Backyard Chickens?

In a nutshell, if everyone, or even a few people each block in neighborhoods where backyard birds are allowed, get birds, the concentration of vectors spreads the flu rapidly. Also, the price to keep chickens will be much more, if only in your time, than paying the price for eggs at the store. If you have several acres and time to raise chickens, and can raise a flock of 20-30, it’s worth your time and cost. People living in under an acre can have a little coop with a few chickens, but the cost, care, and disposal of the nitrogen rich excrement will become a hassle not worth anyone’s time. It also attracts rats, which are yet another vector. There are vaccines, but for the worth of each chicken, the vaccine is too costly, and must be repeated every year. The greater problem is crowded industrial coops where these super flues grow out of antibiotic resistance. This resistance is achieved in these massive operations, and then spreads into wild populations, which then carry it around the world. We cause it, and nature evolves into a more pathogen based environment where we humans loose the survival race.

So, don’t get chickens in a small backyard space, because the song sparrows and crows will connect with your birds, passing on the virus. Which is also getting into domestic pets. Your dogs and cats will be in close contact with your chickens in a small backyard setup. On the bright side, animals that survive the flu become more resistant, until the strain mutates, at which time more animals and people will become ill. This is how viruses work, and they’ve been around since the dawn of life, millions of years before we evolved into being, so microbes certainly have the upper hand in that survival race we’re all running. Eggs and fried chicken are wonderful foods, which we’ve bought as cheap goods for generations in this military industrial complex. But that cheapness of life- because the chickens are living beings, just like the trillions of acres of mono-crop corn and soy being grown in the same mechanized way we think solves world hunger, that cheapness is killing. It’s killing our water- that other thing we need to live, poisoning it with nitrogen from the runoff of chemical fertilizers and animal waste. It’s killing our soil with the same chemicals that are sanitizing all the microbiology that soil and plants need to live. We put all our eggs in one basket and now the basket has been dropped, and all the eggs are breaking. What can we do?

Pay for eggs and chicken, and make them special, like all food should be. We’ve been subsidizing food until it’s become a cheap commodity, rather than a crucial part of our survival. We have tricked ourselves into thinking our finite resources are endless. We still treat grocery stores as errands, when these food palaces should really be a signal that something in the environment is very wrong. When our warehouses of gluttony turn our minds against connection with food, it’s easy to turn us from all the living world we rely on to exist. That’s what these screens have done. Now we’re bitching about prices, instead of asking what’s being done locally with land and food production to protect against virus outbreaks and tariff wars. We’d see a lot more resiliency, diversity of food choices, and support of local economy. We’d also have times of plenty, and times of scarcity, with limitations on how much- something humanity is deaspartly in need of- restraint in consumption.

This frightens us- the thought of starvation, famine, that’s why we convinced ourselves that through a magical technology of some kind, we’d transcend the limitations of our environment. No, that’s a god head patriarchal colonial thinking that gets humanity nowhere. Dominion is short sighted, cooperation and collaboration are survival necessities. All life relies on other life to exist. So how do we move towards this future? Well, here’s one concept- low tech. Here’s an amazing pair of scientists engineers working towards a better future for all. Biggest take away- grow some bugs and/or mushrooms, not backyard birds.