Hen Chronicles: It may not be perfect, but it's a good life

At times, I feel badly about our hens’ living conditions. Don’t get me wrong. Their coop is comfortable, clean and dry. Their pen is large enough for them to walk around in the fresh air and get some exercise. They eat well, thanks to a quality feed and plenty of snacks (apples, strawberries, yogurt, wheat bread, the occasional hand-delivered earthworm, etc.).

The girls don’t lack for much, except for one thing. Most of the time, they have no lawn on which to peck for bugs, tasty bits of grass, and the like.

When they first arrived on the scene, the hens had ample grazing opportunities. I placed their open-bottomed pen on a stretch of lawn near the northern edge of our lot. But the voracious appetites of the hens gradually denuded the spot, transforming a once-lush patch of green into bare earth.

I could move the coop and pen to another location in the yard, but if I did, it would suffer the same fate. The more often I relocated the pen, the smaller the lawn would become. Eventually, the backyard would be grass-less. Neither humans nor hens would be happy with that outcome.

So I compromise. My wife Liz and I regularly pull up tufts of grass and weeds from the lawn and give it to the hens, either by dropping it into the pen from above or by crouching to hand feed the chickens through their wire enclosure, a few blades at a time.

We also periodically create a temporary enclosure on the lawn with a roll of chicken wire. That allows the hens to graze outside their pen for a few minutes at a time. They can range somewhat freely, but not freely enough to destroy more of the lawn, or to make a run for it.

If our backyard were fenced in, we could let the hens roam a large area, and for longer periods of time. But it isn’t, so we cannot. In any case, giving the hens free rein would allow them to demolish nearby flower, vegetable and herb gardens, which isn’t much of an option.

I suppose the hens would be happier if they could explore the yard at will, but their lot as egg-producing pets could be a heck of a lot worse than it is. In a recent cover story entitled “How the Chicken Conquered the World,” Smithsonian magazine had this to say about the living conditions of chickens confined to factory farms:

“Factory farming represents the chicken’s final step in its transformation into a protein-producing commodity. Hens are packed so tightly into wire cages (less than half a square foot per bird) that they can’t spread their wings; as many as 20,000 to 30,000 broilers are crowded together in windowless buildings.”

No sunlight. No fresh air. No room to move. No chance to spread their wings, as birds so love to do even if they rarely, if ever, fly. By comparison, our trio - Snow, Nala and Stella - lead lives of luxury.