This was all over the internets yesterday - hipsters go back to the land, raise chickens, and then get bored of them. (BTW, blessings to whomever makes running a chicken shelter their life's work.)
Do you have a chicken that has stopped laying? Or a rooster that is wearing out its welcome? Good news - the Internet has almost thirty million chicken soup receipts. Click around, and you are sure to find one that appeals. You will find that the stock from an older bird will give you much more robust flavor. So all you have to do is kill the chicken, pluck the chicken, gut the chicken, feed the entrails to a pig or something, make your stock, and there you are. Problem solved, and dinner served. The sticking point, I guess, is in the killing and butchering. Two observations: I don't know if all of these folks looking for chicken shelters don't eat meat, but it seems sort of naive to imagine that if you eat non-meat animal products such as milk and eggs that the inevitable animals that do not produce these products (roosters, older hens, boy cows, etc), have a cushy plan B, like a high paid adjunct gig at CUNY a la Gen. Petraeus. A failure to recognize this reality points to the risk of these kinds of neo-agricultural ventures being a reboot of Marie Anoinette in a milkmaid costume, previously mentioned here, and here. The issue seems to be a moral blindness caused by privileging the aesthetic over the pragmatic, though it's hard for me to imagine who would want to live in a DIY Potemkin village.
*That said, it's hard for me to understand just how this is a hipster problem, because the word ceased to have meaning some time ago.
I revere your Codness but I gotta edit: "blessings to *whoever*".
My in-laws recently installed chickens. Wondering what they will do with them when they outlive their usefulness. They used to have beef cattle and couldn't bring themselves to eat them, so I'm not optimistic.
Posted by: Catherine Skeen | Sunday, 14 July 2013 at 10:41 PM