Chickens Out of Season

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 889, 17 August 1956, Page 30

Chickens Out of Season

by

SUNDOWNER

JULY 15

HAVE been struggling for 50 years with Emerson’s advice to trust my emotions. Sometimes I do trust them, and sometimés I don’t, but the effect on my conduct is neither here nor there. I do what I want to do when the impulse is strong enough, and stays with me long enough; then I juggle with my conscience and sooner or later think

of a justification. Animals have no conscience, and we call their emotions in-

stincts. But what makes a hen trust its instinct to go broody on the shortest day of the year? We have ten _ halfbred pullets, all now about eight months old. Six weeks ago they had all started to lay, and one of them, after three weeks of laying, insisted in sitting. If we took her off the nest she screamed and pecked and beat at us with. her wings, then rushed back again as soon as we liberated her. It was such a violent attack of broodiness in ‘a hen of her

age that we decided to give her something to fuss over, and after a week of her tantrums we bought some incubator chickens. Now she is calm and happy and so gentle that she neither treads on the chickens in the confined coop nor loses her head when we lift up a chicken to examine it. I suppose her physiology has played her this trick because we have played her a wofse trick by feeding and coddling her instead of compelling her to work for a living, Left to herself from the day her mother dismissed her she would no doubt have survived, but she would often have gone to sleep hungry, would probably not have laid one egg before spring, and, if she did later brood, her chickens would not have fun the risk of frost, hail, and snow. But I suspect that instincts in animals are seldom as regular and never so trustworthy as they are generally supposed (continued on next page)

to be. Among those creatures that lay eggs instead of producing their young within their own bocies, seasonal aberrations might be fatal for the offspring, but would not often injure the mothers. A hen rearing chickens,in the wild in winter would be hard put to it until some or all of the chickens died; but she would not die herself. A cow carrying a calf in hungry country through a hard winter often does die; before its birth if the conditions have been unusually harsh, If those people are right who call instinct ancestral memory, it is clear that some animals have better memories than others. My pullet hatching chickens in mid-winter commits an isolated folly; but what are we to think about the moths whose instinct drives them into the candle flame, about the birds that dash themselves to death against lighthouses, or the lemmings that drown themselves when instinct leads them to a river or the sea? % * *

JULY 18

A READER wants to know what I think of this story broadcast, he says, by the BBC; ' A neighbour of mine had a remarkable old dog. They were one day bringing the ewes and lambs down the hill when a little Cheviot lamb bolted and the dog failed to bring it back. W at did the old dog do but run to the lamb, sniff it, then back to the flock. He sniffed through the ewes one by one till he found its mother, parted her out, drove her back to her lamb, and brought mother and lamb. back safely to the. flock. I think it could have been told by one of my sheep-farming brothers, but I had better not say which one. I think

he would have made better story of it, and in the telling have banished

his own as well as my doubts. I think he would have convinced those who heard it for the first time that although the dog was remarkable the performance was no more than those who live with good dogs would expect, I think he would have remembered other remarkable dogs and other performances astonishing te those only who don't know what dogs will sometimes do. I think they would all have been real dogs, wise beyond the average run of cogs, and that every recorded performance would have been founded on fact. But I am not yet as old as my brother, and my past, when I look back, is all clear daylight, When my brother looks back there are peaks in the haze which my factual eyes can’t perceive. He can

see things, hear things, describe things that fascinate me when he makes me aware of them, but fade into dream stuff afterwards. So that BBC dog leaves me undisturbed. His nose, his logic, his craft, and his conscience would have been rabbit feed in the matagouris of early Otago, In any case, one of my brother’s dogs would never have left that lamb, He would have stayed with it, run with it until it was tired, and gently circled it back to the flock and its anxious mother. Not till he had been dust for 50 years would my brother have thought him. worth a story.

JULY 20

% * * CAN think of no more reassuring sound than the cackle of a hen that has just laid an egg; unless it is the cackling of two hens. Though I can't recall that Browning was influenced by hens,

or was living near hens when he wrote Pippa Passes, I seldom myself

hear their cackle without feeling as Pippa did that New Year’s Day at Asolo -that the world is worth a song. Tomorrow I must be Pippa who winds silk, The whole year round, to earn just bread and milk, But "this one day" she was free, with a lark on the wing and a snail on the thorn, and loye in her heart for everything and everybody. As. we are all Pippas some of the time, and the humbugs, pretenders, and sinners she passed most of the time, we need all the proof we can find that our shabby lives are worth liying. My hens say it more convincingly than philosophers and men of science. Nor is it simply that they say it in the morning, when confidence comes easily, What makes it so reassuring is the .act that they can’t help saying it, that it is not their message but life's. There is no prudential reason why a hen should cackle. All she achieves in my yard by announcing an egg is the unwanted attention of a graceless cockerel. All she ean achieve anywhere is the theft of her egg and a hint to her natural enemies, But she still cackles, It is as necessary to her as twittering to a starling on the roof or the leap into space of a sportive kitten. It is something above and beyond reason-as a good woman once told me religion is. So I gather an egg and cast out fear. I hope that is worship. (To be continued)