Which Came First?

Question: Why would the average Dartmouth graduate (or the exceptional one, for that matter) want to read a book about chickens? Answer: Because Page Smith, the distinguished historian, Dartmouth A.B. and Harvard Ph.D., has written an absolutely irresistible one.

Is it a book about raising chickens? Yes. Is it a history of chickens? Yes. A chicken philosophy? Yes, and a mine of chicken folklore, too. There's also a detailed account of cock-fighting. (The weakest part of the book, I think.)

How sound is this book scientifically? Completely. Smith wrote it in collaboration with a biologist colleague. Is it fun to read? The whole book is a pleasure; the second half is one of the most delightful pieces of writing I've come across in years.

Probably the best thing in the book is Smith's history of chickens in America. For the first couple of hundred years, it was much the same as the history of chickens in classical Greece or in Renaissance Italy. Every farmer - and a remarkable number of city people - kept a few hens. They scratched around, clucked, laid fertile eggs, sat on them, raised broods of peeping chicks.

Then a cycle of changes began which is still continuing. It began innocently enough with the importation of exotic new breeds from China in the 1840s, and the great Boston Poultry Show of 1849. Two generations of Americans became poultry fanciers, and breeders of prize hens. Robert Frost was such a one; Smith quotes one of his two major chicken poems in this book.

But in the 1880s, in Petaluma, California, a new thing appeared. A farmer named Nisson started the first commercial hatchery. That is, instead of allowing hens to hatch their own chicks, he began doing it with machinery. As the machinery got more and more complex, the lives of chickens got more and more unnatural. By about 1965, the typical poultry operation consisted of between 50,000 and half a million hens caged for life in tiny wire cages - each hen surrounded on six sides by other hens similarly caged. All were (and are) debeaked, because such a bleak existence led the hens to peck each other to death out of pure frustration. All were, and are, on an artificial 21-hour day, drugged, hormoned, turned into what poultrymen themselves call "egg machines."

Smith tells the story brilliantly. He includes the first picture of this kind of living factory that I have ever seen, and the last I ever want to see. He goes on - in the final, chicken-raising section of the book - to make a strong case for a return to more natural methods.

But that's only a fraction of what he does in The Chicken Book. There is an account, both loving and accurate, of eggs. I would quote it entire, except it's 40 pages long. As it is, I will mention only the one fact that a hen's egg is a regular trove of vitamins - with the exception of Vitamin C. Why no C? Because baby chicks don't need it. In common with most other creatures, they can manufacture their own. Only man, some kinds of monkeys, and the guinea pig lack this ability.

There are at least a hundred other passages in the book that I marked as specially interesting. I'd like to quote them all. How can I deprive the reader of Smith's extended and very funny analogy between the sexual behavior of chickens and that of human beings in the last century? Space limitations, that's how I can. Never mind - there's a much shorter passage on another subject that I'll quote instead. It is bound to be of interest to any alumnus who may con- template raising a few chickens. Smith has been saying that milk is an especially good diet for table hens. Then he adds, "In Europe in the 16th century the Dutch had developed a technique for fattening hens and capons by substituting beer for milk."

I wonder if there's something about Hanover that leads to this sort of thing. There are exactly four pieces of writing about poultry I have ever encountered that I would recommend to a friend. These are Page Smith's book, Frost's poems "A Blue Ribbon at Amesbury" and "The Housekeeper," and a short essay on the egg as an art object, written in the form of a dialogue between an art critic and a hen. (You'll find it in a book called American Criticism, 1926.) That happens to be by Benfield Pressey, who taught English at the College from 1919 to 1961.

THE CHICKEN BOOK. By PageSmith '40 and Charles Daniel. Little,Brown, 1975. 384pp. Illustrated.$12.95.

A frequent magazine contributor, ProfessorPerrin of the English Department is author of A. Passport Secretly Green, Dr. Bowdler's Legacy, Amateur Sugar Maker, and Vermont in All Weathers.