Requiem For Three Hens

Last Monday I did my least favorite farm chore, one that I dislike even more than cleaning the chicken house:  I took my three oldest layers to be slaughtered.

They hadn't done anything wrong.  They'd just grown old--perimenopausal, to be exact.  They still laid an egg every once in a while, but not often enough to warrant feeding them through the cold months, at which time their laying would decrease even more.  I had anticipated this back in the spring, when I bought eight day-old pullets whom I expected to begin laying in the fall.  This has now happened, and these teenage hens are laying like a house on fire.

The perimenopausal hens were only three years old--time passes quickly if you're a chicken.  They were Buff Orpingtons, big-boned, blond and plump like Walkyries, with calm dispositions seldom found in the operatic world.  Orpingtons are a "heritage" breed.  This means that they don't lay as early or as long or as consistently as modern hybrid hens.  They also exhibit a strong tendency to become broody, to sit on eggs for weeks at a time in the hopes that something will hatch.  They don't care that there's no rooster in sight, and the eggs are therefore infertile.  All they care about is sitting with Buddha-like concentration on the nest, keeping all the other hens at bay.  This results in broken eggs and in eggs laid in odd corners of the coop by desperate hens.  And while a hen is broody, she doesn't lay eggs.

I hope I have convinced you by now that slaughtering the three Buff Orpingtons was the rational and sensible thing to do.

In our many years together, my husband and I have occasionally slaughtered a chicken or two.  The slaughtering part we do beautifully, choreographing each step so the chicken is hardly aware of anything (I keep my hand over her eyes the whole time).  The plucking and gutting and cleaning, however, are a mess.  I know that this is something that our grandmothers did routinely every Sunday, in the interval between church and dinner, but the reason they did it so efficiently is that for them, unlike for us, it was routine.  When we did it, it was hard, sweaty, smelly, uncertain work ("What is this thing on the liver?  Don't nick it, it might be the gall bladder!").

Slaughtering our chickens at home, I believe, is the humane thing to do.  The chicken dies in familiar surroundings, by familiar hands--as happy a death as a chicken can hope for.  So in opting to take my hens to be slaughtered elsewhere, I was thinking not of them, but of myself.  My comfort and convenience, because I am human, overrode the chicken's quality of death, because she was a bird. This was not a decision I felt good about, though I made it anyway.

The night before the slaughtering, in the dark, I went into the chicken house and plucked the three hens, one by one, from the roost and put them in a roomy, ventilated box without waking them.  First thing the next day my husband put the box in the car and we drove a few miles to the farm where they were to be killed.

The friendly chicken-slaughterer offered to do them right away, while we waited, so we handed him the box and went to sit in the car.  We listened on Morning Edition to news of other slaughters all over the globe, and eventually the man emerged with our hens in plastic bags, pre-cooled and looking just like supermarket chickens.  We handed him $9 and took the hens home and put them in the freezer.

It will be a while before I can look at them again.  But one day I will put them in a pot with onions, celery and carrots and simmer them for twenty-four hours.  Then I will strain the broth and freeze it, and bone the carcases and save the meat for the dogs.  And our three friendly hens will become part of our bodies.

But I'm not there yet.  Right now, left to my own devices I would become not just a vegetarian (because milk and eggs imply the slaughter of bull calves and rooster chicks), but a vegan.  And I would steer clear of all the writings that prove that plants too are sentient, want to avoid pain, and want to live and prosper.

Farewell, My Lovelies

This afternoon, Blossom and Virginia Slim left, never to return. My goat herding days are done, this time for good.

It is the end of an era that began in 1975, when we bought our first house and with it an orchard, a garden, berry bushes and a few chickens. My mother visited and said "Now all you need is a little goat..." And in a week I had a little goat, only because goats are herd animals I had to get a second goat for company.

Over the next thirty years, whenever we lived in the country, I had a couple of goats, for milk, for cheese, for company. These last two were Nigerian Dwarfs, the reasoning being that little goats would be easier to handle, would not drown us in daily gallons of milk, would require fewer bales of hay, less work. But when I had to stop milking at Christmas because of shoulder pains that are still with me, I couldn't see myself going through the whole breeding/kidding/milking cycle again. The chronic fatigue syndrome that dogs me is not getting better with the years. I finally had to admit that keeping goats no longer made sense.

As I agonized over the process of putting Blossom and Virginia Slim on the market and letting them go to some unknown place, the heavens sent me the ideal buyer--a gentle woman seriously dedicated to building a Nigerian herd, knowledgeable, and recommended by my long-time goat guru. I took it as a sign and went ahead with the deal.

This afternoon I put collars on Blossom and Virginia Slim and led them up the dog-ramp into their new owner's Jeep, where a thick bed of hay awaited them. I took a last look into their bright little faces, those eyes that--unique among ruminants--sparkle with cleverness and intelligence, and wished them well. I know they'll be happy. For one thing, they're going to a farm tht has bucks, and that is what they have literally been screaming for the last few weeks. So they will be fine.

Me, on the other hand...There is no question that I will not miss the 7 a.m. expeditions to the barn in sub-zero weather, nor the milking that crippled my arm so that every move was painful. But oh, the smell of the place, and those bright eyes, and the way they stood still as if hypnotized when I brushed them. I will miss them in the spring, when the dandelions come out and I would let them gorge themselves while I picked blossoms for dandelion wine. I will miss the uniquely peaceful feeling that you get sitting in a field with goats grazing around you. I will miss the milk and the cheese and generally being a goat lady.

But it's time to let it go. I've been reading Buddhist texts lately, which helps. And I remember what Colette said: "On ne possede qu'en s'abstenant." You can only possess by abstaining. If so, I will forever possess Blossom and Virginia Slim--their lithe little bodies, their perfect udders, their long, refined necks, their upright ears, their cleverness.

This time, it's time to let it go for good. I have asked my spouse, if ever he sees that goat-gleam in my eye again, to sit on my head and not let me fall prey to my obsession. To everything there is a season, and my season for goat keeping is past.

I will still have my hens, and that is all I need to provide compost for the garden, which will feed us, and them, and they in turn will feed us with their eggs. With chickens and a garden, you can still have a homestead, right? Those four Buff Orpingtons better watch out--there's a whole lot of loving coming their way.