Chickens in Trees
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suziepetryk.com
They make lovely sounds and they live next to my office so working at home is delightful. They are endlessly silly. They are manipulative. They are dignified and stupid. Their plumage is a miracle of biology. They aren’t particularly friendly. I have no clue why I adore them.
Had no idea that such stupid little dinosaurs would change my life so dramatically.
Hell, even killing new born kittens / puppies is considered by some normal thing, if they breed uncontrolled (even if they could just... castrate / neuter them [not sure which is the right word for it, I'm not native]).
After all how is it different from a full grown chicken, other than the fact you don't normally eat cats/dogs?
I think any good person can understand and empathize with the modern day practices of factory farming and meat production, but the solutions coming from vegans are also untenable in the face of human history. We can move away from unethical farming practices without removing meat from our diets and ignoring the absolutely huge benefits of eating meat as humans.
Plants that are responsible of lots and lots of human well-being and as life beings deserve to be treated with a similar respect that we use with other organisms.
Incidentally is also bad for human health
Yes, it is. Those articles that claim that you can live on a strict vegetarian diet without any bad consequences for your health are either lying, incomplete or based in pseudoscience. Is basically a religious movement.
If you would be surrounded by chickens, livestock and other farm animals and watching them getting butchered was your daily bread as a child, why would you reconsider when you would grow up? It literally put food on your table, and besides home grown farm animals taste A LOT better (speaking from experience, but never grown them myself, any meat product I buy from the Walmart alikes tastes much worse).
Its only when you never witnessed death of any kind that you become so sensitive to it. Once it becomes normal (of course, I talk about farm animals here only) it's really hard to see advocates for vegetarianism as some sort of zealots.
And personally? What's the difference if they die of natural causes vs. just butchering them when the time is right? If you raised them ethically and they were generally happy, then for these animals its just... How it would end anyway? If you compare that to industrial farming, and if it was the only way to get meat sure I would consider being vege instead, its horrible how they are kept and treated. But for my own raised animals? Its a cycle of life.
I'm not sure that being desensitised is a good argument. People can become desensitised to a lot of things, like slavery or other abuse. That doesn't make it ok.
The difference is factory farming really. I don't think eating meat is wrong, per se. (But I do think a lot of people wouldn't miss meat if they tried it, especially the only eats chicken breast type). But factory farming is disgusting.
On that note, let me tell you how home grown vegetables are also a lot better than... ;)
Joel Salatin. Farmstead Meatsmith. Justin Rhodes. Etc.
I guess it depends on your definition of fun but rarely are people learning as an immediate need for survival.
Some goats can kill you.
If you are doing it as part of putting a good tasting food on the table, I would say no, no one bats an eye, but I suppose they don't enjoy the process too - it's messy process and requiers some safety considerations too like making sure your meat doesn't have any parasites.
When there is a shoot on the estate we request some of the birds and then through the season we regularly come home from work to find braces of dead pheasants hanging on our front door. We pluck them and then roast or make stews out of them and they are delicious.
It is common to walk through the village after a shoot and see dead birds hanging from most of the doors. Nobody complains or thinks it is strange, in fact everybody looks forward to the free meat!
You are a descendent of millions of years of hunters. I know many hunters and have been hunting myself. I know many who like to fish and have been fishing myself, and cooked my own catch. It's quite a satisfying experience actually.
Red junglefowl, the ancestors to domesticated chickens, only lay a few clutches annually for a total of less than 20 eggs per year. Modern chickens that lay hundreds of eggs a year are a product of selective breeding, not some natural adaptation.
A consequence is that 'natural' will lose all meaning. If everything is natural, then nothing is, really.
It's like going "haha gotcha! tomatoes are fruit, not vegetables!", completely missing the difference between the use of the word in a culinary versus botanical context. It's not insightful or useful in any way, it's just equivocation.
Hunting is different for a couple of reasons. First, you're almost certainly talking about killing from a distance with a gun. But it's also quite different to hunt a wild animal rather than raise a domestic animal just to kill it. But also some "hunting" is basically a simulation using released domestic animals (see pheasant shooting in the UK). And some is just downright cruel (see fox hunting in the UK or shooting of birds in Malta). Nobody is doing the slaughter for fun, though. It's always guns or dogs doing the dirty work. Funny that.
But also to provide. The estate near us has shoots every season and the fowl which is killed is given to the local residents. Lots of local poorer people really look forward to shoot season because they can pack their freezer with lots of free meat. I speak to lots of older folks in the area and they say this is the way it has been done for hundreds of years.
Someone has to skin & butcher the animal though, or does that "just happen?"
We now view this as wrong, but that wasn't beating them.
Yes, some idiots did beat their children, or hit their children out of anger. That doesn't mean it was common.
out of care and love, when they did things dangerous to themselves or others, and sometimes a strap or switch when something truly horrific was done.
In other words, never because fed up / angry. Never because of minor situations, and so on. For example, swearing isn't "dangerous to themselves or others". Spanking employed when the life of the child or others is involved, is a short-cut to locking an intense memory into long-term recall.
This sort of event is rare.
And to be frank? "Improved their lives" isn't necessarily important. Note how I state "dangerous to themselves or others"? Siblings and other children have to be taken into account.
Lastly, and take this from someone with grey hair, it wasn't until my 30s that I started to appreciate some of the discipline I disagreed with as a child. Disagreeing, doesn't mean it was wrong.
In the areas that still do beat their children, they commonly do beat more, when they are angry.
We also don't teach our kids to defend themselves against sword attacks, for the same reason - it's no longer necessary.
Your argument implies that the past behavior was bad and we should change it, but that's incorrect. The past behavior was correct for its time. If someone would have raised a child without spanking 100 years ago they would end up with a weak person who could not live in the real world, this would be a bad thing.
In this particular ethical issue it is an eternal tug-of-war between humans as essentially vegans by nature, corrupted by cloaking animal suffering in neat, pre-slaughtered packages (if we would only see...), and the other side presenting humans as one of the animals eating other animals. We are made out to be part of a natural order as hunter and butcher, which is both normal and good. Modern sensibilities around animal suffering is seen as a whimsy aberration of normality, artificial and unnatural. It is both descriptive and normative, and the what-is functions as a tool for the what-should.
This does lead to pretty bad 'science' (on both sides, really) and conversations that are very loaded around basic facts. I would agree if you would say the what-is does not depend on the what-should-be and vice versa, free will and all, but this is often not how ethical conversations (and rhetoric) works.
If I have leftover rice, I'd rather refrigerate it and eat it tomorrow, instead of feed it to chickens.
Rabbits can not eat food waste, they have very sensitive digestions. Very few fish will eat food waste (mostly just tilapia will do so).
> feed bacteria and worm waste to plants
Plants do not eat bacteria. You can't just "feed" worm waste to plants, you would have to bury into the soil via plowing or some other method.
Bacteria also make CO2 by digesting food. The fertilizer they make is minerals and nitrogen.
You have a bit of a simplistic view of how this food cycle works.
> I was always taught that recycling was good, while pumping oil out of the ground and creating new CO2 is bad, but I'm no expert.
It's not so simple. Except for metal, recycling usually uses more oil than not recycling.
You seem to have selective comprehension issues.
Recycling is more than just throwing trash into different coloured bins and burning oil to process it; Specifically, recycling in my comment refers to the process of water and air turning into food, and back into water and air, as has been customary for terran life for a few years now.
It is quite simply a natural cycle using no oil for centuries, vs. an industrial cycle using millions of tons of oil per year.
Sort of. Some bacteria do convert ammonia into a form that plants can eat, but the majority of bacteria waste is just CO2.
> rabbits can eat some kitchen plant waste
Very very very little. A couple leaves from romaine lettuce and that's about it. They can not eat vegetable peelings for example.
Chickens can.
> rabbit poop can be fed to fish and chickens (rabbits themselves eat it like 3x because poor digestive tract)
This is not correct. Rabbit poop is mostly cellulose and chickens can not digest it, nor can most fish except for tilapia. Rabbits do not eat their poop 3x - they have a special partially digested waste that they will eat a second time, sometimes, it depends on their diet. They do not re-eat their regular poop.
> It is quite simply a natural cycle using no oil for centuries
And it releases lots of CO2. The CO2 the plant absorbed is released when it decays. What's your goal? Reduction of CO2? Less stuff in landfill?
This started with your claim that not refrigerating will reduce CO2 emissions. This is not true. When you "recycle" leftover food, all the CO2 in the food is emitted, and you have to grow more.
The amount of CO2 emitted to recycle food is FAR FAR more than the CO2 from running a refrigerator.
I understand you long for the old days and how we did things, but you are overlooking the downsides. Each person in the past used far more resources than they do today, the world had fewer people and it worked out. It's not possible to support this many people using the inefficient methods of the past.
Before the industrial revolution almost every single tree in Europe was cut down in order to support human life there, it was not sustainable - they ran out of trees.
Using technology the increase in efficiency was so great we also got "treats" other technology we greatly enjoy. There are downsides of course, too much CO2, but going back to the old ways is NOT the solution.
The argument for CO2 reduction has always been that all the extra carbon released from coal, gas, and petroleum, is bad, as a net increase of emissions, beyond natural processes.
> You are a descendent of millions of years of hunters. I know many hunters and have been hunting myself. I know many who like to fish and have been fishing myself, and cooked my own catch. It's quite a satisfying experience actually.
When I see posts like this I chuckle a bit at how steeped in their culture they are.
I contrast this with Western cultures where meat is often the centerpiece of the dish and many times your food is just meat with accompanying carbs and veggies. The kind of rhetoric the GP had about relishing hunting is a lot more absent from these cultures just because there's a general understanding that eating meat is unethical but something we all do because we aren't perfect.
All that to say that culture creates a powerful framing. Obviously in places like the steppes it's very hard to live without eating meat, but in places rich with agriculture attitudes toward meat are more about the culture you're steeped in than any material nutritional issues.
India has a lot of carb veggies as well, which I found really interesting. I found it hard to get leafy greens of some sort (the vegetables you need to eat to stay healthy, cooked or otherwise) when I visited Delhi and Jaipur. But that could have just been me picking the wrong places to eat. China has much more leafy greens in my opinion, but again I’m limited in experience when it comes to South Asia. They definitely take the cake in making tofu taste like meat, but I’m not really into that.
I also find Japanese food to be shockingly short on veggies but same thing, it's hard to grow veggies there so a lot is imported, which makes veggies a bit of a luxury. Fruits are ridiculously hard/expensive to get there. Japanese food is a good example of a diet that historically was pretty meat poor and fish rich, though is changing with meat imports and modern processed fast foods like fried chicken ("chikin") and chicken nanban.
This is reflected by a thousand years or so for most of the West with significant parts the calendar where there was abstinence from meat which for many now people would consider impossible. At most we would be periodic vegetarians, omnivores with the balance towards the vegetarian.
But I think you are also forgetting that agriculture has improved since and people aren't hungry any more. We don't need to keep a pig and feed it swill. There's so much to go around that many people are fat. It's 100% a choice to eat meat today and if that choice involved doing the killing I don't think many would make it.
Wut? A quarter of a steer provided my family of 3 with beef for an entire year. A quarter!
I know that modern vegans have a more challenging time sourcing protein.
Old time diets didn't have the same limitations that modern vegan diets do, so they could for example lean on eggs and similar options.
But if you subtract 90% of protein sources from a modern diet, they had to have been eating something to make up that deficit and I'm always in the market for possible ideas to improve my own diet. :)
I'm having trouble understanding your post, maybe because you got this backwards.
Modern vegans have a trivial time sourcing protein. Tofu, wheat gluten (seitan), TVP, tempeh, and all the infinite vegetable options available year round instead of just seasonally.
My mother was one of 14 kids growing up on a small farm in the West of Ireland in the mid-20th century. They ate meat (mostly bacon, home-killed and salted) cooked on an open fire 6 days a week, except during Lent
It's important to note that in the Christian traditional at least, fish and other aquatic animals weren't considered "meat" and were fine for eating on meatless days -- which survives to this day in the tradition of Friday being a common day to eat fish (Fridays were traditionally "meatless").
We raised them from a few months old (we took them from a farm that was having to close) and did the entire processing and butchering process ourselves. The meat is night and day better than what you can buy in a store, the bacon is delicious, and we know the animal lived an excellent life and had a near instant end.
There is a very humane way to kill mammals actually: inert gas asphyxiation. A pig will happily enter a chamber full of nitrogen and die peacefully. If you arranged that then it's commendable. Personally meat is nowhere near important enough to me to go to such lengths, though.
As far as the near instant end I mentioned, yes I did see it. I pulled the trigger myself, each pig dropped instantly. I wouldn't begin to claim that there is a humane way to kill anything. Taking a life is no small thing, though its a part of life it shouldn't be taken lightly and demands respect.
I had a bad experience with attempting to use gas asphyxiation to put down a baby chick that was suffering. It didn't go well unfortunately, and though I'm sure with just the right setup it would work really well, I don't have such a setup.
While we're on this subject, though very out of place for HN, I've never personally agreed with the idea that death can be humane. It seems to be a relative comparison if suffering from a third party's perspective. We never really know what one experiences when they die, we only know what we see and what appears to be suffering. We similarly assume that plants don't suffer when killed, frankly I just don't buy it. There's plenty of research showing communication between plants, why couldn't they feel pain or loss? Do plants truly not feel anything, or are they just so different from us that we don't recognize any signs if pain or suffering?
Still eat meat.
Three years later, and we’re taking Belinda ‘the bruiser’ to the vet tomorrow for her second hormone implant. Turns out the ISA Browns that are bred to lay have their insides just destroyed by the constant production.
So you can let them die, or you can spend thousands of dollars keeping them alive. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I had no idea I’d love chickens this much. They’re tremendous animals.
Two years later we learned mountain lions are bigger and stronger than expected.
And that's kinda crazy bad luck. Every story I recall reading of a mountain lion getting into a chicken enclosure built well enough to defend against a determined racoon or fox has been a young cat strolling through an open door, not forcing their way in.
Genuinely appreciated. I have lost many relatives and (human) friends in my life with causes ranging from murder to disease to suicide. The chickens are different, I think because I am completely responsible for their safety. They are true innocents and I screwed up.
> Every story I recall reading of a mountain lion getting into a chicken enclosure built well enough to defend against a determined racoon or fox has been a young cat strolling through an open door, not forcing their way in.
And same here. I didn't understand how strong the big cats are. Our Fort Knox is accessible only through a garage so that wasn't an issue.
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/tree-goats-of-morocco-argan...
I really like the pictures from Morroco though, thank you!
A friend of mine always checks his small flock just before dark for escapees from the coop. If the count is off, he always looks in the near-by trees.
Chickens roost in trees instinctively. Is a relatively safe place for those races that still can fly. Bantams either do it or look for a dense spiny shrub. Industrial races lack the confidence and are too heavy to jump safely without fracturing their hips.
> Just like your own flock, we need to feed ours in order to get eggs. That’s why our membership is required to unlock the full intelligence of your coop.
I remember the first time my wife saw your coop, she said “that is what I wanted to build”, so you probably have some product market fit going on. We had already built our run at that time, however now she thinks a good supplemental product idea is a feeder with a camera. Like Petcube combined with the Grandpa’s Feeders product. She would definitely be up to chat about her chicken keeping needs and all the ideas that come with it. Her details are on her blog: tropicalchicki.com
Note for other HN peeps: If you really like cats and nature you probably will like chicken keeping! They have lots of personality and communicate in more ways than we are typically taught.
On the article, I wonder if people commonly see their first chickens in trees on islands. It’s a common thing in PR, which also has a lot of wild chickens roaming. Vieques, the smaller sister island off the east coast of PR, kind of celebrates this. Lots of chicken murals, themed gifts, names of beaches, etc
I feel you might need to expand here
Deters thieves without the flesh carnage of lead pellets | buckshot.
If you ever decide to start keeping chickens or turkeys, you will discover that most of the things you thought you knew about birds are wrong. They are fascinating creatures.
There is a mini documentary out there on said chickens. They are kind of the town mascots.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/running-ponies/meet-...
> Don't blink. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead. They [the Weeping Angels] are fast. Faster than you can believe. Don't turn your back. Don't turn away. And most of all, don't blink.
I know this has nothing to do with the point of the article, but Weeping Angels are exactly the wrong analogy for something approaching slowly!
Its Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraponera_clavata
Races of chicken that were breed to fight are very slim and all muscle. Not much different than pigeons. Probably a hard meat. Old roosters of most other races are perfectly edible.
Of course locals could have more than one motive to not want foreigners eating the birds. Specially when there is an old and widespread tradition of let the chicken free-range around villages
None of the hens have aged out of laying thanks to the efforts of the local predators. Should that ever happen, it will surely require resolving the question of whether the hens are livestock or pets before I can tell you about how the cooking process varies from a grocery store bird.
"The proclivity of free-ranging indigenous village chickens for night-time roosting in trees" [1]
[1] https://cabiagbio.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s43170-...
Maybe not the adults, who are big enough to be a challenge, but almost certainly the chicks.
A friend of mine who lives on a farm was trying to get ducks to live on his pond. He was advised to shoot all the feral cats he could find, which he did. He still has something of a problem with snapping turtles nabbing the ducklings as they swim, but he's working on that too.
It would be an ironic (and sad?) thing if the human history of the chicken began in trees and ended in trees.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/26/out-...
In summer they disappear into the leaves, but in winter they're pretty obvious.
Hum, thinking about it, this is a great meme waiting to happen. All that you need is a warm Olympic swimming pool, to borrow some fatty velociclucktors and the cover of the night. Worldwide fame, here I go again...
There are chickens in the trees
There are chickens in the trees
Won't you listen to me please
There are chickens in the trees
<https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf>
Previously on HN:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35745880>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5830497>
And a dang compilation from 2023: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35746402>
Video: <http://yewtu.be/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk>
Humans are gifted at ignoring the miracles that are happening right in front of them, everyday.