A Mothers’ Day Post

Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals

Farm Sanctuary is one of my favourite places in the world. It’s situated on 175 acres of lush, rolling hills in the Finger Lakes region of New York and is home to hundreds of rescued sheep, goats, cows, chickens, ducks, pigs, and rabbits. Cofounded 26 years ago by Gene Baur, it has provided true refuge for countless farmed animals: those rescued from incredible neglect, natural disasters like the Iowa floods, stockyard downers, live market escapees, factory farm rescues, and more.

At the end of April I spent an idyllic weekend loving up rescued animals and getting loved up in return. I cuddled with a turkey (who closed her eyes and “purred” — yes, turkeys have a sort of purr!), hugged pigs and goats, got kissed by a cow, and was happily accosted by a couple of unusually exuberant sheep.

Many people who’ve never experienced farmed animals as anything other than dinner are surprised at the animals’ obvious personalities. Some are quiet and shy, some are outgoing, some are mischievous, the occasional one is a bit of a bully. All are playful when they’re young (some still are in adulthood!), and with few exceptions, all respond to affection.

Virtually every animal at Farm Sanctuary has something in common besides being the lucky, rescued few: nearly all were taken from their mothers at birth or were mothers themselves, but never allowed to nurture their babies. The chickens raised in battery cages, starting life under a heat lamp instead of with their mothers; the calves who were literally dragged off as newborns to be raised for veal or meat; the dairy cows who were impregnated time and again and had every baby taken from them moments after birth; the mother pigs who were confined in gestation and farrowing crates; the sheep and goats raised for their milk — like the dairy cows, they too were raised in factory-like settings, forcibly impregnated and then had their babies taken from them so that humans could have their milk to make cheese.

All animals have the drive to protect and nurture their young, and most animals are good mothers if given the chance. Animals’ babies matter to them as much as ours do to us. They are not indifferent to having them taken away, to being denied their most basic instincts. The babies are not indifferent either. And none is indifferent to being born into misery, to being confined, to being mutilated without anaesthetic, and often to being cruelly and deliberately abused.

Give someone a great Mothers’ Day this weekend: Go vegan. Go veg. Take steps toward going veg. There’s no downside; the only thing you’re really giving up is cruelty.

Sophie’s Choice: a bovine love story

I read an article the other day that broke my heart. It was the story of a cow on a small dairy farm, the kind where the cows have some physical freedom and a so-called nice life. This cow — let’s call her Sophie — was pregnant for the fifth time, and one night she gave birth out in the pasture. The next morning, as she had four times before, Sophie walked her new baby to the barn, where he was taken away from her forever, just like her first four calves.

She was put in the milking line, but her udders where completely empty. Twice a day she was brought in to be milked, and twice a day she had nothing to give, at a time when her milk yield should have been the highest. More than once the vet was called in, but she could find nothing wrong with the cow.

On the 11^th day, the farmer called the vet again — he found out why Sophie wasn’t producing any milk. He’d been watching her closely and one night he followed her as she went back out to pasture. What he discovered was that Sophie had given birth to twins…she had kept one of her calves hidden at the edge of the woods adjacent to the pasture. She was finally, after five pregnancies and births, able to be with and nurture one of her babies.

The vet pleaded with the farmer to let the mother cow keep her calf. But he too was taken from her, to be chained for a few short months in a veal crate before going to slaughter. If you have never seen a mother cow and her calf separated, I can tell you it would tear at your heart.

So think about this: this cow (an animal to whom most people attribute little intelligence, never mind feeling) demonstrated memory and understanding of the past: every time she got pregnant and gave birth and went back to the barn with her calf, her calf was taken away from her. When she gave birth to twins, she made a plan and she made a decision. She knew she could keep one of her calves if the farmer didn’t know about him, so she kept one calf in the woods where he wouldn’t be seen. And she made a heartbreaking choice in choosing one calf over the other. It’s all the more amazing that she didn’t hide both, as though she knew that returning to the barn without any calf at all would raise suspicion.

Imagine her grief when her second calf was discovered and taken from her. That’s not anthropomorphizing. If you have ever seen a dog or cat show grief, joy, sadness, contentment, fear, you know. Cows are no different, and neither is any animal. We have been conditioned to think of farmed animals differently, but it’s a false notion. There is simply no fundamental difference between the animals we eat and the ones we allow to sleep on our beds. They all feel pain, fear, love, grief, they respond to affection from one another, and from humans. It is absolutely unconscionable the way we treat them. There is no such thing as “happy meat” or “happy dairy.”

Get Cracking? No thanks.

A friend of mine posted a link on Facebook to a good article about understanding egg labelling and what the labels mean for chickens. The article itself contained a number of links, including to the USDA’s website and Farm Sanctuary’s website. Someone replied that a number of the websites were American, suggesting that the information being provided didn’t apply in Canada, and said we could get some good information about Canadian eggs from Get Cracking, a website of Egg Farmers of Canada. In other words, a lobby group.

Believing this person to be misinformed, I said welfare standards for chickens in Canada are about the same as they are in the U.S., and that the scant welfare laws in place to “protect” farm animals don’t apply to chickens. In fact, as I’ve said here before, you can do absolutely anything you want to chickens and it’s not technically illegal.

There are some regulations about not beating pigs and cows and goats and sheep as they’re on their way to slaughter – but those regulations don’t stop many slaughterhouse workers from doing it, and much worse. There’s a rule that says a Canadian Food Inspection Agency inspector is supposed to be on site at slaughterhouses, and sometimes they are – but not on the killing floor. There are some guidelines about the treatment of farmed animals, but that’s all they are, and virtually no one seems to pay too much attention to them. And of the laws that do exist to protect farmed animals, there is a clause that exempts anything that is considered to be “standard animal husbandry or farming practice.” Practices like debeaking, detoeing, disbudding, castration and more, all without benefit of anaesthetic. If it’s “common practice,” it’s okay.

The woman I was having this conversation with on Facebook said she’s been an agricultural journalist for 20 years (though a Google search turned up not one article with her byline) and said she’d never heard  of chicks being debeaked or detoed and certainly never seen such a thing in all her years of visiting farms. (If you’ve never heard of it either, please click on the tab above “But eggs are okay, right?”) She directed me to the Canadian Criminal Code section that deals with animal abuse, specifically birds, seemingly unaware that chickens (and turkeys) are not classified as birds, but under the law have their own label of “poultry” – of which there is no mention in the criminal code. She then directed me to Farm & Food Care Ontario, an organization that seems to have good intentions (they link to some fact sheets that actually do detail humane conditions for raising animals for food – though whether or not we should be is another matter), but in fact is like a PR umbrella for a number of provincial lobby groups, and she directed me again to Get Cracking, citing all of these places as good sources of information on farmed animal welfare in Canada. With the exception of the Government of Canada website, every site she directed me to has just one purpose: to promote the consumption of meat and eggs.

A bit more research revealed that this woman is actually part of the animal agriculture lobby and has worked in an editorial capacity at a number of agricultural magazines.

I was galled at what I considered to be the propaganda she was pushing because I have friends who work in animal rights and welfare, friends who have been on undercover investigations and photographed some of the worst things I’ve ever seen, and these investigations have taken place on Canadian factory farms. Factory farming is not a myth. But the agricultural lobby is very sophisticated and they know how to make conditions for the animals sound pretty wonderful. With extremely rare exceptions, what they tell you are lies. There’s just no other word for it.

When you read something about farmed animals and it sounds pretty good, please ask yourself where the information is coming from and what the writer or publisher has to gain. Chances are, it’s money.

If you want information about how the animals we raise for food are really treated, please visit Jo-Anne McArthur’s gallery of farmed animals on the We Animals website. Visit Mercy For Animals, Canadians for the Ethical Treatment of Food Animals (CETFA), or the Canadian Coalition for Farm Animals – not the egg, dairy or meat marketing boards.

Schmallenberg Virus

I read yesterday about a virus that’s become quite devastating for some farmers in Europe. It’s called the Schmallenberg Virus, named after the pretty district in central Germany where it was first discovered just three or four months ago, in November 2011.

Since then, it has spread to Belgium, the Netherlands, the U.K., Luxembourg, Italy, and France. Sheep have so far been the most affected animals, though the virus has also been seen in goats and cows. While symptoms in cows can include fever, diarrhea, and decreased milk production in lactating animals, adult sheep often seem to be asymptomatic…until they abort, have stillborn lambs or give birth to deformed offspring, who die soon after birth. The virus is spreading quickly and farmers are losing many animals — in rarer cases, as many as 50%. One farmer interviewed in the media was quoted as being “heartbroken,” and I believe it. After all, not every farm is a factory farm, and some of these farmers genuinely care about their animals. While the financial cost is certainly being tallied, for some farmers there is an emotional cost, too.

So where did this virus come from? No one is sure. It seems to be spread by midges – an umbrella term for several different species of tiny, two-winged flies. It is not yet known whether the virus can spread between animal species, and according to Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency (AHVLA) in the U.K, it’s not believed to be transmissible to humans, but they don’t know for sure. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDPC) says it is “unlikely that this virus will cause disease in humans, but it cannot be excluded at this stage.”

There are a lot of unknowns regarding this virus. In the E.U., lambing season has just begun and no one’s sure what to expect. Cows have a much longer gestation period – about nine months, as opposed to around five months for sheep – so the rate of infection in cows won’t be known for some time yet. In the two days since I first read about it, the number of infected farms in the U.K. has climbed from 74 to 83. In Germany, it’s about 10 times that. Some officials fear the virus is being drastically under-reported. Can the virus come to North America? We don’t know that yet, either.

While this may prove a financial catastrophe for farmers, it also has the potential for tragic consequences for the animals: recall the large scale “culls” which took place in the U.K. during an outbreak of BSE in the 1980s and ‘90s, and the horrific treatment of millions of pigs in 2010 and 2011 in Korea during an epidemic of hoof-and-mouth disease (pigs were documented being dumped by the thousands into open pits where they were buried alive). While farmers nervously watch their flocks and herds, animal protection activists are watching nervously too.

A Question of Rights

I am fascinated by an article I read on a mainstream news site today. A number of scientists got together last weekend in Vancouver at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the largest science conference in the world. According to the BBC, “experts in philosophy, conservation and animal behaviour want support for a Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans.” By this they mean they want the animals to be declared, accepted and protected as non-human persons. This is based on the fact that cetaceans – that’s dolphins, whales and porpoises – are known to possess intelligence, awareness of self, and many other qualities of so-called higher, thinking mammals, including cultural practices like mourning their dead. A declaration of rights would mean that they cannot be hunted, used for entertainment or kept in captivity.

Personally, I think this is great. And I was genuinely surprised to see that in a poll at the end of an article on the CBC’s website, the vast majority (over 64% at this writing) of respondents felt that such a declaration is appropriate for these mammals. The poll asked whether dolphins and whales should have rights “as non-human persons.”

There is a philosophical definition of person as “a self-conscious or rational being” (Oxford English Dictionary). Under this definition, and using the criteria set out by the researchers who proposed this Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans, all farmed animals – cows, sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, ducks and pigs – are also non-human persons. This is not news to anyone who has spent time interacting on a personal level with farmed animals, and it’s certainly not news to scientists and animal ethologists like Marc Bekoff, Jane Goodall, and many others. There is actual science that proves that all of these animals, all of these farmed animals whom most people eat without a thought, have complex social and familial relationships, are capable of reasoning, planning for the future, solving problems, feeling joy, contentment, sorrow and fear, concern for their fellow animals (and not just those of the same species)…and yet I can imagine the uproar if anyone suggested a declaration of rights for all animals, including farmed animals.

But it is a fact that they are all sentient, feeling and thinking beings with an interest well beyond what might be called instinct in their own lives and survival. And they suffer. They suffer when they are confined, abused, separated from their families and social groups, and they suffer when they are killed. They fit the philosophical definition of a person. And we treat them as if they were of no account at all, simply ours to use. It’s nothing more than societal conditioning. Many things in our history were once considered acceptable simply because they were part of the status quo. But when you know the truth, can you ignore it?

The Chicken or the Egg?

It’s a trick question. When it comes to terms like “free range” and “free run,” it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the chicken or the egg: it’s really the chicken who’s on the line, every time.

Many people prefer to buy cage free/free range or free run eggs (meaning that the eggs come from hens raised in one of those manners) because they believe it’s the kinder alternative. There’s more awareness now about battery cages and it turns out that animal welfare matters to most people on some level. They’re usually surprised to learn that the terms can be all but meaningless, and no one’s really policing their use. The only thing it means is that the chickens are not kept in battery cages. Is that inherently better? Not necessarily.

“Free range” may just mean that the chickens – tens of thousands of them — have access (which might be a one-foot-square hole in the wall), if they can get to it, to a five-foot-square patch of dirt. It might mean they’re not caged but living in a relatively airless barn, heavy with the smell of ammonia from their urine, and not allowed access to the outdoors at all.

Canadian free range chickens. Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur, We Animals

What it does not mean is that they are healthy, well cared for, have clean nesting boxes and adequate space, access to the outdoors where they can hunt and peck and dust bathe. I don’t know what the percentage is of chickens who actually live like that, but I can tell you that it is infinitesimally small.

Cage-free eggs will almost invariably still come from hens whose sensitive beaks were seared off when they were just days old, whose toes were amputated without anaesthetic, and whose brothers were tossed live into grinders or garbage bags or bins simply for being born male. And instead of living out their lifespan of about 12 years, they’ll still be sent to slaughter when they’re just two or three years old. (For more information, please click on the tab above, “But eggs are okay, right?”)

The humane choice isn’t cage-free; it’s egg-free.

The Myth of Happy Meat

“I make sure my eggs are organic and free-range.” “I only buy organic dairy.” “Yeah, I still eat meat, but I only eat happy meat.” Sound like you? I used to sound like that, too. There’s a lot behind statements like these, not least of which is concern for the animals involved. Generally speaking, the people who say things like this are aware of factory farming and have some idea of what goes on. They might be fuzzy on the details, especially the more horrific ones, but they know about the intensive confinement practices, the hormones and drugs in the animals’ feed, and they’re not comfortable with it. They want to know that the eggs they’re eating come from a chicken who’s allowed to run around and be a regular chicken, and that whatever meat they’re eating had a nice life while it was here.

I have a friend whose sister has a small herd of cows she raises for beef. She loves her cows. They have names. They graze in the pasture, they have nice stalls in a heated barn. Their stalls are mucked out every day, soiled straw replaced with fresh, and the cows are petted and talked to and treated with love and kindness. She even plays music in the barn and decorates the cows’ stalls at Christmas. And then one day she walks them onto a transport truck and says goodbye. I said to my friend “How can she do that??” He sort of chuckled and said “I don’t think she really thinks too much about where they’re going once they leave the farm.” Evidently not.

Here’s the thing: they’re going to the same slaughterhouse the other cows (and pigs and sheep and goats) go to. The same slaughterhouse where the workers have lost their sense of humanity and decency, or are so intimidated by the managers that they’ll do whatever they have to do to keep their jobs. That often means doing things that would give any normal person nightmares (and indeed, many slaughterhouse workers suffer from PTSD, alcoholism, and drug abuse, along with having the highest rates of workplace injury in the country).

So here’s what happens to the cows who had a nice life. They are tortured to death. No exaggeration. They are not killed “humanely.” Industrial slaughter is a disassembly line where time is money. The line moves from worker to worker so fast that anything remotely resembling a humane death is an impossibility. You probably know that animals are supposed to be stunned, rendered unconscious, before they are killed. But because of the speed at which animals are moving through a slaughterhouse, that doesn’t necessarily happen, or when it does they are insufficiently stunned and come to somewhere along the production line. All too often, they are fully conscious while they are shackled and hanging upside down by one leg…fully conscious while their throats are slit…and fully conscious when their legs are cut off and still conscious when they’re skinned. Before any of this happens, they may be treated with incredible and callous cruelty by workers who have become completely desensitized to the suffering and pain of other beings. And they are subjected to this because people like meat. Think about that, please. Think about that the next time you feel like having a steak, or a pork chop, or lamb souvlaki.

This is why I became a vegetarian, and ultimately vegan. I couldn’t justify any animal suffering because I felt like indulging a particular taste. I used to be really careful about where my meat and dairy came from. Until I figured out that ultimately, it all comes from the same place.

Disconnecting From Our Food

I posted today on Facebook that I’ve rediscovered my love of Brussels sprouts and was looking at recipes. Almost inevitably, one friend posted that she liked them best with crumbled bacon. Then another friend posted that she preferred to sauté them in bacon fat. I tried to take this in the spirit intended (no one was setting out to offend me) and not get all preachy — after all, I used to love lots of things with bacon, too, and nobody likes a “vegangelical.” (I often say the hardest thing about becoming vegan is not proselytizing.) So my response was a teasing “Shame on you!” with a link to a Farm Sanctuary story about two darling rescued piglets. One friend then replied with an apology saying she didn’t realize I don’t eat pigs. The other said she was eating bacon and eggs at that very minute and while she swooned over the piglets’ rescue story, she just couldn’t seem to make the connection between the “heart-wrenching stories” and what was on her plate.

I hear that a lot and it frustrates me, but I understand it. I used to be like that too. For years  — like 20 or 25 of them — I usually ate meat uneasily. By the time I was in my late 20s, I had trouble eating meat if there were bones involved; it made me think too much about where, or rather who, it came from. Now, you’d think someone who just pretty much couldn’t eat meat if she thought about who she was eating might have become a vegetarian a long time ago, but no. I’m a great compartmentalizer: I loved animals and I loved the way they tasted, and I was pretty successful at keeping those two thoughts far away from each other. But once those thoughts start overlapping, there’s no stopping them.

I became a vegetarian in 2010 a couple of months before my first trip to Farm Sanctuary. I’d been doing a lot of reading about farmed animals and I finally reached the point where I just couldn’t eat them anymore. But my trip to Farm Sanctuary was a turning point in my life. I met so many animals who had names and personalities and stories of their own, and it changed me. I met a beautiful cow, a rescued former veal calf named Larry who was as gentle as he was massive. A sweet, affectionate sheep named Jeanne who head-butted me if I stopped giving her attention, funny, inquisitive goats who acted like playful dogs, chickens who loved a good cuddle, and pigs who rolled over for belly rubs and snorted with joy when they got them. And one little piglet, about the size at the time of one of my own cats, who still bore the road rash he sustained when he fell off a transport truck on his way to slaughter — Bob (who is now 300 pounds of piggy lovin’). To me, when people talk about bacon, they are talking about Bob. Bob is someone to me, not something that goes well with Brussels sprouts or green beans or on a sandwich with mustard and salt.

It’s easy to be disconnected from your food; it initially takes a bit of effort not to be, but once you know something, you can’t “unknow” it. So if you really love animals, but not enough to not eat them, or you somehow see farm animals as different from your pets, I encourage you to read. Read some of the books I recommend (see the tabs above), read some of the blogs to the right of this post, read the Farm Sanctuary website. And if you feel uncomfortable eating meat, understand that there’s a good reason for that and don’t ignore it. Maybe this is a good time to give it some thought.

Coming soon: the myth of “happy meat” and a humane death.

A horse of a different colour

Horses have been in the news lately; have you noticed? You may not have. Generally speaking, issues pertaining to animals are relegated to a couple of column inches near the inner fold on about page 25, if they make the mainstream media at all.

A carriage horse collapsed on a New York City street the other day, renewing public calls to end the carriage ride business. The poor treatment of many of the horses used for tourism has been well documented for years.

The week before American Thanksgiving, President Obama quietly signed a bill – after stating in 2008 that he would not do so – that undid a five-year ban on horse slaughter in the U.S. Of course, this didn’t mean the horses didn’t get slaughtered; they just got shipped to Canada or Mexico, where it is legal. Part of the justification for reinstating horse slaughter in the U.S., according to the Government Accountability Office, is that the ban on slaughter had a negative effect on the price of horses. This apparently led to abuse and neglect as owners of older horses had no way to divest themselves of the animals without selling them to “foreign slaughtering facilities where U.S. humane slaughtering protections do not apply.” Right. Where were these humane slaughtering protections when hundreds of thousands of animals were treated with outright cruelty at the Hallmark slaughtering plant before it was shut down in 2008? Where are they right now? I could post link after link of undercover investigations showing that “humane slaughter” is nothing more than a fairytale.

Here in Canada, horse slaughter is legal, though not done in very many abbatoirs (just four, two each in Alberta and Quebec). There is a small domestic market for horse meat, but most of it is exported to the E.U.

On Monday this week, The Canadian Horse Defence Coalition released videos of horrific treatment of horses at Les Viandes de la Petite-Nation Inc. in Quebec, including one horse who was shot – badly, sometimes what looked like in the face – with a captive bolt gun 11 times before being rendered unconscious. Other horses whinnied as they were shot multiple times. Several of the horses are known to have been race horses, with one of them having raced just three months ago. Some may be retired carriage horses from the tourism industry, retired riding stable horses, or a beloved companion that someone may no longer be able to care for.

Dr. Nicholas Dodman, an anesthesiologist and veterinary behaviourist at Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, said “My final conclusion, after reviewing 150-plus horse slaughters in this series of videos, is that the process was terrifying for most of the horses and, in many cases, horribly inhumane.” To be clear: many horses are hung by one leg and have their throats slit and legs cut off while they are still conscious.

As word about the horrendous slaughterhouse conditions and abuses spreads, Canadians are disgusted and horrified. Who wouldn’t be? It’s an entirely appropriate reaction. NDP MP Alex Atamanenko (BC Southern Interior) has even called for the Canadian government to shut down all horse slaughterhouses.

So what is the fundamental difference between a horse and a cow? Absolutely none, not in any way that matters. Yet hundreds of thousands of cows (and pigs and sheep and goats) are slaughtered exactly the same way every single day, every minute of the day. I don’t say this to in any way diminish what’s happening to the horses, beautiful, noble animals capable of deep relationships not only with their own species, but with ours. I say this because it mystifies me that so few people stop to think that other farm animals are absolutely no different. Where is the public outcry for them? How could a taste, a meal that will be eaten in less than 15 minutes, possibly be worth all that suffering?

The Problem With Backyard Chickens

You may have noticed a lot of talk lately about “backyard chickens.” Seems a lot of city folks want to stay in the city, but they have this quaint, back-to-the-land notion of raising their own chickens for eggs. It’s a romantic idea – “We’ll raise chickens! We’ll have fresh eggs and know where they came from! What a great thing to expose our children to!” – and a trendy one, stemming from the locavore movement. What could be more local than your own backyard? The reality, though, may be quite different than what many of these people imagine.

Keeping chickens is legal in many places, and as it becomes more popular, it’s becoming legal in many more. In Canada, you can raise chickens in Vancouver and Victoria and a good handful of other smaller cities. In the United States, an astonishing number of cities from San Francisco to Portland to Raleigh and Buffalo have embraced urban egg farming – in fact, by one count, some 86 American cities allow backyard chickens.

In Toronto, where I live, there is currently a ban on backyard chickens, though it’s rumoured that a small number of people have them anyway. Proponents of the ban usually argue that the smell and the noise would be objectionable. Barnyard sounds and smells don’t bother me in the slightest, so I’ll leave that for someone else to write about.

What concerns me is that there’s a movement gaining momentum here to reverse the backyard chicken ban. Two Toronto city councillors plan to bring a proposal before the municipal licensing and standards committee in February in a bid to overturn the ban. (This makes me wonder if one would require a license in order to raise chickens. If so, what would be the requirements for obtaining one? Could a license be revoked? Under what circumstances? There are no cruelty laws regarding animals that are not pets. And the scant protection offered to farm animals? It excludes chickens.)

A chicken is a living, breathing, sentient animal and it has needs; I question whether all those who are eager to get their own chickens have taken this fully into account. Here are some things that potential urban egg farmers should give some thought to before acquiring a few chickens.

• Chickens, like anyone, occasionally get sick. They’re prone to a variety of viruses and other illnesses. Your local urban vet is probably not well versed in them. In fact, she may very well not even see chickens in her practice.
• You will likely get your first chicks from a hatchery. By some estimates, sexing errors occur 25% to 50% of the time. What if you wind up with a rooster or two? Roosters are not legal in the city and there are no plans to allow them, so what will you do with them?
• How will you heat your henhouse in the winter? Do you have the time and inclination to clean it every day, ensuring that the hens have fresh straw and clean water?
• Who will look after your chickens if you go away on holiday?
• How will you protect your chickens from predators? If you’re one of the people who thinks we have a problem with coyotes and raccoons in the city now, wait till you’ve got chickens in your backyard.
• The average lifespan of a chicken is seven to 10 years, though they can certainly live longer. However, hens lay eggs only until they’re two or three. What will you do with your hens when they are no longer “productive”? Will they become someone else’s problem (a shelter, a sanctuary, or simply left somewhere out in the country to fend for themselves), or will we be talking about amateur backyard slaughtering too?

This is a much more complicated issue than I can easily cover here, even leaving aside the ethics of eating eggs (for the record, I don’t). What I am saying is that chickens are living creatures, not fundamentally different than a cat or a dog. Just like a cat or a dog, they have physical, psychological and emotional needs, and caring for them is a serious responsibility and a commitment; you should be prepared to do your very best by them for the duration of their natural life.

Overturning the current ban on backyard chickens would be a mistake. Too many people do not take their responsibility to their pets seriously, which is why our shelters are perennially full; what will become of chickens they view as “less than”?