[A-List] Animals II: Chickens, Rabbits and Fish

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (September 15 2010)


When people think about animals in the context of rural homesteading or
backyard gardening, odds are the earthworms and bumblebees discussed in
last week's post won't be the first thing that comes to mind. The
reason for this is simple: they simply aren't tasty enough. I recall a
book I read years ago with the winsome title Butterflies In My Stomach:
The Role of Insects in Human Nutrition (1975) that made a strong case
for dining on insects, but I confess to never having put its
recommendations into practice; and as for earthworms, I'll leave them
to those with bolder palates than mine.

No, the animals most often contemplated in this context are those that
provide food a bit more directly, and palatably, for our species. This
isn't an unreasonable habit of thinking. Though the earthworms,
bumblebees, and other wild creatures that interact with a garden or a
farm probably play a more important role overall in green wizardry,
domesticated livestock of various kinds have a crucial place in the
backyard food economy. Their task is to take biomass that human beings
either can't eat or don't find very nourishing and turn it into more
edible and more nourishing forms.

Now of course this is not the way modern industrial agriculture
generally does things. I've commented before that if an evil genius set
out to design the worst possible way of producing food, his most
diabolical contrivances would have a hard time competing with the way
we grow food in America today. The animals we raise for human food in
this country come out of millions of years of evolution that has fitted
them to eat foods that human beings don't, and turn them into
foodstuffs like those that human beings evolved to eat. Do we feed them
their proper foods by putting cows out to pasture, say, or letting
chickens scratch for insects and vegetable scraps? Of course not.

Instead, we feed them on grains that could just as well be food for
human beings, laced with chemicals and drugs, and "enriched" as often
as not with the ground-up bodies of other animals that have been
discarded as unfit for human consumption. We do this, mind you, in vast
energy-wasting warehouse facilities so overcrowded and poorly managed
that the manure, which would otherwise be a valuable resource for
improving soil fertility, becomes a massive problem - and of course
nobody would think of dealing with that problem by any means as
sensible as industrial-scale composting. Meanwhile the meat, milk,
eggs, and other products of this system are a sickly parody of the
equivalents that can be gotten from healthy animals fed their natural
foods in sanitary and humane conditions.

Plenty of people who object to the appalling conditions and ecological
cost of factory farming have responded by swearing off animal foods
altogether. This is certainly a choice, but it's far from the only
option, and some of the arguments that have been marshalled in defense
of it simply won't hold water. Those of my readers who find that a
vegetarian or vegan diet suits them should certainly feel free to
continue their herbivorous ways, but not everyone finds such diets
appropriate to their needs, and those who find a place for animal
products on their dinner tables are part of a long hominid tradition;
our australopithecine ancestors ate meat, as indeed chimpanzees do
today, and it may be worth noting that no surviving or recorded
preindustrial culture anywhere on Earth has had a traditional diet that
does entirely without animal products.

It's important to remember, also, that there's a middle ground between
eating the products of industrial factory farming, on the one hand, and
abandoning animal foods altogether. One way to pursue that middle
ground is to buy animal products from local organic ranchers and
growers whose operations are open to visits by consumers. Another,
though, involves a glance back toward the household economies of an
earlier time, when a henhouse in the back garden was as much a part of
most urban households as a stove in the kitchen and a roof overhead.

Like food plant growing, in fact, animal raising can be done in one of
two ways, extensive or intensive. The extensive approach, in
preindustrial societies, is called pastoralism, and was the foundation
of one of the two great human ecologies to evolve out of the
hunter-gatherer lifestyle around the end of the last ice age. Where the
early agriculturalists set themselves to domesticate plants they once
gathered from the wild, the early pastoralists set themselves to
domesticate animals they once hunted. Both new human ecologies had
their growing pains and their catastrophic failures, but both worked
out most of the bugs, and will be as viable after industrialism as they
were before it. It's pretty much a foregone conclusion, for example,
that the Great Plains four or five centuries from now will be inhabited
by pastoral nomads whose raids against the agrarian towns of the
Mississippi-Ohio basin will impose the same ragged heartbeat on the
history of the future as their equivalents on the central Asian plains
did for so many centuries in the past.

The cattle herds and nomad raiders of 25th-century Nebraska are a bit
too far off for present purposes, though, and the closest modern
equivalents are out of reach for anyone who doesn't have enough acreage
for the cattle and horses that will define those nomads' lives. This is
where the intensive approach comes in. Just as backyard gardens can
produce a significant harvest of vegetables when worked intensively, a
backyard henhouse or rabbit hutch can produce a steady supply of animal
foods when handled in the same efficient and intensive way. This does
not mean putting the animals in some small-scale equivalent of a
factory farming operation; rather, it calls for a comfortable shelter
and space adequate to the needs of the number of animals you have,
along with ample food and clean water, provided by your efforts rather
than the less generous habits of nature.

Hens and rabbits are not the only animals that can be raised this way,
but for people who don't have enough real estate to set aside a
good-sized piece of pasture, they are among the best. Both can be kept
comfortable and healthy in a relatively small space, thrive on an
inexpensive diet, and produce abundantly and reliably if treated well.
Hens are particularly good for those with tender feelings toward
animals; you don't have to kill them to be nourished by them, since
half a dozen hens will keep a couple of humans amply supplied with eggs
for most of the year. Rabbits don't have that advantage, and neither do
chickens raised for meat; most people I know who raise either one
respond to the hard necessity of slaughtering by doing their level best
to see to it that their animals have only one bad day in their lives.

To be healthy and productive, hens and rabbits need comfortable,
well-ventilated, rainproof and clean housing, well enough insulated to
keep off summer heat and winter cold. They need food, and in any sort
of intensive setting they won't be able to forage for themselves;
you'll need to keep the feeder stocked, whether it's with food you grow
yourself or with something from a local grower or a feed store. They
need water, and they need to have their manure hauled away, though
admittedly they repay this last bit of regular effort by providing some
of the world's best raw material for compost. (Animals concentrate
nutrients, and a regular dose of chicken or rabbit manure mixed into
your kitchen and garden waste in the compost bin will speed the
composting process and boost your soil's fertility dramatically.)
Animals also need various kinds of incidental care at every stage of
their life cycle from birth to stew pot.

What this means, ultimately, is that if you choose to raise small hens
or rabbits, you or someone you trust will have to be there for them
every day of the week, every week of the year. Other animals have other
needs, but for all practical purposes, all of them require daily care.
The precise requirements are too complex to cover in detail here; they
can be learned from the many books available on the subject of each
animal, and if at all possible supplemented by useful advice from
someone who has actually raised the animals in question.

What are some of the other options for small-scale animal raising?
Pigeons have been raised for many centuries on a backyard scale; if you
have a little more room, ducks, geese, turkeys, and guinea fowl can all
be raised successfully. On the larger scale, too, goats and small pigs
are good options; the Vietnamese potbellied pigs that were briefly
fashionable as pets in America, for example, have gone on to become a
staple of small-scale pork raising. There are more exotic options that
can be found with a little searching. Perhaps the most intriguing of
the alternatives, though, are fish.

Microscale aquaculture was a central focus of the New Alchemy
Institute, one of the most innovative and inspiring of the appropriate
technology groups back in the heyday of the movement in the 1970s and
1980s. Tilapia, one of the more popular farmed fish these days, was one
of the Alchemists' discoveries; their Arks, or integrated ecoshelters,
included tanks for tilapia that provided water and fertilizer in the
form of fish feces to greenhouse crops, as well as a steady harvest of
fish. I've never worked with small-scale aquaculture and so have no
practical knowledge to offer here, but the concept seems to have worked
well in practice, and green wizards who are unfazed by the technical
challenges could do worse than look through the papers of the
Institute, which are available via several sites online, and start
experimenting.

Whether finned, feathered, or furred, animals are a much greater
challenge than vegetables. More biologically complex than plants, they
are equally more fragile, and require a great deal more care; the same
concentration of nutrients up the food chain that make them so
delectable to human beings also make them equally prized by other
predators, and the sort of hearty nip that most plants can shrug off
without incident will put most animals at risk of infection or bleeding
to death. Even among green wizards, they aren't a suitable project for
everyone, but those who decide that raising small livestock is a
challenge they want to take up can contribute mightily to the larders
of their households and, on a broader scale, to the resilience of their
families and communities in a world where factory farming will be no
more than an unhappy memory.

Resources

The standard Seventies-era book on backyard livestock, found on the
shelves of every back-to-the-land homesteader of the naked hippie era,
was Jerome D Belanger's The Homesteader's Guide to Raising Small
Livestock, which covers goats, chickens, sheep, geese, rabbits, hogs,
turkeys, guinea fowl, ducks, and pigeons, in no particular order. An
overview rather than a detailed guide, it needs to be supplemented with
specific books on whatever animal you decide to raise, but it provides
a good first glance over the options and some very good pointers as
well.

The books I relied on back in the day when I tended chickens and
rabbits were Leonard S Mercia's Raising Poultry the Modern Way (1983),
Bob Bennett's Raising Rabbits the Modern Way (1988), and Ann Kanable's
Raising Rabbits (1980). They remain good solid texts, though there are
plenty of newer books on the market, and the backyard animals I didn't
raise also have a literature of your own. Your best bet is to find
someone who currently raises the animal you have in mind and ask for
suggestions; in most cases you'll find yourself with a new friend, and
plenty of good advice.

_____

John Michael Greer, The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids
in America (AODA), has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of more than twenty
books, including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006) and The Long
Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (New Society,
2008). He lives in Cumberland, Maryland. 

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