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Under the Henfluence

Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

An immersive blend of chicken-keeping memoir and animal welfare reporting by a journalist who accidentally became obsessed with her flock.

Since first domesticating the chicken thousands of years ago, humans have become exceptionally adept at raising them for food. Yet most people rarely interact with chickens or know much about them. In Under the Henfluence, culture reporter Tove Danovich explores the lives of these quirky, mysterious birds who stole her heart the moment her first box of chicks arrived at the post office.

From a hatchery in Iowa to a chicken show in Ohio to a rooster rescue in Minnesota, Danovich interviews the people breeding, training, healing, and, most importantly, adoring chickens. With more than 26 billion chickens living on industrial farms around the world, they're easy to dismiss as just another dinner ingredient. Yet Danovich's reporting reveals the hidden cleverness, quiet sweetness, and irresistible personalities of these birds, as well as the complex human-chicken relationship that has evolved over centuries. This glimpse into the lives of backyard chickens doesn't just help us to understand chickens better—it also casts light back on ourselves and what we've ignored throughout the explosive growth of industrial agriculture. Woven with delightful and sometimes heartbreaking anecdotes from Danovich's own henhouse, Under the Henfluence proves that chickens are so much more than what they bring to the table.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      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.

    • Booklist

      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.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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  • English

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