IN my childhood a farmyard chicken was a resourceful bird.
It gleaned the stackyard, it picked the midden, and it nested when it could without detection, and sometimes brought off a brood of chickens from a nettlebed or a roll of old fence wire overgrown by briar. There are still such birds about, but they are fewer. The modem chicken, laying that recorded egg with a pale yolk, lives its life indoors on a mess of stuff that is known as deep litter, or, worse still, it spends its life caged in a battery where it produces eggs with mechanical regularity. The battery bird is happier. Research men have proved that. It is heavier, healthier, and it is something my resourceful, scraggy farmyard fowl somehow never was—it is econo- mical, because the day its chart shows a fall in output, a passing of prime efficiency, it is killed off to make way for another inhabitant of the cage. In spite of the fact that its weight and its output show that it is a happy bird, I am sorry for the battery fowl. It is not a chicken at all, to my mind. A little of its wonderful condition should be sacrificed to allow it to flap over into the cornfield and roost on the ridge of the henhouse once in a while.
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