Chicken
To have power, to rule means to set up rules, to establish them and to monitor their compliance in a variety of ways. This is what we are currently experiencing and some of us are beginning to understand the framework in which people see the world. But Easter is just around the corner and after a visit to an organic farmer where I bought eggs, I decided to write about chickens. Perhaps this blog will be helpful to look at the shady machinery going on behind the scenes, behind regulations, system pressures, power interests, lobbies, stubbornness, ignorance and prohibitions.
Journey to the ancestors of our chickens
In the rhythm of our heartbeat we can travel far back in time. To a time when there were fewer borders, fences and barriers. There we meet a bird that later received the name Bankiva chicken. Chicken, cock and chick loved the free fields, meadows and forest edges, in whose dense bushes they built their nests. When man found these nests, he took some eggs and found them digestible. If they killed a chicken, they found its meat tasty. Man was integrated into the living system of nature. The waste of one was food for another. Man, too, found himself tied into an interdependent network.
The Bankiva chicken went on a journey with mankind, long before Christ’s birth, and came from the Far East, first to Egypt, later to Greece and via the Roman Empire it migrated northwards to us. Chickens on farms could still do everything. They gave everything that was needed on the farm.
Which chickens do we live with today?
About a hundred years ago, man changed his relationship to chicken, chicks and roosters. Homo sapiens began to breed. He wanted a chicken that gave the best meat and as many eggs as possible. But this did not succeed. Only after World War II did research manage to split the chicken into broilers and laying hens.
After only one month, broilers produced enough meat to be slaughtered. An egg laying hen lays more than 300 eggs a year, then it is regarded useless.
Roosters have a hard time. They are no longer kept for their beautiful plumage or for their fighting skills. They have become useless, they give no eggs and very little meat. Male chicks go into the shredder right after birth. Genetic modifications make it possible that the few remaining breeds are less susceptible to diseases. The European also eats only the chicken legs, perhaps also the breasts of the animals, all other parts of the body are shipped and exported to China.
Happy Holy Time in the maximization society in which we all live. One of the possibilities we have is to support and promote the local small farmers, organic and Demeter farmers. On their farms we experience what it means to think in long periods of time.
But in my opinion this alone is not enough. Our society needs a spiritual foundation in which life and living together is once again valuable and we can get out of the dilemma of the climate crisis, economic crisis, inequality crisis and the crisis of democracy.
