Chickens in the City

Today my husband and I attended a two-hour class sponsored by a local community garden project. The subject was on raising chickens in the city, and the teacher was a man who keeps five or so hens in his backyard. Evidently, there are a number of such backyard chicken enterprises throughout our community here on the east side of Atlanta. And the city has ordinances to provide some kind of control on backyard chickens while also not discouraging the practice. The Chickens-in-the-City class is so popular that it usually fills very quickly each time it is offered. One attendee at this morning's class said that she had tried many times to sign up for the class and had been put on a waiting list. On Friday, I received an e-mail from the community garden supervisor advertising that five slots were still available for this class from 10 A.M. to noon, so I quickly signed up online.
 

It was actually quite a lovely way to spend a Saturday morning; temperatures were in the mid-fifties at the beginning of the class, warming to mid-sixties, maybe, by noon. The sky was clear, and beautiful fall leaves stood out brightly against the blue. The teacher had set out a semi-circle of metal folding chairs in his backyard, and his talk was punctuated by the contented clucking of the chickens in the hen yard behind him. (My pleasure in the rather quirky gathering would have been much increased, however, had I not been suffering from a migraine that lingered well into the afternoon and early evening hours.)

I spent my childhood in the country in East Texas, and both my grandmothers raised chickens, as well as my father. My grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat mainly raised leghorns; she had a white henhouse of about one hundred chickens for a while, after she retired from teaching English to middle school children in Barbers Hill (also known as Mont Belvieu), Texas. My grandmother Ruby Scott Benton had a smaller, motley flock of red and brown chickens. And my father chose his chickens by their unique characteristics: Turkens with their featherless necks, Frizzle chickens with upturned feathers, Araucanas that lay blue or green eggs. He chose those chickens just for the delight of his children. But because I grew up in the country, I also knew the downside of raising chickens: snakes and possums in the henhouse, dogs chasing a flock and killing indiscriminately, and first-hand experience with processing chickens for Sunday dinner. I have smelled chicken death and plucked the feathers from many slaughtered chickens. (I never could eat chicken right after participating in processing those chickens for food; it would take about two weeks for me to get that raw, bloody meat smell--as well as the acrid smell of singed feathers--out of my mind.)

When our Chickens-in-the-City teacher turned to the more earthy topics associated with raising chickens, people began shifting a bit uncomfortably in their chairs. He described the raccoon he caught in his henhouse two months ago which he dispatched with a shovel. His Ameraucana hen was so traumatized by the raccoon invasion that she hadn't lain an egg since then; most of the time she crouches under bush cover at the edge of the henyard. The raccoon had killed one hen and left another near death. The chicken owner had to dispatch the second hen in order to diminish her misery, and he described the various ways to kill a chicken. "Can we call you to dispatch our chickens when something like that happens?" one Chickens-in-the-City student asked, plaintively.

I know that I could kill a chicken if I had to, but over the years, I've left the butchering to other people. My husband followed the policy of my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat: a chopping block and an ax. My grandmother Benton would take a chicken and break its neck by whirling it around and then snapping the neck with a flick of her wrist. I was the chicken-plucker. Most people in the class, however, seemed to be interested mainly in egg production and in the counter-culture act of owning chickens in the back of their very suburban yards.

While standing in the chicken yard looking at the construction of the teacher's henhouse, my husband and I heard the call of a white-throated sparrow, one of my favorite bird songs, perhaps because the song reminds me of the times we hiked in the cool coniferous forests of Minnesota and heard that bird calling from deep within the woods. Despite the migraine, I felt that the Chickens-in-the-City class had exceeded my expectations.