For more than 8,000 years, chickens have lived close to mankind, their long proximity leaving its mark on our language. We fear things “coming home to roost”, worry about “putting all our eggs in one basket”. Through all those years, the rusty klaxon of the cock’s crow has jolted humanity awake. The cockerel’s miracle-like defeat of darkness has earned him a symbolic place in religions around the world. Heard less often today, a rasping “cock-a-doodle-doo” now conjures a simpler, more rural existence. This rousing barnyard cheer is making a comeback, for a growing number of Britons are discovering the joys of keeping chickens.
Hen-keeping has a long and mostly female history in this country. In the past, “egg money” offered financial independence of a minor kind to the farmer’s wife or, in this case, the vicar’s. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen lightens the plight of Charlotte Lucas, married off to the pompous Mr Collins, by giving her a few hens. These provide a welcome distraction. “Her home and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry, and all their dependent concerns, had not yet lost their charms.”
In the 19th century, Queen Victoria’s passion for poultry saw her build an extensive hen house in gothic style at Windsor. Her endorsement of breeding and showing poultry sparked a century-long mania for chickens, known as “hen-fever”. Victorian breeders became obsessed with creating ever fluffier and more outlandishly rotund birds, in a huge variety of colours, and many of those bloodlines still exist.
In 1992, Francine Raymond got her first chickens. Four years later, with an evangelising passion for her new hobby, she wrote and self-published a pamphlet entitled Keeping a Few Hens in Your Garden. It became an underground bestseller. She has been raising rare-breed chickens for pleasure and writing about them ever since. She founded the Henkeepers’ Association in 2006, during the bird flu crisis, to offer health and management advice, and it now has 10,500 members. “I love birds, I feel towards them as others do to mammals. I hate the way chickens are raised for meat,” says Raymond, who no longer eats chicken. She holds her hand out flat: “At six weeks, the age when most birds raised for meat are slaughtered, you can still hold a buff Orpington [a large, fluffy-legged, rare-breed hen] in the palm of your hand.”
Raymond downsized from her Suffolk smallholding to Whitstable in Kent four years ago. “When I first moved here, I didn’t have any chickens but I really missed them. I somehow couldn’t see the point of gardening without them.” Her two hens (she usually has more), have a secure run and a beautiful, handmade wooden coop but are allowed out to garden with her every day. Her most recent book, The Garden Farmer, promotes the virtues of food producing in an urban setting.
“I always keep pure breeds, up to about eight hens. I try and hatch out two new ones each year. In their first year, even rare breeds will lay an egg a day.” The Orpington bantam is a fluffy mass of rusty gold feathers, laced with black, while the speckled Sussex has feathers that gleam a dark rust-red marbled with white. “The Sussex is a vigorous layer but something of a greedy pest when it comes to scratching up the garden. She has drumsticks of steel.”
Raymond’s new garden is already well established with fruit and nut trees, vegetable beds and an eclectic assortment of plants growing out of pots and containers. Her chickens contribute by eating pests and clearing fallen fruits, fertilising the garden and providing company throughout the year. On a wintry day, they add a splash of colour. For Raymond, the decorative beauty of her hens goes hand in hand with their utility. “Growing your own protein gives you power,” she says.
It was Raymond’s hen pamphlet that persuaded journalist and would-be hen keeper India Knight that she could do it, too. Knight moved from Primrose Hill to “deepest Suffolk” three years ago and followed Raymond’s instructions to design the super-secure chicken run she calls Henditz. “We built a seven-foot-high fence, which goes down two feet, and has a two-foot apron going out. It’s made of expensive game mesh, not chicken wire. The chickens are really happy and confident.”
Knight has 11 chickens but plans to get three more this summer. “Chickens occupy that grey area of utilitarian pet. Ours all have names,” she says. “I love the idea of being the Duchess of Devonshire, surrounded by heritage breeds, but they don’t lay enough eggs. I just love ginger chickens and I’m not bothered if they’re a hybrid.”
Knight adores her chickens but is frank about the less alluring aspects of their care. “I can’t stand to see the pecking. It’s raw, bloody and bald and I really don’t like their feet, especially when they get scaly leg mites and I have to brush off the lumps with a toothbrush.” She hastens to qualify her criticisms. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I do really care for them. In the summer, I sit in there with them with a cup of tea.”
The current boom in keeping hens as pets might owe something to the Eglu. The high-concept, curved plastic hen house was dreamt up by four students at the Royal College of Art. Production of the brightly coloured coops began in 2004 through Omlet, the company they formed on graduation, which now sells hen coops worldwide. “We wanted to change the way people behaved, to see if we could get them keeping chickens by making something safe, secure and hygienic. Before, hen huts were mostly homemade, and hard to clean and keep foxproof,” says Johannes Paul, one of the Eglu’s inventors. He has noticed that keepers are getting younger (usually, in their late 20s to 40s) and more discerning.
“People are looking for a pet that’s a bit different. But eggs are still the big draw, as people don’t trust the food chain and this gives them the chance to really connect with where their food is coming from.” For now, he says, “keeping chickens is overwhelmingly a hobby for southerners, although the city with the largest growth is Glasgow, with sales up 1,400% in the last 12 months.” Like Raymond, Paul, too, has given up eating chicken. “It would be like eating one of your colleagues,” he says.
Alongside a growing awareness of the intelligence and sociability of chickens, there is also an increasing demand for cheap chicken meat. The latter is driving the growth of intensive chicken farming. Last year, for the first time, chicken overtook red meat as the most popular in the UK. Worldwide, 50 billion chickens a year are bred for slaughter, mostly under industrial conditions, in vast, windowless sheds.
Lauriston Primary School in Hackney, east London, is surrounded by high-density housing; it’s not the sort of place you’d expect to find an apple orchard with a few hens scratching contentedly but here they are, four ginger chickens housed in a large walk-in run. For the last few years I, with other parent volunteers, have helped maintain the school vegetable garden here. We planted the orchard and got the first chickens in 2013. The first six were killed by a fox a year or so later (the door to the run had not been secured properly). Undaunted, the school bought fertile eggs and incubated them.
Learning support assistant Stephanie Wilson puts the chickens to bed each night and collects the eggs. “They’re my chickens. I’ve looked after them since they were chicks. I brought them home every weekend and they stayed in a rabbit hutch in my sitting room. I’ve got attached to them”.
Year five pupil Lucas, aged 10, recalls with pleasure the day the chicks hatched out three years ago. “We put the eggs in a cage [incubator] in the library and when you came out of assembly, you checked to see if they were hatching. Lots of people were excited. Classes went down to see the eggs cracking open. The chicks were soft and fluffy, very cute.” For Lucas, the chickens offer a break in routine. “When you don’t have anything to do at play time, you can go and look at the chickens. I think the school would feel different without them.”
Ayman, aged seven, is part of a year two eco-team who help out in the school garden once a week. “I made a swing for the chickens and I put a cabbage in a net for them to jump up to.” He is thoughtful for a moment. “Some children feed the chickens grass and it makes them happy.”
His brother Zakaria, aged 10, thinks that it is a good thing the school has animals: “It teaches you to clean up and be responsible. As you grow up, you take less notice of them but I like thinking about how they use the eggs in our lunches.”
Kim Stoddart has a smallholding in Ceredigion, west Wales, where she grows food, runs gardening courses and offers a calm space for people with autism. She has kept a mixture of traditional breeds and ex-battery hens for eight years and has seen at first hand the therapeutic power of chickens.
“Every person with autism is an individual. There are issues with over- and under-stimulation to do with colour and noise but there are so many ways that chickens can help,” she says. “Looking after chickens gives you autonomy and a routine. By giving responsibility, you build confidence. Time outside also helps with emotional regulation and wellbeing. On a practical level, collecting and washing the eggs, and stroking or picking up the chickens, also helps with fine motor skills.”
Each person will react differently. “One lad who came here couldn’t be around animals before. Chickens move fast and make loud sudden noises but he was moving around with the chickens, he had the bucket and the food and dealing with the chickens at close hand, herding them, made him tune into them. This is another thing animals can do, take an autistic person out of themselves.”
For Kim and her son, who was diagnosed with autism a few years ago, the chickens are something to laugh about together. “Arthur finds them hilarious, especially when they jump up high to catch flies.”
The chickens have also helped him gain more enjoyment from food. “Every morning you have to let them out, feed them and then collect the eggs, which you can then cook with. It’s a full-circle connection. Arthur loves cooking, he makes his own breakfast of scrambled eggs or pancakes every day.”
Kim loves to see her cockerel strut and swagger and keep his hens in line – she finds the cockerel’s preening vanity and machismo amusing. “He won’t go out of the hen house when it rains; he likes to keep his feathers clean, so he can look immaculate.”
Tessa Fitch, a hen-keeper and beauty therapist, lives in the village of Aldbourne, Wiltshire, with her husband Eddie Barisha, a chef, and their daughter Grace, aged six. Fitch runs her business from a luxuriously fitted-out shed in the back garden. She credits the hens in her garden with making a trip here a bit different from your average neon-lit salon.
“We wanted a pet that would be low maintenance, plus Grace has allergies to cats and dogs. We started with 10, which we got from a local smallholder. We had one very special ex-battery chicken called Lola and she was the friendliest chicken ever. We took her to the annual animals church service on the green and she squawked and clucked along to the hymns. We were devastated when she was killed by a local dog.”
The last two years have given Fitch a crash course in chicken care. “To start with, they were free-range and kept getting into the churchyard. We realised we needed to fence them better when someone said they’d found some eggs on their husband’s grave.”
Fitch’s current favourite is a large Cochin. “We bought her off a local Facebook group, Wiltshire Mum’s, where people sell stuff. She came with her husband Frederick (now deceased). They told us he wouldn’t crow as he had virtually no voice box, which turned out to be a total lie.” For Fitch, having hens in the garden is much more about their company than their role as food providers. “To be honest, I’m a bit over eggs and Grace is not that bothered either,” she says.
“My customers love looking out at them when they are having their treatments and I love watching them, too, the way they are aimlessly scratching and pecking all day. Chickens are at one with the earth,” she says “you get lost in what they’re doing.”
