Cute chicks and death on a farm

Why, hello!

When I got to the farm last week, a batch of 60 newly hatched chicks greeted me (greet: to scurry away from a human hand). Leg cramps and other forms of mild discomfort were ignored in favor of lengthy observation. They eat, drink, poop, and climb all over each other trying to get the most comfortable spot with the most perfect temperature. This last activity is violent. Sue found a dead chick on Thursday morning, squished by his fellows.

These chicks arrived via USPS, which strikes me as a very strange practice. My aunt and uncle work for the post office and once snatched up a chick from a very large shipment - who would notice? - and raised her in Fred's back yard. She was a beauty named Little Barbara, named in loving honor of my aunt, her rescuer. She's in chicken heaven now, and I regret that I never really got to know her.

I wonder how many chick casualties can be attributed to their shipment? In the case of these new chicks, 63 were shipped and 60 remain (two died the first day, one was the poor squished guy). I guess in terms of percentage this is pretty good - better than 95% survival rate. But it's still so sad that any of them die.

Death is a constant presence on a farm, though, something I'm not used to and feel weird about acclimating to. I grew up in a suburb, with family dogs, and now live in a city with four indoor cats and a history of fostering litters of kittens. I value the individual lives of the animals I take care of so very much.

When I started caring about food towards the end of college, I changed my eating habits (I only lasted eight months as a vegan, but I ate a vegetarian diet for about five years) entirely because of a desire to restrict my participation in the abhorrent treatment of animals. Why should we kill them and exploit them when it's possible for us to survive and thrive on an entirely plant-based diet? My thinking has shifted now. I guess I would summarize it as something like: if I have a reasonably good idea that the animals were treated well (especially given access to the outdoors and appropriate food), I'll buy and eat their eggs, milk, or meat. My ideal is to raise these things myself to change the "reasonably good idea" part to "absolute assurance."

Death on a farm is just part of the process, whether it's because of injuries sustained by a day-old chick during shipment, roosters fighting and killing each other, chickens dying from unknown causes (we found one in the loafing shed last week, too far gone to tell how it died), or just humans killing animals because we like to eat them. While I can't say I want to, I do hope I get experience in processing chickens so I can take part in this last bit - the bit I find most troubling - in a very direct way. I don't necessarily think I need to be capable of killing a chicken to feel morally or otherwise justified in eating it. That used to be my stance, but it's not reasonable to think that every person needs to be capable of doing every task. But I feel like I should try it. If I'm able to do it, it would certainly make things easier on my future farm.

So if I can shift from vegan to vegetarian to conscientious omnivore, can I also shift from thinking about and valuing the animals in my life as individuals to thinking about them as parts of a whole, where connections to individuals are much lighter and deaths are noticed and perhaps analyzed but not really mourned? The excruciating sadness I felt when my first foster kittens were adopted led me to purposely connect less deeply to my next foster kittens. By the time I had done it for a year or so, I didn't even really feel sad after adoptions - it was just part of the process.