Backyard Diversity

Keeping Chickens

Terra Brockman

It was a cold but sunny mid-November day when a half dozen kindergartners at the Academy for Global Citizenship, a Chicago Public Charter School on the Southwest Side, introduced me to Buttercup, Daisy, and Puddles. Like the students, the school's resident hens were a diverse trio: one gold-speckled brown, one glistening iridescent black, and one fluffy white. But all had the glittering eyes and brilliant red combs of healthy hens, and they clucked conversationally with one another, as contented hens will do.

The children chattered away alongside the hens, comfortable with them yet respectful of their space — neither cuddling them as if they were pets, nor keeping a wary distance as they would with wild animals. When I asked the kids if they had hens at home, they looked at me as if I had stepped in from another planet. Of course not, they said, these were school hens, just like the school garden, and the school cafeteria that cooks organic meals from scratch. That a school might not have organic meals or a garden or hens was a thing of which they were as yet blissfully unaware.

Although those particular children did not have hens at home, Chicago and its suburbs are key players in the backyard chicken movement that has swept the country since the early 2000s. "Urban Chicken" now has its own Wikipedia entry, and there are over 200,000 members of the go-to website BackYardChickens.com. Even mainstream companies are capitalizing on the burgeoning interest in knowing where our food comes from: Urban Outfitters has opened new stores called Terrain to meet the need of urban farmers, and Williams-Sonoma features an "Agrarian" line of products. The hens have come home to roost in Chicagoland too, hatching the Chicago Chicken Enthusiasts website (www.chicagochickens.org) and its lively Google group discussion forum and Facebook page, as well as giving Buttercup, Daisy, and Puddles a home at the Academy for Global Citizenship.

When recess was over, I followed the children as they scampered across the asphalt to line up in front of the school door. I had come to join them for their afternoon class, a review of everything they had learned in their "Chicken Unit." Having grown up the fourth of five generations of a central Illinois farm family, I have more than a passing familiarity with chickens as rural livestock. What I was interested in was urban chicken keeping, and their keepers in general.

"Keep it" are two words that have echoed in my mind ever since I heard farmer and philosopher Wendell Berry say that there is really only one commandment concerning the creation: "Keep it." I later found the passage in Genesis: "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it" (Gen. 2:15). Digging deeper, I found that the English translations for "till" and "keep" come from the Hebrew abad and shamar. These are not arcane or abstruse terms, but wonderfully straightforward words that describe common activities. Abad is the root of words related to work, service, or serving. Shamar means to protect or preserve, or to keep. It turns out that the original version of the gentle benediction that ended every Lutheran church service of my childhood, "The Lord bless you and keep you ..." — which comes from the famous blessing that the descendants of Aaron were to pronounce over the people of Israel — uses the word shamar.

If Genesis 2:15 and Wendell Berry are correct, our primary task in this world can be reduced to one word: shamar. We are here to tend and keep, preserve and protect, the ecosystem we share with every other living and nonliving thing — including the plants and animals that feed us.

How urban chicken keepers relate to their chickens, and how keeping chickens situates humans in the larger ecosystem, seemed a good way to explore the question of how well we humans are "keeping" the creation as a whole. Chickens might be good teachers, I reasoned, because they occupy a distinct space between pets and wildlife. Pets we love like family members. Wildlife, particularly the charismatic megafauna, we admire for their beautiful, wild otherness. But chickens? They do not fit into either of the animal categories to which we are most accustomed. They are not pets and not wildlife; they are neither completely wild nor fully tame. What they are, domesticated jungle fowl prized by many cultures for their powers of divination, leads to our complex relationship with them, and to lessons they can teach us about ourselves, our fellow humans, our fellow creatures, and our common world.

And so I found myself sitting in a pint-size chair in a colorful classroom at the Academy for Global Citizenship, curious to see how city schoolchildren keeping a few chickens might illuminate the question of our responsibility "to keep" the creation. The teacher calmed the kids down with a few yoga stretches, and then started a PowerPoint presentation to review the parts of a chicken, eliciting exclamations of "Wing!" "Beak!" "Comb!" "Feathers!" "Feet!" and "Tail!"

Then the teacher asked, "What are the five things the animals who live with us need?" Hands shot up around the room: "Food!" was the first answer, followed quickly by "Water!" And then a discussion of "shelter" and how animals needed sun and air to be healthy, but also protection from the sun on hot days, and from wind, rain, and snow.

I was intimately familiar with animals' food, water, and shelter needs, since meeting those needs had comprised the chores I did every morning and evening growing up on a small farm. Even on the coldest, darkest winter morning, I lugged two sloshing five-gallon pails of water to my cow, Frosty, and made sure she had enough hay before running down the lane to catch the school bus. Each of my six siblings did the same, looking after the food, water, and shelter needs of their sheep, chickens, goats, rabbits, cows, and pony.

As far as I was concerned, food, water, and shelter covered basic animal needs. But in the classroom more hands were up, waving the bodies attached to them, vying for attention. "Friends," shouted one student. The teacher nodded as she clicked to a photo of a flock of chickens in a green pasture, "And what else?" "Love!" shouted three or four kids in unison, putting their arms around themselves and rocking back and forth in what was obviously the school's sign language for love.

Love. Chicken love. That was not an animal need I would have thought to articulate. But, reflecting on the summers spent on my grandparents' farm, "love" was certainly present, as were "friends" in the large flock of laying hens. Sometimes a flock of young males shared the chicken yard as well — the "fryers," we called them, knowing they would end up as the crispiest fried chicken on the planet one Sunday afternoon, a fact that complicated but did not...