Chicken Soup for the Vaccinator's Soul

“Nature answers only when she is questioned.”

--Jacob Henle

We are fast approaching flu season in the U.S. and it is time for the general public to start making plans to get vaccinated.  It was time many months ago, however, for the Centers for Disease Control (among many others) to start planning just exactly what kind of vaccines should be made available for this year’s version of this ongoing fight against influenza.

Lots of variations on one basic theme:  Ick! Yuck! Phooey!

We won’t go into the abhorrent pseudoscience involved in the anti-vaccine movement in this post (though there is certainly rich material there for many an essay); rather, we thought this might be a good time to speak about influenza generally, and avian flu specifically, particularly as it relates to concerns anyone may have about the possibility of disease spreading through backyard chicken flocks.

Spoiler alert:  Well tended backyard chicken flocks are actually beneficial in fighting the spread of avian flu.  We’ll explain in a bit.

Influenza, or “flu”, is usually nowhere near so serious an illness as to justify the enormous amount of attention it gets each year.  Though it is somewhat more severe than the common cold… it is typically not fatal, and typically lasts for somewhere between a week to two weeks.

The problem, of course, is that word “usually” – when it does take a turn for the worse, it takes a nasty turn for the worse.  The most famous example is the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, which took the lives of 50+ million people worldwide.  To provide some context… “only” 16 million people died in World War I over the four years preceding the pandemic.

Why so much death from a disease that usually just sends you to bed for a couple of weeks?

The reason is that the influenza virus is one of the most mutable viruses ever discovered – most of the time, the dominant strain of influenza is one which may put those who already have weak health (the elderly, young children, those with compromised immune systems or who are already wracked by some other illness) in mortal peril (it is a rare year in which influenza deaths in the U.S. do not number in the thousands).  However, in most years, those who are reasonably healthy will suffer nothing more than an uncomfortable couple of weeks of fever, chills, headaches, sore throats, maybe nausea (depending on strain), general body aches, etc.  You know, “being sick”…

In some years, though, the mutated strain of virus is much more dangerous, and ends up generating potentially fatal complications like pneumonia, dangerously high fevers, impaired kidney functioning, etc. in previously healthy persons.

And that is why all the fuss.

The goal of immunization is, therefore, not particularly personal. 

We bill immunization as an attempt to “keep you healthy” but the reality is that immunization is more about collective than individual health.  A population in which a sufficiently large percentage of people have been immunized is much less likely to spread the virus, and is therefore much less likely to play host to the more virulent varieties of the virus.  There will still be individuals who get sick even if they get the vaccine.  There will simply be fewer of them, which is good for everyone.

So how do birds relate to all of this?

Glad you asked.  Birds, it turns out, are frequently the place where the whole story begins.  There are various strains of flu associated with different species, and those which have evolved specifically for human hosts are almost never particularly dangerous.  The varieties which run amok and kill large numbers of people are viruses which originally evolved in other kinds of animals.  On occasion, those viruses mutate in such a way that they can cross over and infect humans – this has happened with swine flu before, for example, but avian flu (flu associated with birds) is by far the most common of these “crossover” diseases.

There are numerous versions of Influenza A, the virus which is adapted to birds, the most famous of which in recent years is H5N1.  This variety has been spreading throughout Asia since 2003, reached Europe in 2005, and the Middle East in 2006.  One case was reported in Canada in January, 2014.

The virus originated in bird populations, and spread to humans.  Which birds?  Well… of the affected populations studied, 84% were domestic populations composed of chickens, ducks and turkeys, and the remainder were wild birds.  So the domestic populations were to blame, right?

Wrong.  At least, not exactly…

The virus almost definitely originated in wild birds, and was then transmitted to domestic flocks via interaction with the wild birds (waste matter dropping into a pen… wild birds scavenging food or water from the flock… there are a lot of ways for the birds to comingle).  Wild birds, however, do not live in confined quarters; as a result, they have a much lower rate of interaction with each other than do domestic birds.

A typical commercial poultry flock, however, will number thousands of birds in very, very tight quarters.  And will almost always have insufficiently cleaned ventilation, food and watering appliances.  A typical commercial poultry flock  is a pathogenic disaster waiting to happen.

Who in their right mind is dumb enough to think this is a good idea?

The response of government to the finding of an infected bird is informative in this regard – when an infected bird is found, the entire flock is killed.  They literally have no choice – there is no way to quarantine an infected bird; if one bird in a chicken farm has it, they all have it.  When you are raising birds in a 1’ by 1’ cage (or “free-ranging” them by allowing 1,000 birds to roam in a 20’ x 50’ barn) then they are not only breathing the same air, they are quite literally pooping on each other and living in muck and filth.  And those are the good farms, where regulations and procedures are being followed.

The sad, despicable truth, though, is that no one knows exactly how many poultry operations actually follow the rules.  The USDA does not have enough manpower to cover more than a small percentage of the regulatory territory to which they are assigned, and even when inspectors are available to review the health and sanitation of a given poultry operation… it is frightfully easy for operators to misdirect investigators away from problem areas.

Salmonella outbreaks are the most common result of disease-laden poultry farm ventilation systems… but one can easily envision H5N1 being spread in the same way.

Enter the backyard chicken flock…

There are a number of advantages to raising backyard chickens, and we have enumerated many of them on other occasions; aiding in the fight against avian flu, however, is one area in which taking birds out of cramped conditions is an underrated element.  Consider:

• The principle dangers associated with poultry farming come from population density, which is not a problem for backyard flocks ranging only anywhere from 4-10 birds, in much larger spaces than are afforded by factory farms.
• Occasional interactions between wild birds and diffuse backyard flocks will still happen… but any one interaction only affects 4-10 birds, not 10,000.
• Human interaction with a flock of 4-10 birds is limited to one household, not the tens or hundreds of thousands (or even millions) who interact with a single poultry farm in factory farming setups.
• While flu can spread via the lungs, it is much easier to transmit via fluids, like, say, blood, which is often smeared all over human workers on a poultry farm, and almost never contacted by backyard birders.

The logic behind a more diffuse production system for poultry related products is fairly simple – for the same reason that contagion is more common in dense population centers, the spread of food-borne pathogens is much higher when the production of those foods is also performed in dense populations.  When the Black Plague hit London, even the superstitious folk of the pre-Enlightenment era knew to head for the hills, because there was danger in population density.

The advantages posed by backyard birding, however, will not be fully felt unless a sufficient number of folk take up the “hobby” and make it a lifestyle choice.  In order to decrease the population density of

Much less chance of contagion, and no equipment to clean.

commercial poultry farming, sufficient numbers of backyard chicken flocks will need to be raised to take a serious bite out of the bottom line for the monsters of the industry (pejorative sense of the word intended) like Tyson, et al. 

Barring having one’s own backyard flock, we would at least encourage consumers of eggs or poultry meat to consider purchasing from farmer’s markets or other venues where small producers with free range flocks not raised in pestilential, overpopulated factory farms make their money.  Otherwise, we will all be vulnerable to the inevitable spread of some form of influenza from factory farmed bird-to-human, and then from human-to-human.  Once it’s human borne, it is out of the hands of the backyard birder or responsible consumer.

Which brings us back to immunization…

We began by noting that those in charge of manufacturing each year’s vaccine have to plan months in advance of distribution, owing to the mutability of the virus (there’s your evolution-in-action laboratory-verifiable example, if you care to argue with a creationist at any point, though we prefer arguing with brick walls, as they don’t spout nearly as much nonsense).  Because there is so much variability, a flu vaccine is really usually a vaccination against up to four different virus types.  Which, obviously, takes a lot of planning, based on data gathered from the previous year’s strains, examples of viruses found in poultry populations, examples found in other countries with which the U.S. population has a lot of interaction, and good solid guesses based on historical trends regarding which strains are “due” for a comeback.

As a result of all this variability, measuring the effectiveness of flu vaccines is anything but straightforward.  In most years (for example 16 of the 19 years before a 2007 study), the strains which actually bloomed during flu season were exactly the strains predicted by vaccine manufacturers.  And even in the years when they guess wrong, there is still some cross-over protection, given that not every mutation of the virus is radically different from the previous version.

There have been many meta-analyses of the data (basically, reviews of multiple studies) which suggest that overall, for healthy adults, vaccinations result in roughly a 75% decrease in the likelihood of getting the bug.  Without doubt everyone involved (particularly those who got the shot but ended up getting sick anyway) would prefer a rate closer to perfection… but remember, the ultimate objective is not necessarily to keep any one person healthy, it’s to keep a pandemic from happening.  If a few people still get sick, but we never see anything like 50 million people dying from something like the Spanish flu again, it will have been an exercise well worth it.

So…

Your assignments for this Fall:  Get your flu shot, raise backyard chickens (or shop at farmer’s markets), try to stay warm and dry, wash your hands regularly, and…

Happy farming!

Hope Springs Eternal

It's the first day of Spring.  So why did the temperature fall to 38° last night?  And why, oh why, a week after we planted all our veggies, given that we had passed the average date of last frost by a full week, is it supposed to get down to 34° tonight?

We'll tell you why:  'cause that's the way the ball bounces.  Life is experienced in non-linear, fractal geometric fashion.  Things happen, then other things happen, and then something changes.  No observable cycle is any more circular than the Earth's orbit which, if we remember our 5th grade science at all, is actually elliptical, not circular.

So.  We've got plants in the ground, we're going to cover them at night, and hope for the best.

We've got other plants not yet in the ground because they weren't in stock -- most notably African Basil, which we have on order, and Goat's Rue, which should be coming any day now.

And, we have ordered an abundance of new trees from The Arbor Day Foundation, including a slew of new Loblolly Pines, White Pines, and Bald Cypresses.  The perimeter of Myrtle's place, particularly around the fish pond, needs to be more forested, and we want an abundance of pine-needles on hand to mulch the blackberries every year.

One unusual addition (unusual, at least, for us) is a Forsythia, which the Arbor Day folks threw in for free.  We don't usually go for ornamentals -- we planted some Raspberry Autumn Sage (Red Salvia, for those who may have heard it by another name), but that and our daughter's Morning Glories are the only inedible plants on the place (excepting a few of the trees, of course).

The Forsythia is an interesting case.  Free is always good, naturally, but in addition, it has this going for it:  it's a member of the Olive tree family:  As an Oleacea, it naturally comes near and dear to our hearts.  We only have four Arbequina Olives on the place, but we're hoping that now they will feel a little less lonely.

We're not yet sure what to make of the Forsythia's bright yellow flowers, but we're sure we'll adapt.

In other news, we have moved garden plots around, expanded some, contracted others, but mostly we've gone about the business of getting as much good chicken-poop compost as possible in the places it needs to go.  Two of our 6'x6' garden beds are dedicated to sweet corn, in addition to a new 4'x20' "S" shaped bed which we placed where the 2nd Olive bed is going to go next year.

Also, we replaced the chickens' plastic water feeder with a stainless steel variety.  It holds more water and, more importantly, is not a source of leached bromides.  Perhaps we are partly motivated by a sappy, syrupy-sweet fondness for our chickens, and we do not wish to poison them any more than any other member of our family.  But mostly, we just don't want getting bromides in our eggs.

For the next couple of days, keep your plants and maybe even yourselves warm, and...

Happy farming!

Why the Virtues are 'Cardinal' and not 'Chicken'...

We have four cardinal virtues in our home:

1. Hard Work
2. Kindness
3. Moral Courage
4. Bounceback

Our children get rewarded (well, okay, our eldest gets rewarded... our 6 month old gets spitty, but that's another story) for demonstrating any of these virtues in an exceptional way.  Going above and beyond on a school assignment, for example, or going out of her way to assist an elderly person, or being kind to a younger child at a social gathering.

These are all examples of the basic virtues we aspire to teach.

It's a lucky thing we're not trying to teach the chickens.  They are some nasty pieces of work when they want to be, let us tell you.

We love our birds, don't get us wrong.  And they do exhibit some virtues.  It's just that, when push comes to shove, they'll be doing the pushing and the shoving.

There's a reason it's called a "pecking order".  The chicken who can peck the hardest (in our case, it's a hefty girl named "Duck") gets to eat first, gets to drink first, gets to crow (did we mention "Whistling girls and crowing hens don't never come to no good ends"?), and is generally known as "She who must be obeyed".

On the other hand, we do notice some interesting interplay amongst our feathered friends.  Over a year ago now, during Hurricane Whichever It Was (you lose track after a while...), we had a sick chicken.  We ended up, on the advice of an elderly Iraqi friend (again, another long story) putting her out of her misery.  That story reads like a scene from Macbeth, and when we are up to it, we'll animate a recreation for you.  Anyway, the point is, one of our sweeter hens, Myrtle, actually, sat apart from the rest of the flock to be with her ailing sister.  That was moral courage, and we respect her for it.

She managed to win back her place in the middle of the flock afterwards, too, in spite of lots of heckling and pecking.  That showed bounceback, the one virtue you can never lose.

Don't judge anyone who hasn't been knocked off their perch, we say.  Judge them by how persistently they flap to get back up.

We like Duck's big eggs.  But we love Myrtle.  There's a lesson in there, we think.

Happy farming!

Whistling Girls and Crowing Hens Don't Never Come to No Good Ends

 "Whistling girls and crowing hens don't never come to no good ends."

That's how we learned it, but apparently, there are several variations on this rhyme:

• A crooning cow, a crowing Hen and a whistling Maid boded never luck to a House. The two first are reckoned ominous, but the Reflection is on the third.[1721 J. Kelly Scottish Proverbs 33]
  
• A whistling woman and a crowing hen, Is neither fit for God nor men.
  [1850 Notes & Queries 1st Ser. II. 164]
  
• ‘A whistling woman and a crowing hen are neither fit for God nor men,’ is a mild English saying.
  [1891 J. L. Kipling Beast & Man ii.]
  
• A whistling woman and a crowing hen will fear the old lad [the Devil] out of his den.
  [1917 J. C. Bridge Cheshire Proverbs 28]
  
• Royal teased her, Whistling girls and crowing hens Always come to some bad ends.
  [1933 L. I. Wilder Farmer Boy xi.]
  
• A whistling woman and a crowing hen, Will bring Old Harry out of his den.
  
  
  [1979 G. Duff Country Wisdom (1983) 55]
  

We don't have any roosters.  We do have a hen who thinks she's a rooster.

This fella pictured to the left lives on a "real" farm, and watches over a bevy of barred rock beauties like some primitive tribal chieftain, or lead singer from an '80s hair band.

Duck (our Alpha hen) bosses around a small group of backyard bitties whose only major decisions each day involve whether to snack on greens first, then get a drink of water, then scratch around in the leaves for bugs, or to do these things in a different order (they usually don't opt for a different order; "Different is bad!" they may be saying.  Chickens are very particular.) 

The one thing they can definitely count on, though, is that they only perform their limited repertoire of tasks at the whim and fancy of Duck.  This even extends to the nighttime decision of who gets to fly up to the roost first.  We were astounded the first time we realized that the evening rustle, always punctuated by some henpecking and fuss, is extended due to the fact that Duck is lining the girls up and telling them who gets to go where, and when.

She also feels the need to announce to the world as each egg is laid.  It's almost as though she's standing there wanting to pass out cigars.  I don't know how to break it to her that her proud brood is soon to be consumed in the form of omelettes and taquitos.

And now, just in the last few weeks (the birds are about 22 months old now), Duck has started to crow.  Every morning, about 30 minutes before sunrise, there is an unmistakable "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" coming from our backyard.  If we didn't know for sure that she is still laying eggs, I would swear she had just been pulling a Jack Lemmon from "Some Like it Hot".  But no, she really is a she; she's just taking on a role.

It's amusing, it's annoying, it's informative.  It makes me wonder what else in the wide world of behavioral evolutionary science we've taken for granted, and made silly assumptions about.

Either way, come on over some time, pull up a chair and a hot cocoa, and watch some chickens with us.  It's really quite a floor show!

Happy farming!

On the Naming of Chickens.... (Or, how do you eat someone so cute?)

When I was a kid, I remember meeting Arnold, my grandparents' hog, during summer vacation.

I also remember eating Arnold, my grandparents' breakfast sausage, during Christmas vacation.

For a lot of farm folk, that's just the way of things.  But we're technically not farm folk, as much as we like pretending.  Our little homestead is right in the middle of the city, and we don't have a huge flock of chickens, we have seven.  Eating them is just right out of the question, at least for us.

This is a dilemma all backyard chicken fanatics must face at some point:  are your birds for food or for fun?  While I grant that there can be some of both, this decision is really critical from a cost perspective; veterinarian bills alone could cripple your efforts at sustainability if you have some feathered friends in your backyard instead of some organic working capital.

That having been said, yes, our ladies have names:  Duck, Smokey Lonesome, Big Myrtle, Spectacles, Edna Flapjacks, and from our smaller second flock Dot and Bombarella.  Amelia and Little Myrtle, rest their little souls, fed the local raccoon population before we figured out how to properly secure the coop.

Which brings up a related subject -- depending on your local ordinances, where you put your chickens may have an effect on how you feel about them, and how you feel about eating them.  In College Station, chicken tractors and other portable devices are not allowed in the city limits.  The coop must be at least 100 feet from the nearest domestic building.  This puts them right outside our back door.

After we solved the smell problem (see deep bedding method in Bedtime for Bombarella), we were left with the no less significant problem that the ladies were now close enough to be members of the family.  We had originally intended to eat them, you see, but this is no longer possible.  They lay a lot of eggs (we're averaging 1 a day from each bird, in all seasons and all kinds of weather, including a hurricane), and we eat a lot of eggs, but we just can't eat the chickens themselves.

Oh, we thought we could find a way originally.  College Station does not allow roosters, and had any of them been mis-sexed by the feed lot, we intended to have homegrown fajitas... but they were all hens, and now we're just going to have to live with the consequences.

So, unless you are a hard-hearted sort, you might want to consider your backyard birds to be a source of delicious eggs... and not meat.  Just a thought.

Happy farming!

Bedtime for Bombarella... Best Practices in the Coop

We are constantly amazed at the capacity for human beings to ignore the obvious. 

What's the number one complaint about chicken coops?  Yup.  The smell.  What's the best possible solution?  Daily cleaning?  Bah!  You'd go crazy inside of a week.  Little air freshener thingies like you hang on your rearview mirror?  Puhlease.

No, the best solution is proper bedding.  And by proper bedding, we mean *DEEP* bedding.  There are numerous suggestions out there, including shavings, shredded paper, etc.  However, it astounds us (especially at this time of year) that people don't think of the obvious.

What do you have a lot of (maybe even too much of) every autumn?  That's right - leaves!

We happen to be fortunate in that regard, as we have a mixture of deciduous trees which defoliate at different times of year.  Elm, red oak, shumard oak, chinquapin oak, water oak, post oak, lots of lantana and hibiscus, and various shrublike undergrowth we haven't chopped out yet and don't know what it is, in addition to all our mustang grapes and garden veggies (which also qualify as leaves, doncha know!)

Every winter, we put in a good 2-3 feet of leaves, stomped down, and by spring the ladies have turned it over, pooped it clear through, and generally made of it the best possible compost you could imagine. 

And best of all, there's NO SMELL.  NONE.  Let me repeat -- that chicken coop stench you remember from visiting a factory farm as a kid, and being so repulsed you became a vegetarian for a while (or maybe even forever)?  It's NOT THERE.

So, if you have chickens, and you have trees, you're in business!

Happy farming!

Mad City Chickens is now available on DVD!

Backyard chickens are not a new phenomenon, by any stretch of the imagination.  In Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas makes a particular point of the fact that her connubial bliss is less dependent upon a happy choice of husband, and more dependent upon a full larder, and well tended poultry.

Our own chickens are more important to us than a lot of other material items pop culture tells us we must purchase.

For anyone considering getting into the backyard chicken habit, I highly recommend this movie!