Chickens in the backyard are nothing new.

Recently there has been a trend in various parts of the country to allow home-owners to raise a certain number of chickens in their backyards. Usually roosters are excluded because -- duh -- they crow early in the morning.

Why do otherwise normal people want to raise chickens?

I think it's because they have a romanticized idea of chickens. After all, they're attractive birds, in a domestic kind of way: plump and slow, unable to fly (i.e., escape) more than a few feet, and often very pretty. A white hen clucking softly and poking around after grubs or whatever in the dirt, fluffing her feathers from time to time, lends to many of us a sense of living in the country. A tame hen can almost seem like a pet.

But chickens aren't pets.

They may get used to us, but they don't interact with us all that much. They have very small brains -- compared to a dog or a cat -- and just do their chicken thing: try to find something to eat. They are pretty much oblivious to us. And the ban on roosters means that the hens we're allowed to keep aren't exactly free range, meaning they aren't existing in a setting nature meant for them. After all, they are females of a certain species, looking -- and looking out for -- males of their species, which our civic ordinances rule out.

So what's a frusrated hen to do without a rooster? Wander around, pecking at the ground, laying eggs that aren't ever fertilized, providing us humans with easy breakfast and a mild diversion. Hey, it serves our human purpose and doesn't hurt anyone, right?

What's missing in this modern version of raising chickens, besides the absence of the rooster, is how and why we did it in the old days, why chickens were domesticated in the first place: food.

What's missing is cutting their heads off and carving them up to provide the family with a Sunday dinner.

I once saw my father, a nice man not prone to violence, grab a plump hen by the neck and haul her, squawking like crazy, to a chopping block, a tree stump, in our back yard and sever her head with one blow of a hatchet. And then, in fact as in myth, the hen rolled around for a while, headless, before dying.

I was about six years old at the time.

The chicken was then taken into the house, where my mother -- with her degree in history -- had to pluck all the feathers from the dead hen and scoop out, with her fingers, the innards. All this to give us a bland stew, with some carrots and potatoes, for Sunday dinner.

Even then, way back before I knew much of anything, I thought this was kind of barbaric. I mean, that chicken had been walking around in our back yard minutes before -- and now was on my plate?

Of course it doesn't bother me these days to buy cut-up chicken at the supermarket, often on sale -- breasts, thighs, wings -- but that's because I've put out of my mind the execution of those chickens when I was a kid. How else could I eat them? I also put out of my mind how chickens are raised nowadays, in crowded conditions that deprive them of any dignity, any movement. They are packed into cages like they're headed for the death camps -- which they are.

I have no problem with anyone raising chickens in their yards, unless their neighbors complain. After all, chickens are, as they say, God's creatures and deserve their own lives, and, for the most part, they are quiet and peaceful. As we used to say in the South, God love 'em.

On the other hand, cutting roosters from the mix means messing with biology, with the natural order. As obnoxious and obstreperous as they can be, roosters are important members of any chicken community. They fertilize the eggs. Without them, the community dies out.

Here are two stories from my childhood with chickens.

One year we had a big hail storm that killed lots of chickens. My father's hens were all killed. An old woman who used to buy from us and provide us chicks for the next year told him that all her hens and their chicks had been killed but that she needed the money so she could give him her last hen. My father asked her if the hen had a name. She said yes, that it was named Daisy.

He gave her two dollars -- the going price for a hen past laying -- and said to be sure Daisy got plenty of food for the coming winter. He gave her an extra dollar, which he couldn't afford.

When I was no more than five or six, I ventured into the backyard, where our big rooster ruled supreme, like a sultan with his harem. I was feeding the chickens but always keeping an eye out for the rooster, who was very territorial and known to charge anyone who approached, wings out-stretched, making all sorts of threatening sounds. I was halfway to the hen house, spreading corn, when I heard a great flapping of wings and then this: "I've got you now!"

Terrified, imagining being pecked apart by the rooster, I dropped the corn and ran for the house.
It was then that my dad appeared from behind a tree, bent over laughing.

I am a great fan of chickens, and roosters, too.

Before you decide to raise them in your backyard, you should be, too.



















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