PUTNEY — Meat birds begin their life in transit, inside the arteries of the United States Postal Service, crossing state lines with bestsellers from Amazon and stretch jeans from Lands' End. But unlike those other packages, chick boxes contain a surplus, a couple of extra baby birds to make up for the wear and tear of travel. It's an inexpensive way to console the customer when a pile of feathers arrives without any peeps.
Chicken farmers, however, are a peculiar type of customer. On the one hand, we want to start with a maximum number of chicks to produce a maximum number of coqs au vin, roasted chicken, and rich chicken stock.
On the other hand, a carton of 51 peeping chicks can easily lead to Chicken Farmer Delusion, the ungrounded belief that, if all goes well, we'll have 51 healthy birds ready to harvest in 12 weeks' time.
One dead bird cures that delusion. It has the same sobering effect on the enterprise as a memento mori, reminder of death, like a skull on the desk of a Dominican monk - a healthy thing when one is venturing into life-and-death matters such as theology or chicken farming.
But we had no memento mori in this year's batch of baby Freedom Rangers. Each little bundle of fluff came out of the box peeping and confused about light and water and the other necessities of life.
Within half an hour, each of their baby bills was dunked in a small dish of water. “Looks like a healthy group of birds,” said Alison optimistically.
But the next morning, we woke up to find one dead bird and immediately lost our bearings on the whole operation. If one was dead, surely others would follow.
During the day, we noticed other possible victims. One of them appeared to be scratched, its skin exposed just above the wing. Did it need to be separated from the others before they pecked it to death? That bundle of feathers sleeping in the corner - was it on the verge of collapse?
We considered creating a chicken hospital for the scratched and sleepy but couldn't find a second heat lamp.
We cursed ourselves and our lack of preparedness and did what most neurotics do when they feel overly responsible for the fate of the world: we went to bed.
Luckily, our symptoms abated when we woke up to a brooder box full of healthy chicks. That exposed skin just above the wing wasn't a scratch but a wet spot.
That sleepy chick was just following the imperatives of its breed. This batch of meat birds, unlike our last batch, are Freedom Rangers, a breed that puts on meat faster because they like to nap. With no memento mori, we overreacted to a minor scratch.
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“Remember that you will die” is one blunt translation for Memento Mori. Each of these baby chicks will die. If not in transit, and not from being pecked to death, they might get picked off in the pullet phase by a crafty mink or crushed by the chicken tractor during one of its daily chugs across the pasture. And sometimes they just die, as chickens do.
But should they survive the perils of childhood and adolescence, there is no avoiding the execution scheduled for early September.
That Dominican monk, well-schooled in the theories of natural law, could explain all of this tending of animals with the intention of slaughter as part of the natural order of things. My job as a chicken farmer, according to that reasoning, is to create the conditions where they can be the best chickens possible and then make the most of their meat.
Natural law theories aren't as persuasive as they used to be. We moderns tend to explain our decisions through cost-benefit analysis or, if we're Americans, through moral imperatives.
The disadvantage of these modern American methods is that they tend to keep death out of the picture. In the cost-benefit argument, death is reduced to a cost, evidence of a very bad risk. In the moral imperative argument, life is a right and every thing should have it.
There is no memento mori in the rhetoric of modern America. There are only future gains and chickens in every pot and an aggressive belief in progress.
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But not every chick makes it to the pot.
As we approach year four of the Homesteading Experiment, my skin is getting thinner as I face yet again the spiritual practices needed to raise meat birds. There is the practice of discernment, of knowing when to set up a poultry hospital and when to set up a hospice. There is the practice of grief, of putting little chick bodies in the animal compost pile and picking up pullet parts after the mink has been through.
These mementos of death bring their own moral imperative: let there not be waste. When the Big Day comes, every little bit of chicken that can be savored, stewed, fed to the dog, or given back to the vegetable bed is properly treated.
It takes so much dying to raise one of these fine birds, it only feels natural to eat them with passion and within limits.
No waste, no excess, and life and death have a chance of existing in harmony.