Winner, winner, chicken dinner
What a strange expression that is.
Have just got back from a week's holiday in east Devon, in south-west England. A very lovely part of the world, with rolling hills, villages chockful of thatched cottages and tremendous cliffs overlooking the sea. It also has two croquet clubs with a total of fourteen lawns between them (which is a lot), and I played at both.
On the way down, to break up the drive, we stayed with a croquet-playing chicken-farmer friend of mine. He has 18,000 chickens on his farm, which is quite a lot really. They make a heck of a noise, and a heck of a stench. Even though they are free-range, they seem to spend a lot of time crammed very tightly together in their hen hut, rather than roaming around the field to which they have unrestricted access. In fact, I think the conditions in that hut are a bit of an eye-opener - much less cruel than battery hens, of course, but still nothing like what most people (and certainly me up until a week ago) have in their mind's eye when they think of free-range - which is probably "space".
But it is sensible to try to judge animals by human standards? When we walked up to the field, the chickens crowded right to the edge to see us, packed very closely together. When we entered the shed, they all came in from outside. And when we left, they followed us along the field, again packed together incredibly tightly. Clearly this is something they do very regularly by instinct. Of course people occasionally get that close together too - on a tube train, at a movie premiere featuring Brad Pitt (or in my case Denise Richards), or at a weird fetish party of the type to which I have been invited all too infrequently (viz, never). But it isn't something we do by our nature, whereas based on my limited experience it clearly is for chickens. So does it make sense to base our judgement on what constitutes cruelty to animals on the basis of our own experience? On the other hand, we really don't have very much else to go on until science invents a way in which we can be beamed into the mind of a chicken.
None of this, incidentally, alters my opinion that battery farming is cruelty to an extent which I'm not prepared to go to get my eggs. But it does make me wonder.
The other very interesting thing on the chicken farm was something I'd never seen before, nor even heard of. A thatched wall. Yes, you read that right. It's a chalk wall, which apparently are very easily eroded by the elements. In days of yore, there was little work to be done on the farm at certain times of year, so the labour force was kept busy by rethatching certain things. Including, in this case, the wall, to protect it.
I think it's fantastic that my friend, Richard, still keeps this up and has the wall rethatched periodically at a considerable cost, when it serves no purposes other than being nice to look at. (The wall just divides two bits of the farm that could just as easily not be separated.) A thatched cottage is one thing, but there the thatch serves the purposes of providing a roof. In a world where everything has to have a purpose to justify its existence, it's sometimes nice to see somebody do something for no reason other than aesthetics.
Which I guess makes the moral of this story that to maintain a thatched wall just for the sake of it is A Very Good Thing. Go forth and do likewise.
Nick
Playlist: Heart - There's The Girl; John Mayer - Dreaming of a Broken Heart; Shawn Colvin - Someday; Whitesnake - Ain't Gonna Cry No More; Jethro Tull - White Innocence (thanks, Dan).
Have just got back from a week's holiday in east Devon, in south-west England. A very lovely part of the world, with rolling hills, villages chockful of thatched cottages and tremendous cliffs overlooking the sea. It also has two croquet clubs with a total of fourteen lawns between them (which is a lot), and I played at both.
On the way down, to break up the drive, we stayed with a croquet-playing chicken-farmer friend of mine. He has 18,000 chickens on his farm, which is quite a lot really. They make a heck of a noise, and a heck of a stench. Even though they are free-range, they seem to spend a lot of time crammed very tightly together in their hen hut, rather than roaming around the field to which they have unrestricted access. In fact, I think the conditions in that hut are a bit of an eye-opener - much less cruel than battery hens, of course, but still nothing like what most people (and certainly me up until a week ago) have in their mind's eye when they think of free-range - which is probably "space".
But it is sensible to try to judge animals by human standards? When we walked up to the field, the chickens crowded right to the edge to see us, packed very closely together. When we entered the shed, they all came in from outside. And when we left, they followed us along the field, again packed together incredibly tightly. Clearly this is something they do very regularly by instinct. Of course people occasionally get that close together too - on a tube train, at a movie premiere featuring Brad Pitt (or in my case Denise Richards), or at a weird fetish party of the type to which I have been invited all too infrequently (viz, never). But it isn't something we do by our nature, whereas based on my limited experience it clearly is for chickens. So does it make sense to base our judgement on what constitutes cruelty to animals on the basis of our own experience? On the other hand, we really don't have very much else to go on until science invents a way in which we can be beamed into the mind of a chicken.
None of this, incidentally, alters my opinion that battery farming is cruelty to an extent which I'm not prepared to go to get my eggs. But it does make me wonder.
The other very interesting thing on the chicken farm was something I'd never seen before, nor even heard of. A thatched wall. Yes, you read that right. It's a chalk wall, which apparently are very easily eroded by the elements. In days of yore, there was little work to be done on the farm at certain times of year, so the labour force was kept busy by rethatching certain things. Including, in this case, the wall, to protect it.
I think it's fantastic that my friend, Richard, still keeps this up and has the wall rethatched periodically at a considerable cost, when it serves no purposes other than being nice to look at. (The wall just divides two bits of the farm that could just as easily not be separated.) A thatched cottage is one thing, but there the thatch serves the purposes of providing a roof. In a world where everything has to have a purpose to justify its existence, it's sometimes nice to see somebody do something for no reason other than aesthetics.
Which I guess makes the moral of this story that to maintain a thatched wall just for the sake of it is A Very Good Thing. Go forth and do likewise.
Nick
Playlist: Heart - There's The Girl; John Mayer - Dreaming of a Broken Heart; Shawn Colvin - Someday; Whitesnake - Ain't Gonna Cry No More; Jethro Tull - White Innocence (thanks, Dan).