CHICKENING OUT

It used to be that Montana folks near Yellowstone obsessed about bison all the time.  They still do.  At least hippie chicks have stopped trying to throw their arms around them, obsessing about their miscegenation with cattle, and insisting that brucellosis is an invented disease -- doesn’t exist.  But this winter with heavy snow (still snowing today) the bison come out of the Park.  Doesn’t matter what you do, bison come out of the Park.

So what do the Great Falls and Valier folks obsess about?  Chickens.  For months there has been high emotion about whether people can keep chickens in their yards.  I don’t have a chicken in this fight, so I’ve been free to listen closely.

In Valier it began with horses.  Four or five people kept horses in town last year and they got loose.  One young mother, evidently from the city, became very concerned that they might attack her children.  The town council, whose chief purpose in life is to prevent trouble and look good, therefore banned all horses.  It turned out that one old tribal grandpa had kept a few horses in a pasture that happened to be inside the town limits.  Too bad for him, in spite of appeals and petitions.  

Then the council saw that it would be one animal after another, so they banned all livestock, sparing dogs and cats -- barely.  Some people want to eliminate cats.  It’s true enough that we’ve got far too many feral cats because a) the farmers around here dump half-grown fertile kittens in town with the fantasy that there are plenty of old ladies who will take them in, b) there ARE old ladies who can’t take them in but who are happy to feed them near the old buildings where they have found ways to shelter, and c) alcoholic old men like to accumulate cats.  (I didn’t know this last until I moved here.  I thought cats and dogs were gender-assigned.)

But then 4-H and FFA projects had to have an exemption because their parents were significant.  So some kid raised pigs in a corral just inside the city limits.  A few rabbits.  In Portland in the Seventies we had one old duffer who had a mini-farm in a residential neighborhood, including a pot-bellied pig and some chickens.  In my childhood (Forties) in Portland there were two old ladies who kept bantie chickens in large enough numbers that we bought eggs from them.

But now Great Falls well-heeled liberals who read the shelter mags that promote “country living” of a sort, have been running stories about keeping half-a-dozen chickens in the city and how good they are for gardens.  These are named and cuddled chickens.  I esp. loved the story about the guy who named his hens for things on his wife’s dressing table:  Noxema, Mascara, Revlon, etc.  So long as roosters are avoided, chickens make comforting sounds (unlike constant barking) and less problematic droppings than dogs.  They eat bugs.  Very organic.

My cousin’s daughter was recently featured in one of those mags.  She has her own chickens, but in addition she and a friend run a “chicken-sitting” business for people who like to travel a little.  She claims that some of them are happy to sit on her lap while she watches television.  Her son has his favs.

I didn’t really figure out what’s going on until I got into a conversation with a nice lady at the CM Russell auctions.  She grew up on a ranch with a flock of chickens and became truly frothing over the issue, as have others.  “I KNOW chickens,” she shouted.  “I’ve taken care of chickens, the dirty, nasty, stinking beasts!  I want nothing to do with chickens except fried on my plate!”  To rural people who dealt with chickens en masse and killed them likewise because they a) they needed the food and b) they were poor, chickens were a marker of a hard and low-status life.  And here were these fancy upscale people who saying chickens were pets, toys, indulgences, conceits.  These doctors and lawyers -- whom these rural people had so hoped would respect them when they finally made it, moved to town, had a nice white picket fence and a new car -- were MOCKING them with their chicken-keeping.  It was the same as Marie Antoinette pretending to be a milkmaid.  Enraging to those who had to rise before dawn and milk a whole row of cows no matter how chapped their hands and aching their backs.  You know what happened to Marie.

Then I saw that the same people who wanted to keep chickens for pets were the ones who wanted to put big bucks into restoring Great Falls’ old arched bridge and hiring a lighting artist at great expense to make it elegantly blue at night.  They are the backbone of the Charlie Russell fans.  Not that these upscale aesthetically aware people were unaware of suffering.  They are often medical people.  

I think of an old story from the homesteading days when women often had to stay in a tiny tarpaper shack on the prairie while their husbands went to look for work.  They could get pretty lonesome.  Cowboys drifting through would stop to chat in exchange for a bit of grub.  One thoughtful gent knew he would be passing a homestead where the woman was on the edge of starvation, but who nevertheless shared with him.  This time he was lucky and had a chicken to give her, tied upside down to his saddle, still alive because there was no other way to keep it from spoiling.  A year later he happened to pass through again and figured he’d be welcome there.  He was, but he was also surprised to see that hen he’d brought still marching around looking contented.  “I thought you’d eat that chicken!” he said.

The women looked abashed.  “Well, the company meant more to me than the food.”

Of course, there were the eggs.

It’s a strange phenomenon that in the Western art shows and mags, chickens have become favorite subjects, often the more colorful roosters.  Of course, on canvas they’re quiet.  Even the bison can come into the house if they’re painted instead of real.  It’s all about the image versus the reality.