The complaining started immediately, which was exactly what I was expecting. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past year of raising chickens, it’s that they don’t suffer in silence.
Hens are talkative but I can’t say that I normally understand the meaning of their various clucks and trills. It was their tone this past Saturday that expressed their horror as I moved 14 Cornish cross chicks, now a month old, from their brooder to the full-size coop with the adult hens.
My 11 laying hens—five barred rocks and six Rhode Island reds— had seen this movie before. But this was the first batch of meat chickens for us since last fall, so my poor girls could have been excused for having assumed they would never again have to share their home with these obnoxious, food-obsessed creatures.
Cornish cross chickens are a testament to what can be accomplished through intensive breeding, in this case, a chicken that goes from hatching to a 6-7-pound bird ready to butcher in just eight weeks. Unlike other chickens these ones don’t show much initiative or curiosity. They mostly lay around until feeding time, at which point they literally launch themselves at the feeder in a frenzy that reminds me of a school of feeding piranha. They gorge themselves, then plop onto their sides and grow, practically before your eyes.
They’re cute when they arrive in the mail, usually two days after hatching. Within a week, they’re feathering out and growing noticeably plumper and uglier and the pace of all that just seems to accelerate as the weeks drag on. This particular batch will spend about five weeks in the coop before it’s time for butchering. By then, they’ll be four times the size they are today and five times as obnoxious. The butchering comes as a relief.
Of course, my hens don’t necessarily know the plan. All they know is that those awful birds are back and they aren’t happy about it.
Fortunately, they don’t have to interact with them, at least for now. The coop is large enough that I can fence off one section for the newcomers. They’ll stay there for a couple weeks until they outgrow the space, at which point I’ll roll up the fencing and give them all free rein in the coop and the adjacent outdoor run for the remaining three weeks.
But even having to be near the Cornish crosses seems to be too much for the hens to bear, as if these remarkably efficient meat machines give other chickens a bad name. One of the reds seemed so upset she went out to the run and started digging furiously. “I’m getting the heck out of here,” she seemed to be saying.
The other hens just looked at me. One let out a loud and pathetic “braaaacckk!” in protest of the indignity. I felt for them… until I remembered they’d still be around next month to enjoy the luxury of their coop by themselves while the Cornish beasts would be sitting in the freezer. When it comes to the typical life of a chicken, these girls really have nothing to complain about. Yet if history is any guide, that won’t stop them.