What do you know about the history of the world? It’s chickens, symbolically, economically, gastronomically, geographically, politically, scientifically. It’s all chickens. At least you’d think it was after reading Andrew Lawler’s book, Why Did The Chicken Cross The World? 264 pages, not counting 42 pages of references, trace the path of chickendom across continents and oceans to its ubiquitous position on a Chick fil-A® billboard along a highway near you.
I grew up with chickens in the background. They were my dad’s hobby and a source of extra income. We lived in Buffalo, and I can remember my dad having to trudge to the chicken coop through the snow in order to thaw out their drinking water during the winter. (He was a generation too early to cash in on the Buffalo chicken wing craze, though. Nobody in Buffalo wanted to buy chicken wings back then. He had to practically give them away!)
For my dad, the fun side of keeping chickens was to raise show birds. Most people don’t realize how many dramatically different - looking chickens there are. The prototype bird started out as a beautiful, but wily and fierce jungle animal, hard to catch, hard to domesticate. Still, it seemed like every time humanity took a step, the chicken was carried along.
Lawler documents times in the past when collecting exotic chickens was a tremendous fad. Even Queen Victoria got in on the action. But the fads faded. There was real money to be made if someone could genetically build a chicken that matured faster and produced more meat or eggs. So, of course, they did. And these “industrial” chickens are warehoused, slaughtered, and delivered plastic-wrapped to our grocery stores without us ever catching a glimpse of the live bird.
Chickens were never my hobby, but I caught myself nodding and smiling as I read some of the stories. They were never my hobby, but I was there. If I were admitted to a nursing home and they were filling out my activity history intake form, I would never put “raising chickens” as something I had done. But the memories - happy memories almost forgotten – would surface if I were exposed to an activity related to chickens. Maybe, in providing person-centered care, we need to ask what someone’s parents did for a hobby?
© Donna Stuart, ADPC April 14, 2015
Lawler, Andrew. Why Did The Chicken Cross The World? New York: Atria Books, 2014.
