[Scpg] The Archdruid on Chickens, Rabbits and Fish

[LBUZZELL at aol.com]

_http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/09/animals-ii-chickens-rabbits-
and-fish.html_ 
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/09/animals-ii-chickens-rabbits-and-fish.html)    



WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2010
 
 
 
_Animals  II: Chickens, Rabbits and Fish_ 
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/09/animals-ii-chickens-rabbits-and-fish.html) 
 


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 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, Bob  Bennett’s 
Raising Rabbits the Modern Way, and Ann  Kanable’s Raising Rabbits. 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.



 
 
 
 





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