Under the Henfluence

December 12, 2022
Journalist Danovich debuts with a heartfelt account of raising pet hens. After spotting a chicken coop in a Brooklyn front yard, Danovich was inspired to adopt her own upon moving to Portland, Ore., where she acquired Peggy, Joan, and Betty (named after the Mad Men characters). Chickens “can change your life if you let them,” she suggests, enumerating the benefits of keeping the pets and offering detailed portraits of hers: Peggy “was the bravest in the bunch” and Joan was deferential while Betty preferred “comfort over exploration.” Danovich grew her flock after suffering losses, including Betty’s death by one of Danovich’s dogs, which the author recounts with grief and guilt. She weaves in a powerful indictment of the poultry industry’s practice of confining chickens to tiny cages, and tells of how she rescued from an egg farm two adult chickens who had been so poorly treated they had to learn such fundamental behaviors as foraging and taking dust baths. Danovich’s commitment to her pets endears and provides an intimate look at animals more often thought of as food than friends (“They weren’t just any someones—they were individuals with a place in both the flock and in my life that would be irreplaceable”). Anyone who’s mulled the possibility of setting up a backyard coop will find this the next best thing.

March 1, 2023
Journalist Danovich explores the growing community of people who raise chickens. Urban and suburban dwellers are increasingly devoting whatever outdoor space they can muster to raising chickens, both as pets and for the eggs they lay. Herself a Midwesterner, and now an Oregon resident, Danovich has her own little flock of beloved hens, whose chirps and clucks she learns to interpret. She visits a hatchery where thousands of chickens are raised for the commercial marketplace. There, she uncovers the difficulty of sexing the newborn chicks, a vital step, since buyers overwhelmingly want only females. The excess male chicks are almost always euthanized, turned into compost, or fed to captive raptors. When Danovich's own birds fall ill, she discovers that few veterinarians have expertise in chicken diseases. Feral chickens still exist in the U.S. in warm places such as Hawaii and Ybor City in Florida. Not intended to be a how-to for amateur poultry breeders, Danovich's work does offer broad and compelling insight into how raising chickens transforms and enriches human lives.

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