Life, Death, and Joy with Chickens: Re-siting More Ethical Futures Through the Backyard Chicken (BYC) Online Community

One of my warmest memories is a pattern: me in the passenger’s seat of my grandpa’s (Bobo’s) dusty, wood-paneled station wagon, Bobo behind the wheel, sun glinting off his square framed glasses, telling me a story (probably something comedically jarring, like that time he complimented a villager’s cat in rural Burma, mistakenly using a word that signified “delicious,” and they later served it up for supper), both of us giddy for the moment something iconic pops up on the horizon of Main Street: Colonel Sanders’ face on a KFC sign. This pattern ends with my Bobo and I digging into a bucket of fried chicken, shoulders hunched and fingers greasy.

Fast forward 25 years and I’m watching my husband dig a grave for a dead chicken. My shoulders are hunched over her black and white corpse, which is framed by the neon orange of a Nike shoe box. I’m thinking about how warm she’d felt on my lap just ten minutes ago: I’d refused to part with her body until I felt the last tendrils of warmth leave her, until I knew for sure the invisible magic that had animated her through countless days of scratching around for earthworms and taking long dust baths in the afternoon sun—the same magic that’s in me as I type these letters, and you as you read them (hell, the same magic that made possible the rectangular screens we’re both staring at, two glowing bookends marking a collapse between time and space)—was now in the ether. Her name was Cordy, a Barred Rock who, just a few weeks shy of turning three, had succumbed to bad genetics.

A snapshot of fast-food chain KFC’s iconic sign: a bucket adorned with Colonel Sanders’ smiling face.

The vast majority of chickens in the world—who outnumber humans by billions—have been bred to lay far more eggs than their bodies can naturally handle. In other words, they were designed to live short lives in tight cages, their presences measured in quantities of product, their unprofitable consciousnesses ignored altogether. The vast majority of the consuming public encounters chickens as always already in pieces and packaged: legs in KFC buckets, breasts in Purdue freezer bags, eggs in 12-pack cartons. That chickens exist as they do now—purely a product of and for consumption—is by human design. But very few consumers have come to know chickens before and beyond the frame of consumption: as deeply social, sentient beings whose origins are as ancient as they are ecologically profound.

So, how did I, a voracious, KFC-slinging kid for whom eating factory farmed animals was part of American family nostalgia, come to know chickens in this way: as beings to share life and routines with rather than to consume? As creatures who impart ethical lessons about our relationships with other beings and non-beings? As teachers who patiently show us—if we’re willing to pay attention—that sustainable encounters with others require a recognition of agency, reciprocity, and an emphasis on dwelling? To dwell is to be rooted, as an individual and as part of a localized community, in a particular place, resisting a desire to bring the here of that place elsewhere, or to bring the elsewhere here. That desire is the thrum of Western capitalist biopolitics, a de-localizing and dehumanizing system that, through consumer-driven patterns of movement, “makes live and let’s die en masse” (Murray 4). Yet, how have I come to recognize and reckon with this desire through chickens?

Unintentionally practicing “chicken yoga” with my first flock of backyard chickens.

The answer to these questions lies somewhere in that collapsing space between our two glowing screens, which blurs the boundary between digital and embodied realities. Han has come to consider this space as “hyperculture,” in which “the hyperspace of culture is organized not by borders but by links and network connections” (9). According to Han, hyperculture “de-distances,” moving beyond boundaries and unmooring from sites: physical locales that were once the matrix of happiness and the manifestation of culture (I take sites to also mean dwelling places, in that I can inhabit them with my body-in-time). But, what happens when our culture becomes de-sited, taking shape beyond tangible landscapes and bodies? Will digital communication’s “lack of corporeality” only atrophy communities, as Han argues (20)? Furthermore, if hyperculture were liberating, wouldn’t it still demand a reckoning with the sited? Wouldn’t true liberation require a radical re-siting?

I argue that the hypercultural space between our screens has the potential  to re-site just as much as it de-sites—and it’s through that interchange that I’ve imagined-into-practice a more sustainable relationship with chickens. How? Hyperculture gives rise to digital communities that embody great power: they can change our physical landscapes and our encounters with others therein, mapping out more ethical ways of building interspecific relationships. In short, I argue that, while the intangibility of hyperculture is daunting–maybe even blinding and oppressive–it does provide us with an intermediary space for radical interventions into our material conditions. Specifically, hyperculture allows us to forge digital communities that defy space and time in order to imagine more sustainable ways of relating with each other and our food sources. For instance, Nicole Ciulla writes about how an online garden exchange created in interactive archive of stories and knowledge that have helped her and many others reframe their relationships with land.

One of the many articles published on Backyard Chickens that provides insights into cultivating land for (and with) chickens.

I happened to stumble into one of those communities five years ago: BackyardChickens.com (BYC). We’d recently moved out to the country, into a house on a one-acre plot of land bordering the national forest. My husband wanted to get a small flock of chickens and I acquiesced. Once we plucked seven fuzzy chicks out of metal vats at the Rural King (the store clerk had placed them in a little cardboard box resembling, of all things, a happy meal), my attitude towards backyard chickens quickly went from disinterested to enamored. Each chick grew into a unique individual with its own personality. Drucie the Gold-laced Wyandotte was as heavy metal as they come: a loner, yet fiercely independent. Glory the Buff Orpington was a drama queen who demanded to be the center of attention. Cordy was the leader: she maintained order and harmony within the flock, but ruled with an iron fist.  As they grew, new challenges and victories emerged almost daily; and with no prior experience sustaining chickens, I relied upon the knowledge of others to keep them alive. In other words, in my prior, consumer-based relationship with chickens I knew only how to let die and not to make live. The BYC community–a digital collective of (mostly) like-minded people who convene to share knowledge, experiences, and questions about keeping chickens–was how I learned to care for the sentient beings who I depend upon for food (in my case, eggs–though many in this community also share knowledge about ethically raising meat birds). 

Chickens tilling and weeding our vegetable and herb garden ahead of spring planting.

But the knowledge gleaned from BYC isn’t a one-way street. The more I learned, the more I was able to materially impact my physical environment: I planted vegetables I could share with my chickens and herbs that had medicinal properties. My chickens created the compost I used to grow some of our food sources. The eggs my chickens laid gave me energy to continue caring for myself and others. It wasn’t perfect. It was messy and often frustrating. After all, as Han writes, “someone who acts needs to overcome resistance” (10), which is a material reality of our interrelations with other things/beings. Through enacting reciprocity in my physical world, I could then share my experiences and insights with others in the digital world. In this way, digitally circulated knowledge took root in the material world, which then provided sustenance–including archivable material–for educating others within and beyond digital spaces. But it goes further. Through my connections in the BYC community, I began connecting with farm sanctuaries in the US and across the globe, engaging in broader conversations about the physical reality of factory farmed chickens–a system that’s invisible when sitting around a bucket of KFC. I also forged material relationships with locals who are invested in keeping backyard chickens as part of a more sustainable–and joyful–way of being in the world. 

Our summer harvest flourished, in part, thanks to our chickens. What we couldn’t eat went back to them.

Joy is an emotion that’s often overlooked in dialogues about ethical food sourcing, sustainability, and reciprocity. Often, joy is linked with notions of play–the very tonic that, as Han cautions, blinds humans to their own bondage in the digital world and prevents action (10). But what happens if we rethink joy and play not as distracted states of being, but as modes of perpetual becoming alongside others? What if we make joy and play intentional interventions in our material world? In other words, how might we approach digital communities as a threshold between physical realities and imagined possibilities; a hypercultural space wherein we might play with ideas for creating more just and joyful relationships with the land, humans, and animals we depend upon? And where our play–the sharing of stories, experiences, and knowledge–might interrupt consumer-driven systems that let die invisibly and en masse? Wouldn’t there be joy in witnessing and sustaining the beings who provide our sustenance? 

I know this: there is joy in the sound of my chickens impatiently squawking at me from the other side of the coop door before I open it up in the morning. There’s joy in the songs they sing for one another when they’ve completed the labor of laying an egg. There’s joy in seeing how ethically engaging with my food source gives material form to vibrant, individuated, and interdependent lives–mine included. There’s also joy in sharing those experiences with others so that they, too, might begin reshaping their own patterns of consumption.

There was even joy in the final flapping of Cordy’s wings–their tips catching the late afternoon sun–as she locked eyes with me and breathed her final breath, slipping beyond her material suffering and the boundaries that had once designated her a live product rather than a producer of life.

There is joy in making live–and being made to live with–that which we have, for so long, only let die.

Cordy stepping into a ray of sunlight. Even during her last days, she’d seek out tendrils of sun, purring with pleasure once its warmth hit her feathers.

_____________

References:

Ciulla, Nicole. “Environmental Justice and Online Garden Exchange.” DRC: Gayle Morris Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative, WordPress, 16 December, 2019, https://www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org/2019/12/16/environmental-justice-and-online-garden-exchange/.

Han, Byung-Chul. Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. 1st ed., Polity, 2022.

Murray, Stuart J. The Living From The Dead. Penn State UP, 2022.