Mess With My Chickens And You Will Meet The Crazy Chicken Lady Shirt

The keeping and breeding of fowl eventually spread to Europe where it was common for individual households to raise birds for meat or eggs. During the 1600’s, English housewives would often fatten their game-birds “in darkness and confinement, sometimes being blinded as well.”4 Even geese would have the webs of their feet nailed to the floor in an exceedingly cruel effort to help them gain weight. And, “it was the custom of some seventeenth-century housewives to cut the legs off living fowl in the belief that it made their flesh more tender.”5 During the 1800’s recipes emerged that sought to employ sadistic methods in an attempt to improve the taste of the meat. In one example, housewives were encouraged to, “take a red cock that is not too old and beat him to death”.6 It is easy to be horrified by some of these practices. While few if anyone today believes nailing a bird’s feet to the floor improves taste or texture, an indifference to the animals suffering or pain clearly has a long-standing tradition.Despite this, life was not always ghastly for these birds.

Mess With My Chickens And You Will Meet The Crazy Chicken Lady Shirt

As European immigrants and settlers came to America, many would come with chickens and hens in tow. Some were raised on farms and in towns sharing living space with the farmer in their house or outbuildings, free to roam the fields foraging for food and even living among the many other animals on the farm. In fact, it can be argued that some birds once lived the bucolic life so often depicted on packaging and advertising used by modern-day producers and egg boards, albeit falsely, to suggest this by-gone era still holds sway over contemporary farming practices.On most farms in early 20th century America, it was the women and children who largely looked after the flock. Apparently it was deemed emasculating for men to be poultry caretakers. As a result, “early poultry extension programs were aimed at appealing to farm women”.7 But this would change as poultry farming, like many other forms of animal agriculture, began to scale-up, introduce higher stocking densities, new technologies and automation to increase yields and improve profit margins to benefit the collectivization of the industry. The 1920’s and 30’s saw scientific research facilities emerge in an effort to increase egg-laying capacity through breeding and genetic manipulation programs. Many of these facilities also served the industry by developing vaccines to help curb the unintended consequences of such programs – disease.