over when the old gals start moving into retirement. Some years a broody hen may decide that the effort of caring for her young chicks was more than she bargained for, abandoning them when they’re still in need of warmth and protection, creating a lot more work for us. And other years, like this year, we may just find ourselves flush with young roosters who torment the hens with their insatiable sex drives. 

Rooster to hen ratios must be maintained lest you find yourself with a flock of hens on an egg-laying strike. A stressed hen is a woeful thing. Yes, roosters must be managed. There’s a couple of ways that this used to be handled on small farms. One way was to castrate the roosters, turning them from rooster to capon. Capons are still raised as specialty birds in some parts of the world like France where they’re prized for their tenderness. It’s an ethical way to allow a “dispensable” bird - not good for eggs and too lean and tough for meat, to still have some semblance of a life.

In our case, we treasure our roosters for giving us the most delicious, mineral-rich soups and broths imaginable. A spent laying hen, on in her years, also produces that intensely flavoured, nourishing broth, but in my opinion there’s nothing quite like a rooster for flavour and nutrients. You know how you can eat a chicken wing or thigh and chew on those marrow-bits on the ends? That’s poorly mineralised bone from a hybridised chicken meant to grow enormous in just weeks. Try chewing on a bone from a properly grown, heritage bird of mature size and you’ll snap your teeth into pieces.

But keeping broody birds to hatch out their own chicks isn’t done so much anymore. People don’t want the rooster problem. People want predictability and efficiency. The bigger the farm, the more necessity for that efficiency. The bigger the anything, the more efficiency becomes synonymous with money and less and less about other costs like time, joy, passion, and the rightness of a thing. Those variables become romantic notions rather than the honest markers of fulfilment and meaning.

So there I was, plucking my roosters, marvelling at their iridescent purple feathers and the gorgeous, ruby red combs on their heads. It was a beautiful morning and the sun was shining on their skin, drying it deep yellow with its warming, sanitising rays. I was thinking about how right that morning felt to me. My husband and I outside working together for our food. The roosters were calm. The other farm animals moved amongst us. We were taking on the responsibility of their swift, humane death between us because it is ultimately a sacred responsibility we feel compelled to meet. To send those birds off to someone else, to cage them and have them brought into a bleached building without windows or sunshine is a preposterous notion. 

They use industrial chemicals in the abattoirs. There are no windows. It is wet and dank and must be continuously scrubbed and sanitised. There, outside, harvesting our roosters, the sun and cool breezes free us from the constraints of a room itching to grow the pathogens of an industrialised food system. We don’t have that problem of sick animals so I don’t have the problem of “safe handling” my chicken. No need for me to spray chemicals on my countertops and treat the food we eat like it’s diseased, because it’s not. More downstream problems of an initial problem being miscalculated.

Around the world, seven billion chicks are put into meat grinders every year. These are the hatcheries people buy their sexed birds from. Why a grinder? Well, they consider it the quick, humane way to do things. There’s been some movement to outlaw that grinder and what ends up happening is these “worthless” birds end up going to vile warehouses where they’re fed and kept within the tightest parameters of life, living long enough to get them into the animal feed market. Is that much better? So we still have a problem. And like everything in this world, farming and otherwise, we seem to spend an inordinate amount of effort and time into creating problems that we patch with poor solutions that then require more problem solving that… you guessed it.

Fight of a Rooster and a Turkey Cock, Frans Snyders, 1600s

We’ll stick with the lowly rooster to illustrate this issue, but it goes far beyond that king of the barnyard. However did we end up here, where chicks are born to a conveyor belt, picked up and sexed by some poor pleb working the line, thrown into a hopper or another conveyor belt that feeds them into a box for some farm somewhere to refresh their egg laying birds? It used to be that chicks came from hens. It also used to be that a bull or a ram or a buck was kept and shared amongst farming communities so babies could be born. As farms dwindled and the onus of responsibility fell more and more to lone farms to specialize, those burdens started to grow. But, so too, did the size of those farms.

People moved to the cities. They stopped raising and growing their own food. I know, I understand that. People who did stay back and farm had to grow bigger in order to feed strangers. And isn’t that a strange phenomenon? Feeding strangers? But so it is. And with that came a decision, somewhere in our collective psyche that sacrifices must be made. You don’t need to ask the milk drinker if they know that the calves are sold off as veal so that they can buy their milk at the grocery store. They don’t want to think about it, but they know somewhere. It’s not the farmer and it’s not the consumer. It’s a system that, bit by bit, has eroded over the decades. We’ve arrived in this place where the solutions to problems seem inevitable.

Well, of course we have to genetically engineer the eggs so that they produce female chicks only! Of course! It’s the only humane option we have! And so they’re trying to do that. And so too, it’s only reasonable to take the chicks out of the equation entirely and grow lab meat in antibiotic slurries in enormous vats. It’s only a quick hop, skip, and a jump to growing food that way when our guiding directive is cost and efficiency. How many of us could honestly claim not to be complicit in that model?

It’s a gross, lazy way of thinking about things, but we do it all the time. Technology will save us. Burrowing down into the hole will surely turn up riches! It doesn’t. It just entrenches us ever-deeper into a way of being that nobody even really chose. We do it with everything, it’s all around us. We use money as measure and then claim no way out. 

Let’s get back to our rooster example. It took about a month or so for three of our hens to hatch out eggs this year. That’s a month with each of them not laying eggs. Their sole mission was sitting on the clutches they had. Speaking of which, those clutches of eggs had multiple eggs they collected over a time before sitting on them. So, there’s the sacrifice of the eggs they squirrelled away that we could have eaten or sold and then taking those birds out of commission for a month each. That too, is an “economic loss”.

When the hens had their chicks, a few got eaten by something. We had to buy special, organic chick feed. There too, is a cost. And as they grew, we obviously had to feed those birds. The roosters would never grow into big, fat juicy birds like the ones you can buy at the grocery store. Those birds were developed in the fifties - another solution to the problem of slow growing birds. Those hybrid birds must be butchered in weeks from their birth or they die under the weight of their own disfigured, heavy breasts - meant to please the market. Our birds, these heritage breed birds, have lean breasts, dark red meat, well oxygenated by movement and balanced musculature. They will live for years, but they will never be familiar to someone who believes that the chicken meat on offer is what chicken should be.

And there’s the problem as I see it. It’s beating, thumping evidence to show where all problems should be addressed - at its heart. Is the problem that we have too many roosters or is the problem that we are so desperately out of sync with the gifts of nature, of all of Creation, as given to us? What goes missing in the modern model of efficiencies and economics? How much are we willing to turn away from to swim in the oblivious waters of “that’s just the way it’s done”? 

I take so much pleasure in taking an afternoon break in the heat of the summer, sitting against the barn wall and watching the hens and their brood. If anyone gets too near their dedicated, chirping little posse of fluffy chicks, the mama hens puff up, throw their tail and neck feathers out and lift their wings in an offensive gesture whose meaning is clear to any fool. It’s beautiful to witness a mother open her arms, or wings, or the soft centre of her body to welcome in that which is hers. It doesn’t last long, that precious time of protection and devotion, but that just makes it more of an honour to observe. What value do we put on that variable?

Een haan met hennen en kuikens, 1855

There are few people that will make a chicken bone broth and understand the intensity of its flavours and the depth of its golden, fatty richness. Not because those birds are gone, but because we have opted for those efficiencies that erase the intangibles. How much we do this is evidenced all around us. We have lost the embrace of wool and softness of well-worn linen on our skin for fast fashion that keeps us shrouded in plastic. We fill our homes with dressers made of compressed paper and plastic because we need somewhere to put our clothes. We create medicines and therapies that poison us because we are sick instead of looking at why we’re sick. Our fertility rates are dropping at exponential rates so we turn to IVF and surrogacy. Our hair is thinning and breaking so we get hair extensions. Our faces age so we freeze them with botulism and cut the skin away from our face to tighten it. We live in places that are too expensive and spend our time working to afford to be there. We build our own cells of “inevitable”.

We just never seem to want to spend any time in the problem itself. We’re not only not curious, we’re downright disinterested. When they arise, we want to get as far away from them as fast as possible. There’s too many other things to think about. It’s normalised and so, it’s normal. I’ve never thought like that, not with anything. I suppose that’s contrarian thinking, but it seems honest to me. I don’t want to be fooled - especially by myself. 

My ancestors would have been horrified that good meat, solid nourishment of any type, would have been wasted and yet, here we are - participating in one way or another. Let’s just be truthful about it. Maybe then we can start having real conversations about genuine solutions. When the only option for the eggs or chickens we eat come from genetic manipulation, sold as a tool of humane livestock practices, will we all protest or will we, finally, be able to realise how our complicity was used to build the systems our children and grandchildren will inherit? I hope we can, at the very least, be honest with ourselves.

Der stolze Hahn, Melchior d'Hondecoeter, 1600s

I’m raising roosters as the roosters will come. I’m telling different stories than the ones on offer. It’s about all I can figure that might make a difference. Maybe, if we all start weighing our decisions against parameters that actually enrich our lives rather than the wallets of industry, we can start making more autonomous decisions for ourselves and our communities. Maybe we can look at the problems in our modern era and back things up instead of hurtling ourselves forward into an unknown technological monster whose answers so far haven’t seemed to work out all that well. 

The answer to the holes in our wool socks isn’t polypropylene socks that saturate us with forever chemicals that then leave us looking for more solutions to why we’re feeling unwell. The answer is to learn to darn the socks. And so it goes with all of our problems. Have the courage and the conviction to find those answers for yourself, away from the consensus and propaganda of industries that weigh only one variable - the least meaningful of all that can be considered. 

The problem with roosters isn’t that there are roosters. Just like the problems in our lives aren’t because there’s not enough money or some other twist of fate or shortage of the abundance on offer. The problem with roosters is us. It’s our linear group-think when it comes to solving the riddles as they present themselves. Instead of coming to these problems with respect for the design and a desire to honour it, we come with hubris and limitations. “To the meat grinder!”, we decree. “Make more money!” “Work longer hours!” We have an infinite stream of consciousness to splash and play in and yet, we choose what seems obvious and inevitable.

girl with toy rooster, anonymous, 1800s

In farming, there are endless problems to solve. An important piece of machinery breaks at a critical time and there’s nowhere to go to repair it. Animals fall victim to injury. A cow breaks a board in the barn and forces her horned head through it getting mightily and irreversibly stuck. Just like us with our heads, our injuries, our broken bits. All the time these problems come as opportunities to find solutions, to evolve from who we are, getting a little closer to who we are meant to be. These little breadcrumbs that present themselves as nourishment to move along our own paths. They may not be delicious in the moment, but they’re there for a reason. 

I have a hard time believing the reason for those problems is to absentmindedly collect them and stuff them down into our pocket before moving on. It’s fantastically satisfying to think about all of the ways we can solve a problem. Nothing should ever be off the table. What if all of the limitations we think are “facts” and must abide by, are simply the brakes we put on possibility? Maybe we don’t want to move, or change jobs, or downsize, or break up with. Maybe we think we’re wherever we are because it’s just the way it is. I’m not into that reasoning. In truth, I’m not into reasoning at all. It’s never worked out for me. I’d rather sit under a cloud and dream my way into answers I will dare to try than to resign myself to the limiting ideas on offer.

I’m making chicken soup today. I’m going to pull out my jumbo, eighteen litre stock pot and put two roosters in there with some foraged, dried mushrooms, herbs from my garden, and a few glugs of homemade vinegar. I’ll let those birds simmer away all day before adding some carrots and picking the meat off the bones. It will be soup that my beloved Bapka and the rest of my ancestors would recognise. She would have put a type of little dumpling on top. I may just do that, too. When I’m done cooking that soup we will sit down and eat like royalty. Not everyone gets to eat roosters, not in the west at least. So, as it turns out, the problem with roosters isn’t a problem at all. The problem is the model and the model is governed by the systems and the systems aim to satisfy the industries and, well… it all just swings back around to us. I’m making my own models, one problem at a time.

Harvest Festival with Rooster Dance, Johann Baptist Pflug, 1839