Chickens

We lost Tallulah the chicken last night - she never came home. We’ve seen no sign of her (dead or alive) so there is still some slight hope. But in all probability, she’s been eaten.

So, all you philosopher types out there, what should we do now? Do we lock the others up for their own safety? Or do we allow them to roam free, even though this means they will in all likelihood die violently before their time?

The question is, how bad is it to get eaten by a fox, compared with how bad it is to live in captivity and die of old age?

If I was free to roam but knew that there was some terrible predator that could eat me at any moment, I would live life in perpetual fear and crave the safety of an enclosure. Or would I? Because I currently go through my life in relative freedom, but I am aware that any of a number of seriously horrible things might happen to me. Hmm. Not really the same. Seriously horrible things do not happen to people (in this country, anyway) very much. But from our current experience, none of our free range chickens will make it to old age.

So do the chickens live in perpetual fear? I think probably not, because I suspect that they don’t have the mental capacity to appreciate the danger they are in. So they have fun (to the extent that they have the mental capacity for that either) scratching about in the field, and don’t worry about foxes.

How would they feel in a cage? Well, they clamour to get out in the morning. But I could probably provide a fairly large fox proof enclosure for them that they would get used to, and their memories of freedom would fade to nothing fairly quickly, I think. But their range would still be probably 1000 times smaller than they have now, so that must entail a reduction in the richness of their experience.

I think what it boils down to, the reason why I would protect myself, is that I have an expectation of ongoing life which I desire to protect, whereas I think the chickens have no such expectation and simply exist. They have basic memory of things such as who feeds them and where they live, but I don’t think they have reflective memory such as ours - i.e. they don’t remember that day when they were a chick and it snowed for the first time or anything like that. So, in a way, being killed does not rob them of anything.

There is still the actual being eaten by a fox bit. That can’t be nice. But it would also probably be pretty terrible to wither away, old and arthritic in a cage, without even any memories of your life.

I think I’ll let them stay free range. What do you think?