Contemplation of Chickens

Last week, Carl broached the subject of the hens and their egg production, or lack thereof. I stood up, alert. Was he suggesting a slaughter? Which just shows how quick to the negative I go these days. In fact, he was pointing to a happy fact. It isn’t just a lack of feathers and short days that might have caused the hens to take a vacation. Carl was suggesting in a very respectful way that the hens are not young chicks anymore.

We were inundated with eggs this past summer; the hens lay eight to nine eggs daily so we had an abundance of eggs to hand out to friends and family with a “please be sure to thank the girls!” But now? Because of the short, dark days, we get no eggs and had to buy our first dozen last week. And assume that next year, the hens will gift us fewer eggs by a lot because hens have a certain number of eggs that they will lay in their lifetime. If you leave the lights on in winter, which we don’t, but when people do, the hens don’t get any rest and will use up those eggs and stop laying that much sooner.

All to say, Apricot is the eldest hen at age eight, and the flock as a whole is at or past the egg-laying time of life. Now, some hens, like Apricot, only have a very few eggs. In her lifetime, we might have gotten a dozen. (Blue. They were a lovely, sweet and precious blue.) Other hens pump them out daily, to the point that I worry and tell them they are working too hard. But onward they go.

Our hens, the youngest being three, are at “that age.” (Like menopause, except usually humans are not killed for no longer dropping out eggs.) Hens at farms and CAFOs, on the other hand, are killed when they stop laying. And sometimes even before then because hens slow down as they age—don’t we all?—and profits are prioritized over so much else. So the eggs must keep coming or into the soup pot or cat food they go.

I’m really trying not to get dark here. So. Let’s spin this around! Carl suggested chicks! In the spring! When the hens go broody, if broody they go, we can get chicks to place under their warm bodies so as to have young hens, known as pullets, who are young and perky and will lay eggs. At which point, Carl and I looked at each other. (Yes, I am finally getting to the point.) We have seventeen hens who potentially won’t be a-laying next spring. We knew we had an Old Hen Retirement home forming. But … to put it gently, none of them seem to be dying.

“Well,” I said to Carl. “This might, on a really bad day, be considered the negative aspect of having built such an impenetrable coop.”

Not that I want to jinx it.