For more than a decade, and in three different locations, we have had chickens. It’s almost a cliché, being the sort of person who has chickens in their backyard, but here we are.
Our own flock has always been relatively tiny, usually fluctuating between two and six, but almost always more than was legally permissible by the municipality we lived in. Don’t get me started on that. People can have giant dogs that bark at all hours of the day and night and that kill other people’s pets, but my two peeping hens are a problem?
I have a bit of a weird relationship with our hens. I’m their primary caretaker—transplant recipients like my wife are warned against birds because of the many diseases they are prone to carrying. The four hens we currently house are not our pets—they don’t have names, and I don’t cuddle them or put cute curtains in their coop—but they are more than merely productive livestock.
In factory farms, where chickens are forced to lay eggs year-round and are fed monotonous meals, and live in crowded, sunless conditions, a hen’s life expectancy is 18 months, max. That is the age at which egg production wanes, and thus they are deemed to no longer be cost-effective to keep alive, and are then euthanized and either dumped in a landfill or composted. As someone who does not depend on our hens for our living, we can afford to keep “unproductive” hens.
We also do not rely on them solely for eggs. We are in a sort of partnership, these hens and me. I house them and feed them and keep them safe from predators, and they lay eggs and dispose of our kitchen scraps and turn it all into manure I compost and use in my garden. They live in spacious quarters—the factory farms could fit 20 hens into the space I give our four, and while they would be happier if they could roam free in the thicket at the back of our property, they would not be safe there. It would also make getting their eggs and manure far more difficult, and there you have the eternal dilemma—balancing my needs as chicken tender (see what I did there?) with their needs for safety. Because, let’s be clear, the average chicken is about as smart as a bowl of Jello.
But, if you decide to keep chickens, have a plan for what you will do with them for the 20 weeks they are alive before they can lay eggs, what you will do with them for the three years after they are no longer productive layers, and you have to have a plan for the eggs. That last one can sneak up on you: a 12-month-old chicken can lay between 200 and 300 eggs a year. If you have three hens, that could mean 75 dozen eggs in your first full year of ownership, or one and a half dozen eggs every week.
Tell the truth: How many eggs did you buy last year? Probably not one and a half dozen a week, every single week. Honestly, having three and four year old hens whose laying has slowed is much more manageable for us.
Right now, I have two new chicks, about three weeks old, living in a storage tub in my office under a heat lamp. They are tiny, perhaps the size of an avocado, and nearly as smart. They peep a lot and respond to my voice, which means they get loudest when I am talking, which makes Zoom calls delightful.
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you over the chicks.”
They will live there another three weeks, by which time they will be living in a pen outdoors, separate from the other, older chickens until they reach full size and can fend for themselves. And then another six to eight years of partnership follows.