The Ethic or the Egg?

Like every conscious person, I face a thousand questions every day. Where can I find meaning in my life? What can I do to make a real difference in the world? How did a city girl from Alaska end up in rural New Zealand with a chicken down her shirt? And what, above all, shall I have for breakfast? Though it seems mundane, that last conundrum is the most significant, precisely because its solution has the power to answer the other three. Especially the one about the chicken.

Though they’ve been managing this almost-oceanfront property for several years, Nath and Steph Davis have only recently purchased Treehugger Organics, and are in the process of shifting away from mixed veggies toward small fruits and garlic. The produce is sold along with other organic products through their tiny on-site shop.

This arrangement is practically the holy grail for small farmers, because it means they cut out middle men such as wholesale buyers, processors, advertizers, shipping companies and grocery stores. I’m not sure what the numbers are like in this country, but in the U.S. farmers get an average of only 19 cents of every consumer dollar spent on food, and for some items it is much less (processed potato chips like Ruffles, for example, yield only 2 cents per dollar). Farmers who can connect directly with their customers get a fairer slice, but shops like Treehugger’s are a rare sight in the U.S. since big-business organics dealers like Wholefoods appeared on the scene.

Treehugger also boasts a free-range flock of about 40 layers and 20 or so maturing pullets, including the lucky chicken who is now making little chicken noises from inside my bra. Or rather, the very unlucky chicken who had the misfortune to be hatched to an inexperienced mother several days ago. My fellow WWOOFer Katrina Salmons was headed out for the morning feeding when she saw a nervous red hen and her four tiny chicks wandering outside the pen.

“Free range” isn’t supposed to mean wandering at will through the raspberry patch, where any passing predator can have a go at helpless chickies. Kat and Nath eventually managed to get them back into the pen, albeit with much distressed clucking by both the chickens and the people. All seemed well until I went out to fill the watering cans, and found the little family had scattered again. We caught one chick in the pen and two just outside of it, putting them safely in the breeder box. Mom and the other baby were in the nearby woods, circling a nest containing broken shells and a dozen unhatched eggs.

“Never mind the chick, the mom’s more important,” said Katrina, so we went after her with a trout net. We hoped that with mom in the box the other three chicks would be kept warm, and the fourth would likely hear her clucking and turn up. The snag in our brilliant plan was Mom’s unclipped wings. We chased her around and around a snarl of deadwood under the trees, clucking and screeching all the while like a mad thing (the chicken, not us. Well, maybe we screeched a little bit). Katrina finally cornered her, but with an explosion of flapping she escaped, and flew to a high perch. While looking for the baby, who was nowhere to be seen, I got tangled in a bundle of old wire and fell gracelessly on my butt. Flustered, frustrated and mildly bruised, we gave up and went to pick strawberries.

When we came to collect eggs that afternoon, the missing chick was just beside the box, gasping and spasming. Baby birds have a difficult time regulating their body temperature, and this one had gotten very cold while his mom was bawk-bawking her silly brains out halfway up a pine. The heat lamp seemed to revive him, but though his siblings have grown in the two days since the dramatic capture, he has not. Today the unpredictable South Island climate turned cold and rainy, and I found my baby bawk splay-legged and squint-eyed, unresponsive on the straw. That’s when I stuck him in my shirt to warm up.

This was not the action of a hopeless softie. I’ve been respectfully sending salmon to the fishy hereafter by means of any convenient blunt object since the age of three, and I’ve even slaughtered cute cuddly meat rabbits. The eggs I had for breakfast may have been fertilized, and the spinach that went in the omelet most certainly was (when I picked it, I saw the maturing seed heads at the top of the flower spike). You may gather that I consider myself a contemplative eater; I do not grieve over every embryonic spinach, but I am not insensitive to the right of other organisms to live. I abhor commercial meat production methods and other types of animal exploitation, and I think about the ethics of eating every time I take a bite. Most people consider animals to be entitled to more rights than plants, but whether I am consuming a side of beef or just a handful of lettuce, I am swallowing something’s future. Even a lettuce values its future.

My baby bawk has no more hope for a future than a fertilized egg, and probably somewhat less. Weak chicks become weak layers, and a small farm with very limited resources can’t afford to feed weak layers. If he is, as I suspect, a rooster, he’s destined for the pot anyway, since a flock can only have one alpha male. I won’t feel bad if my baby bawk meets either of these fates, because in natural systems weak genes are better kept out of the pool. The immature are also fairer game, because the transfer of energy up the trophic levels is more efficient when fewer of the ecosystem’s precious resources have been invested in an individual. Think of it this way: the younger the deer that meets the wolf’s jaws, the fewer the blades of grass that are sacrificed. And as Katrina said, moms really are more important, because successful breeding females represent the community’s best return for the resources it has invested. Cultural morals that require every being to have a “fair shot” or a “good run” actually constitute ecological waste, a crime which is usually punished by quick deletion from the collective gene bank.

Therefore, a chicken down the shirt is probably even more ridiculous than it sounds, ecologically and energetically speaking. Nevertheless, I have given over the only electrical outlet in my room to baby bawk’s heating pad, which means my own heater will remain cold on this rainy night. The impulse to protect a newborn is stronger than cuteness alone could possibly motivate, so the question I face tonight is this: why is it that an egg that might have a future can be cracked into a pan by even a thoughtful eater, but a gasping chick cannot be suffered to gasp its last?

It must be that every puff of feathers newly hatched seems unbearably precious, not because of what it is (a future chicken dinner), but what it represents (hope, or something like it). It is as if my baby bawk’s tiny white eggtooth stands for every shell that will ever break. His little peep heralds the continuance of life through the night and into the morning, making visible to us the hurtling progress of the generations, egg after chicken after egg.

But that’s silly. It’s one of Darwin’s sacred rules that overproduction of offspring is essential to the survival and evolution of every species. Every life cannot be saved, nor should it, if we want the next generation to be even more functional than this one. Still, it seems that to let a newborn die is to sever a link in the great unbroken chain of beating hearts, a chain which stretches from the first ancient glimmers of self-replication on into the endless expanse of our planet’s unknown future. When environmental conditions are changing so quickly that it's uncertain whether anything but the roaches can keep up, every link becomes invaluable; as Atwood's Crake would say, all it takes is one failed generation to erase a species from the Earth.

Whether or not my mind would equate them, though, an individual is not a generation. So what is the bearing of one sick baby bawk on the ethics of eating? None, perhaps, except to point out that even our simplest choices sprout from deep beliefs, which, though they are very important to us, may make no ecological sense whatsoever. An anthropology professor of mine once mentioned to me that the Papua New Guinean tribe among whom he did his fieldwork consider it a special treat to climb trees and snack on whole nestlings, with barely the down of first feathers upon them. Terrible, ghastly, unethical… and yet, their methods of gathering and growing sustenance have more or less maintained the integrity of their ecosystem for about thirty thousand years (and at comparatively high population levels), while our shiny new “civilized” practices are bringing our environment to crisis in less than a hundred.

Regardless of the ethics we invent, we humans are irrevocably intertwined with the rest of the biological universe. Just as we are owed a portion of its bounty, so too are we subject to its rules. Food production methods that don’t work must inevitably meet the same fate as chickens with fragile constitutions. Unlike my baby bawk, however, we are lucky enough to be able to observe, and to reason. We get the chance to choose some of our survival characteristics, by choosing our actions. Starting with what to have for breakfast.