Environment – Humans and hens

My garden is home to two brown shaver hens, Speckle and Shy. They are fine company in the garden, always keen on my weeding, chatting away and cute looking, and they lay eggs for me. Chooks have lots of character. They are wilful, destructive and messy, but also charming, friendly and, in a heartily symbiotic domestic exchange, receive feed and care as a swap for eggs.

The domestic chook (gallus gallus domesticus) is descended from the Asian jungle fowl.

They’re from the pheasant family and were probably initially used in cockfights. But domesticated chooks are recorded in India as far back as 3200BC. Chinese and Egyptians ate eggs from 1400BC and, in Europe, people lived with domesticated chickens since 600BC. Captain Cook brought hens to New Zealand on his second journey, in 1773, and missionaries farmed chooks here in 1814. So there’s a long history of people sharing their lives and resources with hens throughout humanity, and throughout this country’s past.

This long period of happy co-existence is reflected in how much chook behaviour has influenced our own culture and helps us to make sense of the world. The pecking order, crowing about something, egging others on, not fouling (fowling?) your own nest, the chicken and egg situation, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched, flew the coop, empty nest syndrome, mother hen, hen pecked, ruled the roost … the list of sayings we’ve adopted from chook behaviour, goes on.
Chooks are smart. They can apparently distinguish between 100 other hens, have (at least) 24 different vocalisations, have full colour vision, experience REM sleep (dreams?), can navigate via the sun, show mathematical reasoning, self-control, structural engineering (nest building?), have complex social structure and have capacity for object permanence – knowing something is there even when they can’t see it – which is more than a toddler can do. A hen can reject the sperm of an undesirable rooster and will turn her eggs 50 times a day to maintain optimum temperatures. In the wild, they would live for 5-11 years, and lay 10-15 eggs a year.

As well as the rustic backyard hen laying a few eggs and scratching in the garden, these days, there are more than 3.2 million commercial layer hens bred in New Zealand every year. There are at least 170 commercial egg farms, producing more than a billion eggs per annum. Almost 90 per cent of these are produced in cages in sheds, containing up to 45,000 hens. Even free-range egg farms can have up to 10,000 hens on site.
In the US, there are about 320 million laying hens, producing 75 billion eggs per annum, but that’s just 10 per cent of the global supply. ‘Flock’ sizes can be up to a million hens and most of the industry is concentrated in just five states. Our relationship with chooks goes back a long way, but it’s not what it was.

Christine Rose
christine.rose25@gmail.com