While watching The Three Amigos with the ladyfriend, I noticed that the shots of the impoverished Mexican villages included a lot of chickens wandering about. In fact, this seems to be a visual shortcut when filming an impoverished village particularly a Latin American one. So I ask my companion, “Are there really a bunch of homeless chickens wandering around these villages? How would you know whose chicken is whose?” She said “Of course. They’re just, like, communal chickens”
Communal chickens? :dubious: Maybe it’s my American upbringing showing but I’d think that a batch of communal chickens wouldn’t last long before someone decided to have chicken dinner seven nights a week. I’ve seen the same depictions with goats as well and perhaps other smallish barnyard fauna.
So how about it? Do the rural villages of developing nations typically have ownerless livestock wandering around? I’ve heard about India and cows but I’m referring more towards animals intended to be slaughtered and eaten or at least milked or used for eggs.
I’ve travelled around the developing world a lot and I’ve seen chickens kind of walking around in villages, but I’ve seen it at my grandparents farm in VA when I was a little kid. The chickens had a roost that they returned to and layed their eggs in and didn’t stray to far from that. They weren’t communal, just loose. Kind of like a dog that isn’t fenced in, but still knows where his home is.
I don’t know if my grandparents locked them in at night to protect against foxes or not, but they did kind of jus wander around during the day.
Rural villages here in Panama certainly have chickens roaming about. They are not “ownerless,” however - as far as I know, the chickens mostly hang around the house of their owners. They get food there, and don’t stray too far away. If you tried to swipe the neighbor’s chickens I think you would soon have a feud going on. And if you happen to run over a chicken crossing the road, the owner will pretty much be there instantaneously demanding payment.
I asked this question to my relatives in rural China and they said everybody know who owned which chicken. When I asked how they knew, they just looked at me kinda crazy like I asked them how they could recognise their own child.
I remember an old educational film that was used on MST3K about chicken farming. In the film, they mentioned that the chickens can roam freely outside, but by keeping the coops about 30 (?) feet apart, the chickens return to the coop they’re supposed to nest in, indicating that chickens don’t roam too far from their nests.
Good lord, did I actually learn something from an MST3K short?
FWIW, there was also a restaurant in downtown Tokyo with chickens that would roam around out front and forage in the hedges between the sidewalk and street. Despite the humor potential, they never tried to cross the road.
It’s not uncommon to see free-range chickens roaming about in rural settings here in England; they return to the safety of their nest/roosting place in the evening, presumably because they know there will be food on offer, as well as for the safety element. A small number of them will probably be lost to predators and traffic. However, in these cases, I think the birds would all be the property of a single smallholder.
Yes people know which animal belongs to who. You may see goats grazing alone, chickens running free but everyone knows who the owner is.
Funny, you’ll see plenty of roadkill here, mostly dogs, horses or cattle, but I’ve never seen a chicken or goat. I guess they are just too quick to fall prey.
It’s hardly a third world condition. There are a lot of places in the US where people keep free range chickens. I live in the suburbs and for many years there was a farm remnant where the owner kept chickens and geese. They would sometimes wander out onto the road. I just don’t think of them as a sign of poverty or backwardsness.
I’ve also seen TV reports of some small US towns that have feral chicken infestations. They just need not-too-cold winters and the usual human to spam the environment with garbage.
A quick Googling lists articles on feral chickens in Hawaii, Florida, Guernsey (UK) and Bermuda.
Provide coops, food and a little protection and you can easily maintain chickens in a lot of places. Domesticated chickens aren’t that helpless. (Well, maybe not the chicken factory types.)
I don’t think the kind of villages where chickens run about are anything like your typical US suburb - probably the grandmothers know not only what you had for dinner, where you got it from and how you cooked it but what kind of sex you had afterwards.
It wouldn’t take too long for people to link the facts:
-Our chickens are going missing
-Many of them were last seen in the presence of Jophiel
-The smell of cooking chicken is wafting from Jophiel’s place rather often
And then you would get a quick demonstration of community-based rules enforcement re: thieving other people’s chickens.
I just wanted to add that I learned on a trip to Bali that all those wandering roosters really do crow to meet the dawn. And the breakfast. And the noon and the dusk the sunset and every damn minute in between.
Roast chicken never tasted so good as after two weeks of constant crowing.
I’ve frequently worked out of rural villages here in Panama. We often hire a local cook and buy a chicken to cook up for a meal. I’ve frequently been tempted to nominate a particular rooster for guest of honor.
I’ve often wondered why roosters are touted as the farmer’s alarm clock; in my experience they usually start crowing at 2 or 3 AM rather than at dawn.
Dairy farmers might, but probably not other farmers. Certainly Panamanian farmers don’t get up at 3 AM - they normally get up at or just before dawn.
The point is that roosters don’t really crow at any very consistent time, such as at dawn or a specific time before it. You can’t really use them as alarm clocks.
Fair enough. I just see them used in movies as a visual cue of those sorts of conditions.
I didn’t know that chickens were that aware of “home”. Even if that’s where the food is, I’d have guessed they’d get distracted by scratching in the dust ten feet over yonder. Then another ten feet… etc. Although I suppose if they have a nest they’d have a good idea where it’s at.