Watching The Natural History of the Chicken with author Rebecca van Laer
We talk about chicken representation in the PBS documentary The Natural History of Chickens, the American story of the bird, and what it's like to live with five chickens.
Other than Chicken Run, it’s rare to see a chicken as the center of a film. But Rebecca and I wanted to share a common film to ground our conversation and she suggested us revisiting The Natural History of Chickens by Mark Lewis.
The film is intentional in its framing to center people whose lives are intertwined with chickens whether as household pets, nuisance rooster neighbors, or small farm families who slaughter their birds for food.
At times the framing worked for me—the film felt sincere, grounded in the way people whose lives are touched by chickens beyond the supermarket shelf were at the heart of the story rather than “experts.” This choice empowers the individual to observe their relationships with chickens on their own terms.
At other times, I wondered if the film was normalizing bird-as-food narratives. So, I was excited to share my thoughts with Rebecca, below, and to hear her perspective as someone who spends her days with such a familiar, but under-known bird. You can watch along with us here.
Rebecca van Laer is the author of How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press, 2022) and the forthcoming memoir Cat (Object Lessons/Bloomsbury). She lives in the Hudson Valley with two cats and five chickens.
Since some of the moments in the film felt to me Grey Gardens-esque in their framing, I started to wonder about that framing–why do you think Karin Estrada for instance is shown as the only subject who has a chicken as a pet? What does her portrayal do to the viewer’s perception of those who might want to protect chickens’ lives?
I think how you view this partially depends on how you define a “pet”—are animals who we extract labor and resources from exempt from being pets? The answer very well might be yes. At the same time, Janet Bonney’s relationship with her chickens mirrors my own (assuming she doesn’t slaughter them, although that’s unclear). My uncle once referred to chickens as “pets with benefits,” and I think there’s something accurate about that, although which “benefit” is primary—eggs or intimacy/joy—will vary between chicken owners.
But you’re very right that Karin Estrada is the only documentary subject who keeps a rooster in her home, treating him the way one might treat a pampered puppy. I think what you’re getting at is that her affection is quirky to the point of potentially inappropriate. Watching her give Cotton a bath and blowdry him, I asked outloud, “is that good for chickens?” The answer is pretty much “no”—chickens bathe in dust, not with water and soap. So while I think the documentary broadly seeks to show that chickens have greater intelligence and more complex inner and social lives than most people assume, it walks a delicate line in implying that caring for chickens too much verges into the “unnatural,” indeed perhaps suggesting that those who want to protect chickens lives’ are on some level irrational.
At the same time, it’s helpful to me to ask what it would really look like to protect chicken’s lives. In my years of living with chickens, I have come to love them, and in the process become more outraged at the system of industrial agriculture that they are inextricably a part of. It’s odd to live with this contradiction—to give my flock the best life possible, and at the same time not know what liberation would look like for their species, so bred and altered to our purposes. Karin Estrada at least provides an example, even if it seems silly on its face.
I was fascinated by the way the public rallied around the lives of chickens who were saved (or did the saving) in these sorts of phenomenal or “exceptional” ways. For instance, the beheaded chicken who lived for months after or the chicken who survived being frozen in a storm and was brought back to life through CPR getting newspaper headlines. Why are these individual lives seen as more valuable in a country that slaughters billions of chickens a year?
There is so much done to keep the reality of industrial agriculture under wraps. I think it would horrify people if they saw what went on—horrify them to some extent. Yet there might still be that psychic disconnect between what happens there, in these far-away warehouses, and what they’re doing when they order a fried chicken sandwich.
I think it is maybe something the documentary is grappling with. The realities of mass agriculture are depicted in a few scenes, but we certainly don’t see the chickens at the bottom of the tower covered in the shit from all those above. We don’t see slaughter. And the way that we receive statistical information is not via voice-over (as we do in many other parts of the film) but through text on the screen. This makes the truths harder and colder, so different from the intimate individual tales we hear.
It is so hard for people to care about things in the abstract. This is a problem of art, of fiction writing: we so often find ourselves telling stories about individuals to shine light on collective and structural problems. Because this is the level on which we first and most easily experience affection and love, it’s easier to tell stories this way, and to connect with them. So it doesn’t surprise me that many chicken-eating people can connect with a single chicken, a heroic chicken. The harder parter is getting that connection to spread, to encompass the greater species.
While some of the ethics of industrial agriculture are raised in the film, and certainly the sheer volume of chickens consumed brings forward how many lives are taken by this system, the film’s title seems to assert the role of chickens in American lives as farmed animals as the “natural history.” Is the film suggesting the state of affairs as natural? Why do you think that is?
It’s definitely an interesting title for a film that’s looking at something so specific—mass agriculture and a handful of chicken custodians in the US, without anything about the 10,000 year history of domestication, much less the life of jungle birds before we interfered in their evolution. It is really not a history, and then there’s the fact that many of the stories that it tells are told through these very funny (to me) reenactments rather than using real documentary footage. There is something that is, on the surface, so clearly artificial, that reading most generously, I hope the film is actually saying the opposite—that there is nothing natural at all about the ways to we have come to coexist with, exploit, and relate to chickens.
What have you learned about the lives and habits of chickens as you coexist with them? Did watching this film alter or inform your choice to choose this lifestyle?
My dad has kept chickens for a long time, and when we first got chickens, I will admit I was more interested in their function on my sort of miniature/aspiring homestead than I was interested in them as individual creatures. They eat food scraps; they make eggs; I’m a lacto-ovotarian with a lot of food that needs composting. It all seemed very practical. So my dad brought me a cat-carrier with four chickens in it.
As I have come to know them as individuals, it’s impossible not to care about them.
The first thing most people say when I tell them I have chickens is something like “they’re so dumb.” This is basically propoganda. Chickens are not dumb; they’re about as smart as dogs. They have very complex social hierarchies. The first thing I learned is that a pecking order is a real thing. Our top chicken, Bertha, got into the coop the first evening and ruthlessly pecked everyone else as they came in. Within days, they’d established a hierarchy, and each chicken began to show her unique personality and perform her function within the flock. All day long, I hear their coos and clucks as they talk to each other.
Because I’ve developed individual relationships with chickens now, it’s that much harder for me to stomach the system they’re part of. I would love to have a very friendly pet chicken like Cotton, but in most cases, that means raising chicks. And when you buy chicks, even sexed chicks that are supposed to be female, you might get a rooster. We don’t have space for one, but I wouldn’t want to kill him. The local animal rescues are bursting with unwanted roosters. So I’ve decided we’ll stick to rescuing unwanted adult chickens (which we’ve done once so far).
Any favorite chicken stories?
Our top chicken, Bertha, passed away last year. (We brought out a chicken vet; it seems Bertha ingested a foreign object, and as much as we love our girls, chicken surgery is not in the budget.) Her second-in-command, Cali, has taken over as top chicken. While Bertha ruled through violence, Cali has asserted dominance mostly through posturing. No one challenges her, but she’s honestly bad at her job. Bertha could always get the flock to follow her out of danger or after treats, so it was easy to get the chickens in and out of their run. Cali really isn’t interested in the job of ruling—only in the perks like eating first and getting the best perch. Cali is a very relatable queen, and it goes to show how unique the social organism of the flock is.