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I do own two chickens since maybe 6 months for random reasons. Before that I thought they were pretty "stupid"/"uninteresting" animals but I was really wrong.

• whycome 2y ago
  It’s not the egg industry that will lose out if more people have backyard hens. It’s the poultry industry and the eating general. More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats.
  • watwut 2y ago
    Given people grew animals for eating for centuries and generally were more cruel to them then we are , I doubt.
    • NineStarPoint 2y ago
      Those people were a lot more desperate for food than we were too, though.
    • adriand 2y ago
      > and generally were more cruel to them then we are Strongly disagree with this part of your statement. The scale of suffering from industrial animal processing far exceeds anything from past centuries. The one-on-one cruelty of past centuries exists today as well (there are plenty of hidden camera videos to that effect), but what's really different is that now we treat animals as if they are mere inputs to industrial processes, as if they have no feelings or emotions or capacity for suffering. In past centuries, chickens roamed free, sheep and cattle grazed on fields, etc. It was an idyllic experience compared to today's factory farm hellscape.
      • veidr 2y ago
        That's so keenly true I wonder how we've ended up with a society where it's not only non-obvious, but even dubious, to such a significant percentage of people. There's not really any human analogue to industrial meat factories, except maybe like Nazi concentration camps, or ... I mean really only that, right? Maybe something Genghis Khan did might occupy that same space. Like Eazy-E famously said, it's not how you die, it's how the moments from your birth, all the way through to the end of your life in this world, add up. Do you get a positive number? Chicken/horse born on a ranch? Yeah. Chicken/horse/cow born in a concrete meat factory? I mean, I don't think so...
    • partitioned 2y ago
      We are orders of magnitude more cruel to factory farmed animals than farming at any other point in history.
  • nemo44x 2y ago
    I don’t know, farmers always had dogs on the farm but they didn’t eat them and continued to eat the chickens. Chicken is really great and succulent. Hard to resist frying one of them up and sucking the meat off the bone. Absolutely no desire to do that with a dog.
    • yndoendo 2y ago
      I say the smartest hunters are the farmers.
      • nemo44x 2y ago
        I read about these Hawaiians that would use stones to wall in an area of water but leave gaps big enough to let smaller fish in. They’d create an environment that was safe (appeared so to the fish) and provide food. This would keep most of them reliably inside the wall. Eventually the fish mature and can’t escape due to their size. And now you have ocean fish that are easy to harvest.
    • scotty79 2y ago
      Dogs are hard to keep for meat at any scale. We only eat easy animals. Sympathy has very little to do with it.
    • abdullahkhalids 2y ago
      Almost no culture routinely eats meat-eating animals. It is very easy to determine, even in ancient times, that it is incredibly easy to get sick from eating meat-eating animals. This is because predators often catch and eat diseased prey, and end up having a lot of parasites and such. Not to mention the meat of such animals tastes much worse.
      • nemo44x 2y ago
        Yeah plus the whole they eat things I can't and turn it into something I can eat.
  • crazygringo 2y ago
    People have been keeping intelligent animals like chickens, pigs, and cattle for millennia. And continuing to eat them. Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms, and meat and poultry were something you bought in pieces, plastic-wrapped.
    • erellsworth 2y ago
      It makes sense to me. If you grow up seeing animals slaughtered on the regular you probably won't think much of it, especially when the adults around you treat it as completely normal. You grow up in an environment where you might think meat comes from the magic meat factory, when you see an animal slaughtered for the first time it's likely to be shocking enough to turn a lot of people away.
      • deepvibrations 2y ago
        Very true. Just like when slaves were commonplace, it was 'normalised' and many people just turned a blind eye.
        • 0xdeadbeefbabe 2y ago
          The people who think meat comes from a magic meat factory are blind.
        • georgeecollins 2y ago
          Everything biological is going to be eaten. Your dog or cat would eat you if you were dead and they were hungry enough. I am not saying we shouldn't evolve past eating meat, it would be great for the environment. But to say that one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical is an indictment of nature.
          • vengefulduck 2y ago
            I think the problem with this argument is the assumption that nature is inherently good. Nature is cruel and uncaring. Moving beyond it is a good thing imo. We’re just lucky that as a species by the roll of the dice we were given the power by nature to usurp it.
  • JKCalhoun 2y ago
    It didn't stop me and my family. (Chicken katsu is still one of my favorites dishes.) To be sure, we did not eat our own chickens (just their eggs). Somehow we were able to still mentally distance ourselves from ours and "the others". I was living in San Jose in a dense suburban neighborhood. It became legal to have backyard chickens so I jumped at getting three chickens. (We had three young daughters, see.) One mysteriously died. Of the remaining two, the bossy one decided she was a rooster and started crowing, of a sort, in the morning hours. So we had one asshole neighbor complain and I was obliged to send them off to live with a friend who had some property in the Santa Cruz mountains. Sad. And afterward, neighbors strolling by said they missed the chicken sounds in the neighborhood. I'll spare you the unfortunate ends for the two. I'll say the Santa Cruz mountains represent more predators and require someone with a little more responsibility than my friend showed. (I don't blame him. It was really my fault — having more or less dumped them on him.)
    • stickfigure 2y ago
      Everything loves a chicken dinner. Unless you live in a city where the predator population has already been driven out, you are faced with the decision to either let them free roam (and accept a small but steady rate of predation) or keep them penned when not under direct supervision. There's not a third option.
      • noah_buddy 2y ago
        Some sort of goat maybe?
        • alistairSH 2y ago
          Goats can be territorial, but I'm not aware of them having any particular inclination to guard chickens or livestock. Livestock guard dogs work better, but then you're dealing with a large dog that isn't a pet and isn't socialized like a house dog.
          • BobaFloutist 2y ago
  • stickfigure 2y ago
    > More people will start to find... ...that roosters are total assholes. There's room for exactly one in the flock, and I have no emotional difficulty turning the rest into stew. The "chickens are cute" narrative only works in a carefully curated frame.
  • belorn 2y ago
    I have grown up with chickens through out my childhood and I strongly disagree with that take. If anything, it makes it more reasonable to eat chicken given that backyard hens are more sustainable and more natural than processed food bought in the store. Chickens reproduce at a very fast pace, and it is not like one is going to eat the oldest and nicest ones. It does however makes factory farmed animals much less fun to eat, both in term of taste and the knowledge of how much better backyard hens has it. It is like buying clothes manufactured from countries with less-than-stellar working environment.
  • InDubioProRubio 2y ago
    I don't eat sunflower-seeds, as sunflowers murder one another by throwing shade.
  • jkestner 2y ago
    I told the kids not to name the roosters, but we eat them regardless. Once again, humans excel at holding contradictory thoughts.
  • LightBug1 2y ago
    Considering the bizarro world we're now living it, I wouldn't put it beyond us for it to go the other way. If people realise they are still comfortable eating intelligent emotional animals like chickens, the dogs and cats of this world should watch their backs!
    • solarmist 2y ago
      The only reason we don't eat dogs or cats is because they don't taste good. Predators don't make for good eating. That said there are places where dog is eaten usually as a stew because that makes it more tender.
  • solarmist 2y ago
    The only reason we don't eat dogs or cats is because they don't taste good. Predators don't make for good eating. They have to work too hard physically for their food. It makes their meat tough. That said there are places where dog is eaten usually as a stew because that makes it more tender.
    • mharig 2y ago
      [dead]
    • kelnos 2y ago
      Speak for yourself. I would never eat a cat or dog because to me they are pets, and I would feel terrible doing it. Whatever they taste like is very very secondary to that.
      • solarmist 2y ago
        I’m speaking as a human looking at the historical context of eating animals. Predators taste terrible because they are high effort, low reward in terms of nutritional value. I am absolutely not advocating that we start eating pets. I would feel terrible about it too. And if I have an option, besides starving to death, I would take it. The other reason why predators have become pets is because they had a strong additive value in terms of hunting or protection. Dogs in term protection, and hunting and cats in terms of pest control. Groups with these kind of pets tended to fair better.
  • HumblyTossed 2y ago
    Wait until we find out how intelligent broccoli is.
  • PaulHoule 2y ago
    Some people get used to it. We did some work to prepare our barn for chickens but never quite 'pulled the trigger' because between our tenants and other friends we are swimming in eggs. (It was funny as hell that some of our chicken-keeping friends had a fox family living in a stump in front of their house. Their chicken house was solid but they'd catch the mama fox on the game camera every night bringing home a chicken from somebody else's flock every night.) Our favorite meat lately has been roadkill deer. Two days ago a friend was traveling to a job site up route 89 on the side of the lake when they hit a deer. He called us on his cell but we didn't want to drive that far that day. The next day my wife was planning to drive out in that direction to help a friend, the friend welched out but she went to see if the deer was still there, it was, so she loaded it into the back of our Honda Fit and I was told, when she picked me up at the bus stop, to stash all my stuff with me in the passenger seat. Turned out the intestines didn't splatter, it was cold, and there wasn't serious tissue damage from the crash so we're going to get a huge amount of meat out of it. Between roadkill deer and deer my son hunts and deer other people hunt on our land we might need to get a bigger freezer.
    • cindylmcindy 2y ago
      [flagged]
    • um1 2y ago
      I know a guy who does similar. He gives the messed up parts that got damaged to his dog.
  • Psillisp 2y ago
    I’m from a rural area. I have formative memories of raising caring for and slaughtering animals. Hunting and fishing, literally put food on the table. I don’t remember anyone complaining that the chicken in the gumbo came from the yard.
  • nsxwolf 2y ago
    My aunt names all her chickens. She will also grab one and twist its head of with her bare hands while carrying on a casual conversation with you.
  • nothercastle 2y ago
    Have chickens and they are dumber than fish. Have no qualms about eating them.
  • adolph 2y ago
    > More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats. Why do you think that people abjuring consumption of emotionally observable animals is more likely that the opposite: growing an acceptance of eating other sentient beings as part of the cycle of life?
• adrian_b 2y ago
  As a small child, I used to spend a part of the summer vacations with my grandparents, who had some land cultivated with a variety of crops and trees and they also raised some animals, including chicken which roamed freely through a big garden. I liked to play with the chicken, and by rewarding them with maize grains I have succeeded to train some of them to respond to a few simple commands, like coming to me when called and sitting down, waiting to be petted, and standing up upon commands. (Because those chicken were used to roam freely, they were shy of human contact. Normally it was difficult to catch any one of them.) My grandparents and their neighbors were astonished, despite the fact that they have kept chicken for all their lives, because they believed that chicken are too dumb to act like this.
  • PaulHoule 2y ago
    My understanding is that birds are about as intelligent as mammals. Funny I know some people who grew up with chickens who think they are nasty, aggressive and disagreeable. Like little dragons.
    • alwa 2y ago
      Depends how they’re raised… impressionable creatures. Though IME some roosters especially are just plumb mean. A mean rooster has a surprisingly high terror-to-size ratio, and can easily draw blood with its spurs. And they carry grudges, and they’ll stalk you.
      • lsaferite 2y ago
        Can confirm. We used to own a mean rooster and he would certainly stalk me when he was out of the run. Not sad that a fox ate him. Would have preferred the hens not also been eaten though. Our current rooster is pretty chill and just ignores me. He even consents (begrudgingly) to my young daughter picking him up and holding him.
        • PaulHoule 2y ago
          We used to have one around the barnyard who hated me and hated my son (maybe 5 years old at the time) and hated it even more when I was carrying my son on my shoulders. I learned from that, and other experience of hand-to-hand combat with birds, wildcrafting eggs [1], and such, to "never let a bird see your back". I like it how those little red-wing blackbirds like to sit on POSTED: NO TRESSPASSING signs because that is their attitude. They'll dive bomb you but also flap really hard up high at the sky to nip at the wings of hawks who are lazily cruising. You might not even notice they have a nest to protect if they weren't getting in your face about it. [1] at least seven years ago, I think...
• bagels 2y ago
  The kinds of intelligence they display is really interesting. They can't figure out obstacles very well if they can see where they want to go, but are impeded. They just pace back and forth, frustrated, instead of walking around the obstacle. They are very social, recognize people, and can be trained in some limited ways (eg. to return to the coop with whistles, if you associate it with treats).