A miracle has happened. One of our three remaining hens of the apocalypse has got off her large, feathered bum and gone back to work.
Ending what may well be the longest strike in New Zealand’s labour history, Joanna, one of our two golden wyandotte chooks, has ceased her industrial action and started laying again.
It’s a bit problematic that the other two hens, the ex-Prime Minister and Catherine, are still on strike – does that make Joanna a scab?
Still, her return to work was a pleasant spring surprise, if quite an unexpected one. Contract negotiations (which is to say, our quite reasonable demand that the damn things actually lay an egg or two in return for rent and board) broke down at least eight or nine months ago, though it feels much longer.
There had been complete silence from the strikers since about January – well, apart from the incessant racket they make during their usual griping and grousing for more food.
It seemed hopeless. And then, just as the icy weather blew through Wairarapa a week back, Joanna made a loud public announcement – her “I’ve laid a lovely egg” song – that she was no longer a do-nothing loafer and had finally returned to being a productive member of Lush Places. Huzzah, etc.
It is too early to know whether this new round of egg laying is some sort of dead chicken bounce. But so far, there have been four eggs, one every couple of days or so, each with a yolk as golden as summer.
I had almost forgotten that eggs from your own chickens taste so much better than the shop-bought ones, mainly, I suspect, because they’re (sort of) free.
The downside, and there is always a downside with chickens, is that Joanna the Cussed is not depositing her egg in one of the laying boxes in the coop but in one of the most inaccessible spots in the garden.
To get to the eggs, you have to go through an Indiana Jones-like jungle, complete with booby-traps. There are no giant rocks rolling toward you, but you need to be careful where you stand, and be ready for rose thorns to come out of nowhere and snag clothes and scratch skin. Let me tell you, you have to be very brave to attempt it.
There are no signs yet that the other two strikers are planning to go back to work, but I believe I am feeling exactly 33.33% less aggrieved by their food bill now that Joanna is back at work.
Mind you, I discovered recently that our insistence that our evil chooks actually work for a living is not the expectation of many backyard chicken owners.
A study published earlier this year by some boffins at the University of Winchester in the UK found only about half of 2000 backyard chook owners surveyed actually got into keeping hens for the egg production. A large number of owners view them not as livestock with a damn job to do but as pets, similar to cats and dogs.
The study’s co-author, Jenny Mace, told Psychology Today that her results showed many (mad) people had “genuine affection” for their chickens, and that society needed to “catch up to the emerging higher status of chickens” – which sounds bonkers to me.
“There is a lot of love for people’s chickens out there,” Mace said.
Well, sort of. The study also showed that more than 90% of backyard-chook owners would never kill their chickens for consumption, and more than 75% did not see their chickens as “morally less important than dogs”.
However, the vast majority of them were more than happy to eat a chicken raised by someone else. They are welcome to have the ex-Prime Minister and Catherine. If they haven’t gone back to work.
