Ideas - An homage to chickens, a dinosaur, dinner and backyard pet

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Chickens are the stars of this podcast today. Our relationship with this living creature, allegedly the closest living relative to the Tyrannosaurus Rex, is long and intertwined. And as it turns out, chickens have a lot to tell us, as IDEAS producer Tom Howell finds out. If you've ever wanted to hear two chickens attempt to video-conference together on Zoom, this episode is as close as you're likely to get. *This documentary originally aired on October 19, 2020.Fill out our listener survey here. We appreciate your input! 

This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at specksavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. I'm Nala Ayyad. Welcome to Ideas. What if we put headphones on them? Did you get the one clock? On today's episode, a story about chickens. From their adventures among the dinosaurs,

to today's trend-setting urban hen. And then he pecked the K on the keyboard. This episode is by Ideas producer Tom Howell. And he's here now. Tom, can you quickly explain what we're listening to? We've got one chicken in British Columbia at my sister's place. And we've got another chicken in London, England, at my parents' place. And I've gotten to take their laptops into the chicken coops.

Oh, I can hear it. flux from your end, too. And are they doing something to make them speak, or are they just capturing? No, well, this is sort of the thing I want to bring out. Which chicken has got the green line around it? Like, chickens are naturally... Verboose. Quite sociable.

So they're right now sitting in like, hey, basically, all these people. The chickens are not always behaving. And what I'm looking for is I want the chickens on two continents to see each other on Zoom, like through the laptops because they got their cameras on. You're making sort of ductual noises now. And I want them to communicate. How do you make a chicken watch of computer screen? Oh, luckily that's not my job.

That's just up to. That's quite cruel to put your family through. Do you have it on speaker view or gallery? I have no idea. I think it needs to be on speaker view. Start video. Interesting. Is that a reaction?

Is that a reaction to something? It's hard to tell. See, this is the other thing as I didn't realize going into it how hard it would be to be sure. How's it getting chatty, you know? They're into this. Oh. The Canadian chickens are fainter because I think they're further away from the laptop. The British one is the louder one. But which is the most talkative?

Oh, and also the most talkative. Okay. It was British. British. One of the problems is the English chickens keep talking over the Canadian ones. I'm only making you listen to about nine minutes. The original was 20. Oh, my God.

That's a Canadian chicken. That's more like it. Do you think they actually saw each other? It's just one of those things you know when you see it. Yeah. Oh, they've heard that. There you get. Well, that might be as close as well one can get to having two dinosaurs' video conference.

These ones were definitely listening to the call and calling dad. The story of the chicken's relationship with humankind is long and intertwined. It holds a mirror up to our ingenuity, to the bonds we form, the cruelties we commit. For the next hour, we learn what we can from this most helpful of creatures. Here is an evening with chickens. I would call that a roaring success. Yeah, that's it. Can we put the chickens back?

Now they don't want to stop. Yeah, chickens, we haven't upgraded, so you're going to have to wrap up this conversation. I think they are wonderful. I always take opportunities to play with chickens if I'm visiting friends or family that happen to have a chicken coop in the back. This is the Canadian paleontologist, Daniel Field. I'm a lecturer at the University of Cambridge.

I'm a vertebrate paleontologist, and I study the evolutionary history of birds. Daniel recently made one of the most important chicken-related discoveries in the history of chicken-related discoveries. discoveries. But first, here's why he loves chickens. They are fun to observe right up close. For me, you know, I have my own weird specialist reasons for being interested in them. I mean, you sort of stare in the eye of the chicken.

It's always interesting to remember that what you're doing is staring into the eye of an actual living dinosaur. Beyond that, there is obviously something very appealing about them. It's true also from a scientific standpoint that they're not the sharpest tools in the avian shed. We published a paper recently looking at the evolution of brain size across the sort of entirety of bird evolutionary history. And relative to body size, the chicken brain is just, well, it's kind of what you might expect. It's not right up there at the top, like crows and parrots happen to be. But maybe that makes them appealing in their own way. They can be sweet, but dumb. Daniel Field grew up near the badlands of Alberta.

some of the world's most famous dinosaur fossils have been found. So that gripped me in the way that it grips lots of little kids. I was always very interested in paleontology for that reason. But I became interested in birdwatching when I was a child also. And gradually, as I came to think a little bit more about how things like the early history of evolution, which is documented in the fossil record, and how that fossil record can tell us about the origins of the living diversity of birds that we find so fascinating to watch in our backyards and our city parks. I became more and more interested in leaking those two. And that's what I do now. I studied the early fossil record in order to get a better understanding of how modern bird groups have

arisen. Okay. So the chicken... Well, so chickens occupy a very interesting place in bird evolutionary history. So if you think of the family tree of living birds, chickens and their relatives, which together comprise about 300 chicken-like birds, things like turkeys, quails, et cetera, are one of the most deeply diverging groups of living birds in the entire world. So they're one of the most ancient groups of birds that there is. They're one of the first groups of birds to sort of split off of the family tree. In fact, if it weren't for ostriches or ostrich-like birds, chickens and their ancestors would be the first birds to get their own special genetic branch.

As it is, ostriches hold that title, and chickens are stuck in second place. Then all of the other birds in the world, over 10,000 living species, are part of another group. So chickens and their relatives and ducks in their relatives are one of the very, very few groups of living birds that are not part of that mass of radiation of other birds. That reflects their very, very ancient ancestry. But even though we knew that they were quite distantly related to most other groups of living birds, we haven't had much direct evidence about what their early evolutionary history was like. So we think that they arose at some point late in the age of dinosaurs,

but we had never previously found any direct fossil evidence telling us what these early relatives of chicken-like birds were like at that point in time. You'll note Daniel's use of the pluperfect verb tense there. that's because he and his colleagues have now found just such a fossil, the chicken that ran with dinosaurs, or as Daniel calls it, the Wonder Chicken. We just thought Wonder Chicken sounded funny. The particular discovery that we made is a discovery that took place in two parts. The bones themselves were actually dug up 20 years ago by an amateur fossil collector who was digging in rocks that are exposed in Belgium from the very end of the age of dinosaurs.

What that amateur fossil collector Martin Van Dynther found was sort of a very unimpressive-looking rock with a few leg bones poking out, which he turned into the local Natural History Museum on the other side of the border in the Netherlands. And so many years later, we came around and we borrowed those specimens because we're interested in birds from the end of the age of dinosaurs. So even though that specimen looked like it was just a few leg bones, we figured that maybe we could do something interesting with them. So what we decided to do was take this rock with some bones poking out and put it in a CT scanner here at the University of Cambridge in order to peer inside the rock with high energy x-rays to get a sense of what the anatomy of those bones looked like inside the rock.

And when we did that, there was a bolt of lightning moment. We had no idea that there would be a complete skull of a bird preserved within this tiny little bit of rock. but in fact there was, and the bird skull that was preserved inside that rock is one of the best preserved bird skulls of any age. And this is a bird skull that's over 66 million years old. All right, so what was it like? It might not sound surprising to describe it this way to your listeners, but to us it was incredible to see that this skull looked like a total mashup

of chicken-like features and duck-like features. The skull combines features of the face of chicken-like birds with features of the back of the skull, which are much more reminiscent of what we see in living duck-like birds. I actually have a 3D print of the fossil here that I can show you. So you can get a sense of what we're talking about. So this is twice life-size. Can I screen catcher? It's okay if I take a screenshot?

Yeah. If you drop what you're doing and go to the ideas website, you'll see the picture I just took. This is an animal that would have lived at the same time as famous dinosaurs like T-Rex and Triceratops. So it's incredible to think about something as contemporary as a chicken-like bird walking around at the same time as the last giant dinosaurs. But this fossil tells us that, yes, animals just like that were around at that point in Earth history, which is something we would never know if it weren't for fossils. The asteroid that ended it all for most of the dinosaurs struck the Earth 66.02 million years ago.

Daniel's chicken slash duck skull is from 700,000 years before that, give or take a bit. It happens to be the oldest direct evidence of modern birds that we've ever found in the fossil record so far. Are you able to tell things like, just looking at the skull, does it tell you whether the thing clucked? It's hard to know what sort of vocalizations the wonder chicken would have made. But one inference you can draw by looking at living chicken-like birds and living duck-like birds is that they're not the most accomplished songsters across the modern bird tree of life. But nonetheless, ducks quack, chickens cluck. Both of those groups vocalize.

In fact, all of the major groups of birds pretty much vocalize, as do the closest living relatives of birds, which are crocodilians. They're not famous for doing so, but they do vocalize as well, which tells us that this fossil, 66.7 million years ago, undoubtedly would have made sounds of some kind, maybe more cluck-like, maybe more quack-like. It's a little bit hard to tell, but probably something on that side of the bird sound spectrum. Well, this is great, and congratulations on where does this rate in your sort of career so far in terms of moments of discovery? Oh, I mean, the moment when we realized that we had this complete skull and we had the image show up on the computer screen, that moment was to this point, definitely the highlight of my career. It'll take something pretty incredible, I think, to surpass it. I'll never forget that moment. I was in the lab with my PhD student, Juan Benito, and we looked at each other and we said, well, you can probably guess what we said. It might not be appropriate for a national audience, but it was quite an exciting. moment. Daniel Field is a vertebrate paleontologist and lecturer at the University of Cambridge.

That discovery of the Wonder Chicken hit the news media during the first big week of pandemic lockdowns in Canada and many other countries. Outlets were thirsty for some good and threatening news. And the Wonder Chicken fit the bill. It made the New York Times, USA Today, BBC, Pakistan's The Nation, and of course, CBC. It was everywhere. And it probably helped that the paleontologists had given the animal its snappy name. We just thought Wonder Chicken sounded funny. Small piece of trivia, Daniel's Wonder Chicken is not the first chicken-related celebrity to have that nickname. For about 18 months during the 1940s, Americans would pay to go and see the miracle of Mike the Headless Wonder Chicken.

Mike was a cockerel from a farm in Colorado, and the farmer beheaded him one day with an axe, but the execution left Mike's jugular and a small chunk of cerebellum intact. And Mike continued living and attempting to peck for about a year and a half after this, which to those of us with affection for chickens makes it quite a tragic tale. But in the post-war United States, it was another story of triumph over adversity, and Mike turred the country becoming beloved and lucrative. There is something unique about a chicken's spirit that humans seem to respond to. It may speak to why the paleontologists went with Wonder Chicken rather than Wonder Turkey or Wonder Duck

for their fossil, both of which would have been equally accurate. It is the most common domestic animal in the whole world, isn't it? There are many more chickens than there are cows, sheep, pigs and camels. This is Dale Sargentson. She's now retired, but for many years she's been one of the world's foremost researchers in bird archaeologists. To me, one of the interesting things about the chicken is that it didn't start off as being something people ate. Those of us who looked at chickens in the past will strongly suspect that when chickens were first domesticated, it was because of cockfighting, which was a good way of teaching young men that they had to be brave and valiant and go on fighting until they were dead.

Or it might have been because they woke at dawn and crowed at dawn and welcomed the rising sun. and that was not a negligible thing to think about in days when people's religion was to do with sun worship. Take us back before people were keeping chickens. So what do we have? The place where chickens are survivors' native birds is the foothills of the Himalayas, probably both sides of the foothills of the Himalayas.

So once they found outside that region, you begin to think, this bird was probably a domestic bird. So some of the very first finds are in Pakistan at a site excavated quite long time ago called Mahenjo Daro. There are depictions of chickens. There are very few bird bones,

I think mainly because bones don't survive from excavations of that period. And then they begin to spread. And so you do actually find chicken bones on sites in India from the second millennium BC, that's 4,000 years ago. Dale's expertise is on the chicken's westward journey from there, but the chicken was simultaneously heading east into Polynesia,

which sets up one of the best parts of the chicken's story, so please hold it in mind. But first, ancient Greece. The first really good pictures of chickens, you get on Greek vases. And there's some wonderful depictions of cockfighting. Homer knew nothing about chickens,

but a couple of centuries later chickens had arrived in Greece and people were using them. And as well as the actual battles possibly being used as ways of foretelling the results of battles, there are also some wonderful depictions that suggest that older men

would give younger men fighting cross, as a present in order to entice them, to be nice to them. Shortly afterwards, chicken bones start showing up. Archaeologists can look at the type of bones left behind by a civilization and draw conclusions about the chicken's role in society. If you find mostly male birds with spurs, well, you begin to guess that it was cockfighting. I found a collection like that on a Roman site in Britain and realized this is not food. These bones were used for something else.

The other thing is a way of knowing that it was almost certainly food is if you get young bones, bones of young birds. Because again, if it's going to be cockfighting, or if they're going to be kept for some other purpose as special birds kept around temples or something. They're going to be kept to old age. They're not going to be killed when they're young. So that's the sort of things we look at. Dale says you can also tell when chickens were used mostly for egg production because laying hens store much more calcium.

This tells us, for instance, that in England, people started eating a lot of eggs in medieval times, whereas in Egypt, people had kept chickens for their eggs long before then. There's a very well-known site in Egypt, least it's well-known to, those who study these things, called Beronike, where a very large proportion of all the chicken bones had got this medullary bone in it. Medallory bone is the calcium storage part. Now this site belongs to the early Roman occupation of Egypt, so it was obvious that the people there were keeping the chickens on this rather remote site on the Red Sea more for their eggs than for their meat. It's not something anybody could have guessed from any of the documents. We didn't know before that site. We didn't really know how early people started to keep chickens for eggs.

And now we do know that quite early on in the Roman period this was happening. I don't suppose there's any way to know whether they preferred them sunny side up or flipped over, scrambled eggs. Well, you could try. You'll have to go out and look for a promising hieroglyph. Right. That's Dale Sargentson. Before she retired, she was an archaeologist at the University of Southampton in Britain. And she's the author of Birds, a Cambridge Manual in Archaeology.

Now time for a second Canadian chicken-related discovery. As we heard, the chicken was heading west from its home in the Himalek. layers, traveling not so much because it was good at surviving in different jungle habitats, but rather because of its talent for charming humans by celebrating the sunrise, fighting to the death, and later giving us our dinner. But as it made this journey towards Syria and Greece and Egypt and Britain, the species was also journeying east to the coastal islands of the Pacific. And the great thing about watching where chickens go is it more or less tells you where the humans are going too. For one thing, chickens don't fly, and for another,

Chickens are terrible swimmers. Quite pitiable to even imagine it. There are some YouTube videos. This is Alice Story. She's an archaeologist in BC, and her claim to fame is discovering how the chicken crossed the world. There is some potential that in some cases, as with any animal movement across the world, during a storm or something, a couple of chickens may have successfully

rafted to a new island on a displaced vegetation, but for them to have have populated as much of the Pacific as they did, and to have the cultural affiliations with the humans tells us that humans brought them. When Alice was just starting out as a scholar doing her PhD, she knew what everyone knew about how chickens reached the Americas. I really did believe what everybody knew, in quotes, that the chickens had come to the Americas with the Europeans. I believe the prevailing wisdom. Alice was a student at the University of Auckland at the time, looking for her PhD research topic.

And her supervisor had just had a conversation with a Chilean colleague named Jose Miguel Ramirez. He had some samples, chicken samples from Chile that he believed were pre-Columbian. So I fully admit that I looked with some skepticism at my supervisor and said, everyone knows the chickens didn't get to the new world before Columbus. but I'm not turning down samples, so certainly we'll take them. Alice extracted the DNA from the samples and used radiocarbon dating. The radiocarbon date error range fell well before, at least 100 years, before Columbus landed on the other side of the Americas.

We looked very carefully also at the stable isotopes. Sometimes if an animal eats a lot of seafood, it affects the bones in a way that can throw off the carbon dating. Okay, so you did this test and you found that, no, these were not just salty sea chickens. That's right. These were not, they were chickens of the sea, but not in the isotopic way. Alice even looked into the possibility that these were the bones of Viking chickens, and that arrived in Chile after crossing the continent somehow from pre-Columbian settlements in Newfoundland. I threw myself very hard into trying to disprove that this chicken could have come from Polynesia. that was one of the main goals for me

because if I couldn't disprove it that I knew that I was on to something. It's worth acknowledging here that Alice is not the discoverer of Polynesian trade with the South American continent. There were already local stories and physical evidence of exchange going back 500 years or more

before the Europeans showed up. Nevertheless, Alice Story's research gave us the proof that chickens came east to the Americas before they went west from Europe. They also did later come from Europe, but one might say the real story of the chicken's arrival in the Americas is one of going a very long way, only to encounter itself once more.

Perhaps it's the symbolism of this, or even the echo of the hero's journey, that made Alice's discovery so appealing to the news media when it was announced in 2013. Or perhaps people just like stories about chickens. I think the chicken was more of a surprise to people who didn't already know what extraordinary voyaging capabilities, the Polynesians had. I really think they put the Vikings to shame. To the Polynesians themselves, to the people who studied Pacific contacts and already knew about things like the sweet potato,

potentially bottle gourds, and other evidence for contact, the chicken was just more proof that the Polynesians were exceptional sailors. Chickens are something that everyone has a familiarity with and i think that's why this story in particular caught on globally when we when our results were released we were getting media requests from the middle east from china from india everybody knows about chickens but not everybody has that same or any cultural affiliation say to sweet potatoes or bottle boards but every culture has some sort of connection to chickens. Alice, thanks so much for telling me about this research.

Well, thank you so much for letting me have a trip down memory lane. Alice's story is now an archaeologist with the Archer CRM Partnership in British Columbia. on Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on SiriusXM, in Australia, on RN and around the world at cBC.ca.ca slash ideas. You can also hear ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyed. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot, squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives.

That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.com.cavers.com. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location.

Visit Spexsavers.com to learn more. Bingo! Woooo! for your community at a charitable bingo and gaming center. Each game you play has a real world impact on thousands of Ontario charities facing challenges such as food insecurity, educational needs, and rehabilitation. So come choose from a wide variety of entertainment options.

And remember, when you play, local charities win. See how we play. Visit charitablegaming.ca. Please play responsibly. Charitable gaming, community good. The chicken is humanity. top source of meat protein today. We harvest more chickens for food than all other land animals combined. Last year, Canada produced 1.3 million metric tons of chicken meat.

Ideas producer Tom Howell argues there's so much more to the chicken than that. Dogs may have the title of humanity's best friend, but arguably chickens have done even more for us over the years. Up until very recently, almost all flu vaccines were made using chicken eggs. And beyond their instrumental value, chickens can also make charming companions. It's the living animal who stars in today's documentary, an evening with chickens. Yeah, I mean, people love the chicken. People love the chicken. This is the author Emmeline Rood.

I am a food historian and the author of Tastes Like Chicken, a history. of America's favorite bird. Emmeline wrote that book in 2016. Like Alice Story, Emmeline has since moved on to other things, but as she says... Like, no matter how old I get, no matter how accomplished I get, people will always be asking about the chicken. Do you have any affection for the animals themselves? Oh, yes.

I guess, to be honest, anytime I've tried to be a friend of chicken, they did not want to be my friend, so I haven't had that much of an intimate relationship. I appreciate them as a species. although I hear mixed messages from people who raise chickens that they're either really nice or truly evil because chickens have a tendency to cannibalize each other I'm not sure if you're aware of this that they will peck each other to death

so for a while it's really trendy in flocks to give chickens rose-colored sunglasses if you look online you can see all these pictures of chickens wearing glasses and it's to partially blind them so they can't see red so they don't peck each other to death chickens are drawn apparently to the sight of blood If they see a wound on a fellow chicken, they'll go for it.

Now they just saw off their beak so they just can't inflict damage. But before, sunglasses. So the reason why chicken is so popular is because they've managed to transform something that used to be the most expensive, most difficult to prepare food. It was also not even considered healthy for you into the cheapest, most convenient, lean protein that everyone eats every day all the time. bar, Emelim Rood hates chicken and never eats it. I've always hated chicken since I was a wee lass. I've always thought it's the worst food.

I've never understood why people like it. But for a food historian, the chicken is especially important. It's the most significant success story in the world of intensive agriculture. And yet again, there's a Canadian at the heart of it. For a very long time, people didn't really eat chicken. And there's many reasons for this. One of which is that it was expensive. So chickens are, if people who own large flocks of chickens, no, they tend to die.

They're really hard to graze in any large quantity. So unless you are growing it for yourself, for a very long time, there wasn't really an economy of scale. So people would keep chickens primarily for the eggs, and every once in a while, they would kill it and eat it, which is where you get the chicken Sunday supper, sort of a fancy, luxurious food. so for a very long time it was simultaneously the food of the poor because they were the ones who could keep chickens and so it was always in their backyard or the rich because they could pay to get somebody else to raise chickens for you at the same time chicken was also in the ye old dietary guidelines chicken was just not considered a health food in fact people thought that i mean they used galenic medicine the theory that your body is composed of humors and so you eat according to your humors to balance things out to make yourself more phlegmatic um all these things and so chicken in this theory of understanding food you are what you eat in the most literal sense chicken was not good for you if you wanted to be strong chicken was the food of the week it was the food of women it was the food

of scholars all of which make it the perfect food for me um which clearly too bad i know exactly so yeah so chicken was expensive it was also inconvenient You'd have to get a whole chicken and pluck it and eviscerate it and do all this work. And so just all of the fates of the world were not aligned to make people eat a lot of chicken for a long time. Turn the corner then. This starts to change at the end of the 19th century when a Canadian, Lyman Bice, moves to California and manages to develop the world's first artificial incubator, which is a game changer because once they lay an eggs, it takes them a long time to get enough eggs for them to start to brew.

and then once they start to brood, they have to sit on it for a few weeks. They don't lay any more eggs, and then they have to, then they have new baby chicks, and they raise their chicks, so this takes a very long time. But if you take the eggs from the chickens, they will lay more eggs, but you need to incubate them and pretend you're a mother hen. And so for a long time, there are a lot of ancient examples of egg ovens.

The ancient Egyptians and the Chinese in particular were quite famous for these, but there was no really mechanical, consistent one until the end. the end of the 19th century in a place called Petaluma in California and there, as soon as the artificial incubator was invented, the egg industry just blew up and all of a sudden egg became

an everyday item, which is really a boon to the processed food explosion that happened the same time, and also photography. You need egg album in to develop prints. So it was a simultaneous sort of big transition because this one man discovered how to artificially incubate.

babe chickens. And a Canadian. Yeah. Yeah, there we go. Are we pleased? I'm not sure. Are we pleased about this? Yeah, I mean, he changed the world, for better, for worse, whether you agree with

what came centuries later. Yeah, Petaluma also rapidly became one of the richest towns in the world. It was the egg basket of America. There are all these anecdotal things, but the Queen of England would breakfast on Petaluma eggs. The president would always eat Petaluma eggs. As Emmeline puts it, the chicken is now the most efficient meat-making machine on the planet. Industrial efficiencies have allowed the cost of chicken to stay the same since the 1950s.

And that's with inflation. So essentially the cost has gone down. We've made chickens grow so fast, so fast that their own physical structures can't hold their weight, so they collapse on themselves. Which is horrifying, but also a testament to just how intensely we have trained our scientific eye. on this little bird. I'm of two minds of it, because on one side, it's horrible to see an animal collapse under its own body weight because it's been, it's fattened up too quickly and it's five-week life. But at the same time, in terms of if people are going to eat meat, it's the most efficient meat you can eat in terms of resources and environmental impact and carbon emissions.

So in a world in which people are probably going to eat meat, I think chicken is probably the best option they can go for. The other alternative is just don't eat meat. But, yeah, you thread a difficult needle of what. What is acceptable? What is a cost? Who can bear it? At the moment, most of it is the poor little chicken.

Emmeline Rude is the author of Tastes Like Chicken, a history of America's favorite bird. And she's the editor and publisher of Eaton Magazine. The dead chicken is so useful to humankind, it seems risky for us to develop much affection for the live animal. And yet we have. It's almost alarming how easy it is for us to take comfort in the idea of a creature that we generally force. forced to be so uncomfortable. And yet, for many of us, the living chicken is as cheerful and comforting an image as a nice bowl of chicken soup. I didn't actually have a problem continuing to eat chicken even when we had chickens. I guess I didn't think of these chickens

as eating chickens. They were pets. This is Farishter Hashimi. Ferrisht is done one of the most modern, urban things I've ever heard of. She has rented chickens just for the summer to live with her in Toronto. And did you feel a little bit tactless eating chicken in front of chickens, or was that not an issue? No, it never really. It kind of crossed my mind briefly, but not. No. And how are the eggs that you got? Delicious. Farishter rented her chickens from a company called Rent the Chicken, or to be specific, Rent the Chicken Canada, because this is now an international business. They were advertised as a way of, you know, a sort of low-stakes way of getting into the

chicken business. Not the chicken. Chicken lifestyle. Chicken lifestyle, exactly. So I went to the website and booked my chickens. It was the first year that it was allowed, but I spoke to somebody as well who had used the same company the year before, even when it was illegal, but they just didn't say it. A lot of people have chickens, and nobody talks about it.

So anyway, she told, I talked to her about what her experience was like. She was very positive about it, and that sort of sealed the deal for me. I thought, yeah, this is great. Let's give it a try. It's only six months. what can go wrong? I should clarify the legality issue here.

The business of renting chickens was not illegal. But until recently, keeping chickens in Toronto was against the bylaws. The city now has a pilot project underway in certain neighborhoods, allowing people to keep a few chickens. Ferristers neighborhood is one of them. I live in the west end of Toronto, and we have a, you know, slightly larger than average backyard, I would say. Not too big, but definitely enough space for what I was told. be required for chickens. And I love gardening, so I'm in my backyard all the time. And I just thought it would be perfect. It would be perfect to have the chickens there. And I managed to convince the family

to get on board with me. Ferrester rented two chickens. They arrived at her house in the month of April. It was quite cold when they brought my chickens. They came with a large truck and multiple chicken coops on the back of the truck, and they unloaded it, actually picked it up the two people, and they just carried it into the backyard and put it down. It was like a triangular structure. The lower level is the run, where the chickens run around, and the upper level under the peak of the roof is where the chickens roost. And there's a little ladder for them to go up.

They come in their own wooden house kind of thing? Yeah, a nice wooden, imagine, sort of like those A-frame cottages that were very popular, but the lower level is open. It's strong chicken, not chicken wire, it's got another name, hardware cloth, something that's, because chicken wire raccoons can rip through, it's not strong enough, so it's a stronger version of chicken wire. It's all around this structure. So when they're in there, they're safe. We went to a lot of effort to make sure the chickens were very comfortable. We put a fan

for them in the hot summer nights. We built the extra cage. We bought lots of treats for them. They had a very nice life. I loved having them, not even so much because of the eggs. Really, the eggs were just a side bonus. It was really because they were great companions. They were so much fun to hang around with. They had real personality. They loved to hang around with me, too.

They were very social. Whenever I was in the garden, they would run outside. They'd be right next to me if I was digging anything up, you know, trying to find worms or ants or whatever it is they like to eat. If we were out cutting around the garden, they wouldn't even go to bed at night. So they really liked, they liked having people around and we liked hanging out with them. They were a lot of fun. At the end of the summer, the rental period ended and Verster returned her chickens.

That was the year before last. This April, CBC News reported it was almost impossible. to get a rental chicken. They were just too popular. In fact, the same was true of any source of live chickens in the early days of the pandemic. I spoke to one chicken farmer in Tennessee who said baby chicks were, quote, like toilet paper. What she meant by that, of course, was that people were suddenly buying a lot of them, and all the hatcheries for miles around were sold out. There's clearly a belief that a live chicken is like a sourdough starter. It's a good thing to have beside you in a crisis. That impulse might be nostalgic or old-fashioned.

but the urban politics of it are very current. Ferrester referred to the ongoing experiments in Toronto with allowing backyard hens. Calgary may allow them next year. And a campaign to legalize the chicken is coming back to life right now in Hamilton, Ontario. A lot of people do keep chickens. This is Allie Livingston,

and she's going out on a limb by speaking publicly here because she's just started keeping chicks. And where she lives... They are not allowed. I really love them. And so for me, I think that's what's kind of struck up my pro-cultry activism. Allie is teaming up with other Hamiltonians to pressure city counselors to allow the chicken-keeping lifestyle. But in the meantime, she has to watch out.

She's already seen some good chicken-keeping friends go down. Within two days of me getting my chickens home, a by-law officer came and, locked down my neighbor's little check operations. And it was really quite sad because her little chickens, which were two Plymouth Rock, chicks about 11 weeks old at the time, they'd started coming outside and they would, they love to be on my porch. They'd come through a little division in the fence that we had and they'd spend time in my backyard and her backyard. And it was really lovely. When the bylaw officer came by, Her chickens were actually in my backyard at the time.

So I, you know, stood and I listened and I spoke with him. And he admittedly say, you know, this is a ridiculous bylaw. He's like, oh, I see their Plymouth Rock. These are lovely birds. I hate, he said, I hate my job. I hate this part of my job. So it just, you know, it seems so backward. It just seems so backward in this day and age.

I don't know why you would have a pet chicken. Among Hamilton's most adamant voices against backyard chickens is Councillor Partridge. I'm Judy Partridge, and I am the Ward 15 councillor, city councillor, within the city of Hamilton. First of all, Tom, I'm going to say thank you so very much. I really appreciate the invitation to be able to speak to your listeners today and to you as well. My position, well, I got to tell you, I grew up in the rural area. I am a farm girl, and I did work in chicken barns. There are a number of people who have a fascination or are, you know, really gung-ho about having chickens in their backyards and particularly in the urban area.

Now, if you ask anyone in the rural area, there's a reason why chickens are not allowed in the urban area. So my position to answer your question is I do not support, nor have I supported, having chickens in the urban areas of the city, of any city. Okay. And please give me your most compelling argument. Don't keep it a secret. What is the reason why this isn't just a cute idea? If you get the chickens as little chicks, you don't know if you're going to get a rooster,

if you're going to get hens. the bylaw states that you can only have four animals, dogs, cats, you can only have four. So let's assume you wanted to have four chickens. You want hens. You know, they lay eggs, absolutely. They're good for about 18 months to two years of egg laying. And then what are you going to do with them? Nurture their aspirations and treat them as a pet, surely.

If you're going to have them as pets, that's a whole different issue. I will tell you that each chicken requires a... about 10 square yards of space. They don't survive the winter if they're not insulated or has some sort of ability to get into a warm barn or a warm environment. You can't have the running loose in your backyard. Most backyards in urban areas are fairly small. There are predators.

People say, well, I just have to put up a chicken wire fence and they'll be fine. I'll put a roof on it. You know, no problem. Well, they don't jump over. Predators go under, whether it's a fox, whether it's a coyote. Rats love chicken eggs, don't we all? Okay, but so far, this sounds a lot like when someone was explained to me why I couldn't have a puppy a long time ago. Like, these are practical reasons why it might not be a good idea for a certain individual to take on chickens.

But that doesn't yet amount to me to a legal argument for why there should not be, you know, a licensed system where, you know, someone who proves that they're capable can keep chickens in their backyard. So let's talk about that. First of all, you have a smell. They don't urinate and they don't poop. They have it all combined. It's one stream that comes out. They need straw. You need to be able to clean out the coop every day.

If it's not every day, it's every other day. Well, if you've not lived on a farm and if you've not cleaned out a stall of any kind or a barn, you may not realize exactly what it's like. Well, it's only two or three or four chickens. So what, you know, how bad can it be? It's bad. It's terrible. They also get disease and you have no control over that.

And so what do you do if your chicken gets sick? Take them to the vet. What vet? The vet that treats animals. Okay, but you can't just go to an ordinary vet. Why not? Well, I think it's hard for you because you're not from the rural area and you don't understand what it's like to live on a farm. Okay, no, I mean, it's hard for me to understand.

Is it okay to have a cow in a backyard? Probably not. Is it going to be okay to have an ostrich in a backyard? I think most people say, well, that's ridiculous. So why is it okay to have chickens? They're smaller. Why is it okay to have ducks? Oh, so we're talking about size now?

Yeah. Yeah, no, they're smaller. What kind of an argument is that? Well, the reason why it's not a good idea to have a cow in a backyard is that the cow is very big and requires a lot of room, presumably, to do its cow business with a chicken is small, so it fits in a small backyard. But that's not an argument to support. having chickens. These are barnyard animals. They deserve to live in a barnyard. And from a

public health perspective, you've got children, you've got other dogs, if you've got rats coming in, if you've now got more predators coming in. And by the way, we have an issue with coyotes in the city. They will come in to get your chickens. They also eat cats. So the chickens pose a threat to cats indirectly in the sense? Well, they, you know, I mean, the more animals that you have outside in an urban area, the more of a threat it is. It's just a bad idea. It really is for a number of reasons. So returning to the opening that I saw, however, you are against people farming chickens in their backyard in an urban area. But it sounds like you might be open to someone like my parents, don't worry, they're not a threat, they're not moving to Hamilton, but were they to? You might be

open to them having two pet chickens that they nurture into their old age, as long as their neighbors aren't complaining? I'm not in support of it, and I'll tell you why. I'm not in support of anything that puts a little bit of a wedge into a door that starts to prop it open. Are we setting a precedence? Well, if you can have two chickens as a pet, why can't I have four chickens to lay eggs? You'll be spinning in inertia and coming right back to the same arguments. I don't believe that chickens belong in an urban setting. I don't believe that goats belong in an urban setting. I don't believe the cows belong in an urban setting.

It's just categorical. They belong on a farm. Thank you, Councillor Judy Partridge. You're most welcome, sir. Thank you. One could certainly argue that where a chicken belongs is not a single fixed point. Its ancestral fathers and mothers belonged among the dinosaurs of Belgium and perhaps elsewhere, and its wildest cousins belong in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Most of today's chickens live on farms, it's true, but the future is open. The chicken may yet surprise us. with its ability to take on new roles. We became kind of overwhelmed with chickens. This is Glynis McNini. She recently graduated with a master's in social work. There's this thing called chicken math, actually. And it says that as long as you know

the personalities and the names of your chickens, the number is irrelevant. But in the winter, it kind of, with chicks being born, and they didn't have a warm place, so they came back into our house. And so I was in the situation. I did not want any more chickens in my house. So just through the synchronicity of the universe, I gave them or offered them to a few folks within Hamilton over the last year or so who coincidentally just were suffering from PTSD, depression, anxiety, and wanted some company and connection and were curious about something new that they could participate in that was meaningful.

And so they've raised these chickens, and the chickens have come to know the entire community and their families. And it's really been enlightening to everybody, I think, with how beneficial they can be to build empathy, to build community connection, which we know we're lacking right now, and just provide eggs and company. You said you were sort of keen on this idea of chicken therapy. What would it look like, do you think? I am. I am. So I think not only the connection is important for people suffering from PTSD and anxiety, depression. and, you know, we look at the behaviors associated with that,

and that is that feeling of not being able to or wanting to get out of bed or agoraphobia, you know, going out, fear of going out in public spaces. And it's been reported that people who have experienced the chickens that kind of forces them through those barriers, you know, gently because they have the company there of the hens with them while they're sitting outside in their yards. And then with that, there's opportunity to connect with others, right?

It's just sometimes it's that first step and that company. The chickens themselves have such interesting personalities that everyone comments on how they can see their aspects of their personalities and people in their lives, because the reality is the chicken brain is very primitive. And essentially, when you look at the core components of our brain and what drives our behavior and emotions and thoughts, it's oftentimes driven by parts of our brain that we're not necessarily aware that our incommission. control, such as the amygdala, hippocompus, which are enlarge with people that have experienced trauma and more active, play more active role in those behavioral elements. So when you look at the chickens and how they react and go through their habitual routines without any thought, because they're not capable of reflective and reflex of thinking, it's really interesting and people are often more capable of observing behaviors that aren't

within themselves, right? It's easier to point out things in other people. So when you see these primitive brains kind of running around, running through these same habits and routines and reacting the same way based on their, essentially their trauma brain, people have found that's a really good tool for themselves and to reflect on how they can make those changes and rewire those pathways to enhance their lives. Fascinating, right. So the chicken becomes in a sense a kind of, yeah, externalized lizard brain. Exactly. I often like to make jokes about our head chicken. His name's Cluck Norris, and he is a big white and orange silky chicken. He's established himself as the highest in the pecking order, and he is the most vicious. He's a liability. So he drives the

pack and he comes after anybody that he doesn't know. The only way around him really is to sing gently to him and kind of go towards him as if you're going to hug him and pick him up, have a snuggle with him and the thing just runs like you've never seen him afraid of anything more in his life because his job essentially is to keep the pack safe right so you by demonstrating that love and affection towards him tells him that okay you're safe get lost i have a job to do you know so it's very funny to see them uh it's a good example it's a metaphor for you know humans' worst faults in terms of how brains, you know, kind of direct our lives. They're there to keep us safe, not smart.

And the chicken brain does exactly that. Glynis McNini lives in a rural area within the city limits of Hamilton. It was Daniel Field, the paleontologist, who earlier said that to look into the eye of a chicken, is to look into the eye of a dinosaur. It's interesting to remember that what you're doing is staring into the eye of an actual living dinosaur. But I would put it to you that if you spend longer staring into that chicken's eye, you may realize you're not just seeing a dinosaur. You've encountered something more familiar and intimate,

even if it's hard to tell exactly what. Perhaps Glynis is right that you are looking at your own id. Perhaps it is the consequence of all. all our generations of appetites, a mirror to the human soul? Or is it just that quiet, impassive eye of eternity? You are listening to An Evening with Chickens by Ideas producer Tom Howell. Thanks to all of our guests. My name's Daniel Field.

Dale Saul Jimson. My name is Alice Story. Hi, my name is Emmeline Rood. Beresh to Hashimi. Hi, I'm Allie Livingston. I'm Judy Partridge. My name is Glynis McNini. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Web producer Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer Nicola Luxchich.

Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.com slash podcasts.