Via A&L Daily, a genteel meditation on chickens.

Watching chickens is a very old human pastime, and the forerunner of psychology, sociology and management theory. Sometimes understanding yourself can be made easier by projection on to others. Watching chickens helps us understand human motivations and interactions, which is doubtless why so many words and phrases in common parlance are redolent of the hen yard: "pecking order", "cockiness", "ruffling somebody's feathers", "taking somebody under your wing", "fussing like a mother hen", "strutting", a "bantamweight fighter", "clipping someone's wings", "beady eyes", "chicks", "to crow", "to flock", "get in a flap", "coming home to roost", "don't count your chickens before they're hatched", "nest eggs" and "preening". . .

Chickens don't spend a lot of time theorising about efficiency, or devising best-practice feeding strategies to maximise resource utilisation, nutrition uptake and product throughput. But if you think humans invented fast food, you should watch chickens demolish a plate of cooked vegetable peelings. Are they silly, fussy, defenceless creatures? For a worm, woodlouse or a small frog, they are huge, fast and efficient predators. It all depends on your point of view. . .

In the lottery of evolutionary niches, some species got to be fast, powerful and sharp. Humans got the mental wherewithal to try to control everything; the chicken's future rested on being tasty. Chickens are thus relieved of an enormous responsibility, making their lives simpler. They don't have to organise the whole world, or attend meetings to discuss policies "going forward"; they don't have to invent the future continually - it just comes when it comes. . .

Now, I've hardly done much to refute charges of anthropomorphism - but am I bovvered? I'm not projecting human characteristics on to dumb animals - I'm saying I really don't see that much difference in their hopes and fears, behaviour and petty foibles. If one actually lives with chickens, it's a lot harder to treat them as mere objects.

Their preferences are astoundingly obvious, so what possible excuse could there be for giving them any less? If they like greens, why give them pellets? If they like sunbathing, why pack them into a tiny, noisy, smelly place with no natural light? If, as I suspect, the answer is something to do with the "efficiency" of food production, then the notion of efficiency is horrible, incompetent, brutalised and brutalising, and it's certainly not in the interests of chickens at all. And I'm not sure that our ethical notions are all that more advanced than chickens'. . .

In today's economic climate, efficiency and competitiveness are the guiding principles of business, of life; more product faster, while taking up less space. But are these concepts in our interests at all? Efficiency without ethics is psychopathic. And how much cleverer than chickens are we, ultimately?

So what do I get from chickens? Simple lessons like these: competition without co-operation is nonsense; you can't win by simply eradicating all the opposition - that's a pyrrhic victory. In life, winning really isn't everything - it isn't even anything. Taking part is all. . .

Everyone should have a place in the pecking order. Strive for your place in life, not someone else's. Someone else's bread isn't necessarily tastier than your own. Envy will cost you dearly.

Don't let "flock-think" smother your own opinions; give yourself space to be an individual. Common sense is useful, but it's not always right. The society you're in may prompt you to behave badly, but only you can change that.

One could spend years on a moral philosophical quest, or keep chickens and treat them with courtesy and common sense. One doesn't just keep chickens, one lives with them. All chickens are not born equal, but they deserve equal respect.

I elided some mildly interesting chatter about chicken behavior that supports these contentions. Read the essay if you are fuzzy on these things. It's well done so far as it goes. But, the point I'd like to make here is that there is a disconnect, a lack of engagement, and that this blinds the author to some of the most interesting aspects of our multi-species world. It's a common defect in "nature writing". The stories are told from a distance, from on-high, as if the human writer was an alien anthropologist peering through a lens of some sort at humans from a great physical as well as psychological distance, marveling whenever something comprehensible is observed, likening a behavior to the alien perspective and drawing life lessons from the similarities.

I was reminded of an old essay that I'd written about in the past.

I AM SICK of nature. Sick of trees, sick of birds, sick of the ocean. It's been almost four years now, four years of sitting quietly in my study and sipping tea and contemplating the migratory patterns of the semipalmated plover. Four years of writing essays praised as "quiet" by quiet magazines. Four years of having neighborhood children ask their fathers why the man down the street comes to the post office dressed in his pajamas ("Doesn't he work, Daddy?") or having those same fathers wonder why, when the man actually does dress, he dons the eccentric costume of an English bird watcher, complete with binoculars. And finally, four years of being constrained by the gentle straightjacket of the nature-writing genre; that is, four years of writing about the world without being able to use the earthier names for excrement (while talking a lot of scat).

In this chicken meditation it isn't Nature as it is commonly conceived that is being discussed since chickens are not natural as the word is most often used, they are domestic livestock living in more or less close confinement, but they are similarly kept at a distance, behind an intellectual firewall, rather than engaged in any meaningful sense. The focus vacillates between regarding chickens as vegetables devoid of mental lives and regarding them as pets. Aren't they cute and sometimes clever!

The central confusion of the essay arises from failing to understand shared work. It isn't just that humans are clever and chickens are tasty, it is that each has skills and aptitudes that are effective for separate tasks in the joint labors of life. If you take one more step back from the scene - be the alien - and observe humans and chickens together, the scenario isn't just humans feeding more or less humanely imprisoned chickens in order to get meat and/or eggs. It is humans and chickens working together to support one another.

The circularity of the relationship is masked by civilized behavior, but in a more natural setting it is obvious and can be inferred from the denatured remnants.

they eat what we eat (chicken excepted, of course). They like sweetcorn, peas, pasta and rice. They love steak and cooked bacon rind. In the course of evolution, I don't know where chickens developed a taste for cooked pig. Maybe a freak accident: a bolt of lightning; a forest fire; an unfortunate pig ... They also like prawns, salmon, cake and bread, and ironically are rather partial to sage and onion stuffing. They are also fans of strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, carrot tops, cabbage leaves, grass, shoots - especially the ones you've just planted. And they turn all this rather efficiently into eggs and excrement.

They eat what we eat. They are omnivores too. They not only like pig, they like long pig, and would eat your defunct carcass without a qualm if they could get at it and it had not been ruined with embalming fluids or burnt to ashes. Think vultures.

More commonly, they eat insects, amphibians, reptiles and any small mammals that they can catch and kill as well as fruit, seeds and a small amount of leafy greens. They till the earth with their scratching to reveal such prey. It's interesting to observe the net effect of such scratching over time. They can turn a compost pile for you, aerating it, in their search for prey living inside.

When raised in a multi-species agricultural setting - the barnyard of a general farm - they are the pest police. They keep down the population of annoying insects such as flies and grasshoppers, peck apart and spread dung pats searching for any grubs or seeds that might be inside, and so contribute to the overall enterprise with their work. The meat and eggs are extra.

In today's economic climate, efficiency and competitiveness are the guiding principles of business, of life; more product faster, while taking up less space. But are these concepts in our interests at all? Efficiency without ethics is psychopathic. And how much cleverer than chickens are we, ultimately?

This is a remarkably silly statement when we take a larger view of the situation. Efficiency is always nature's way, not ethics. But we need to do full accounting to recognize higher efficiency. The confinement poultry operations that are being criticized are not more efficient if we do such accounting since many of the costs are externalized, off the books. That's an issue worth closer attention, but it does not lead us down the sterile path of ethics. This is the juvenile approach of an immature individual or society that lacks depth and breadth of knowledge and understanding. It's dead common, and becoming ever more so, but mistaken.

We need a new generation, a new breed of nature writers who actually have some grasp of nature. We need naturalists who have knowledge of systems from the micro to the macro and see all of the relationships, including humans. The notion of a depeopled nature is factually mistaken and arguably even more truly psychopathic than an ethics free view of nature. You want ethics, you want to learn nature's lessons, then learn nature's ethics. That's efficiency. You are free to hold you own inefficient and illogical notions but be honest about your neuroses.