It was lucky I was at my desk or else I wouldn’t have seen them. Two foxes, big ones, and ahead of them flapping, hurtling, racing, mad as a damaged missile – the white hen. By the time I had unbolted the front door, they had had several seconds to continue their attack unimpeded. I was roaring monstrously, but far too slow to deal any damage – the foxes fled before I lay my hands on them. I chased them as far as the tall grass, but then I had to turn back.
The white hen was in the boiler room, buried in a corner with her back to the door. Perhaps she didn’t want to see her end if it was coming. Or perhaps she retained that childish notion that what she could not see, could not see her either. I picked her up and took her to the hen house, locking her in the enclosure. She was hurt, but less badly than I had thought. Her feathers littered the drive, but her attackers had not drawn blood.
I went to find the black hen.
I went through the garden, up and down the drive, and across the front lawn. I found feathers, a lot of them, on the path by the firepit. I found also the little hollow the foxes had made under the wire fence going into the undergrowth. I followed it, and as I advanced something moved ahead of me, retreated still further into the deep green darkness. But I came across a clearing covered in black feathers and I understood that I had come far too late.
Many of the pessimists whom I wrote about last week asked whether life was a good or a bad thing, all considered. One thought experiment they conducted was to ask who would be willing to live their life through again. The answer, they concluded sadly, was few of us. We may have plenty of pleasures and happiness in our time upon the earth, but when we consider the pains – grief, sorrow, illness – we find that they far outweigh the former in intensity, even if in quantity they may be evenly matched.
Our hens lived good lives. They had a huge area to roam, customers who did not insist on eggs – for neither myself nor my brother actually like them all that much – and food and water and love and warmth. Last year the smaller of the two black hens died of an illness, leaving us with just the big black one and the white one. And now the white one is all alone.
It’s funny the things that a death like this makes you think of. It’s funny really, that it can get to you at all. But I felt guilt, a lot of it, and still do in my way. Earlier that morning I had heard the hens, and I had thought then that it was simply the triumphant clucking of a successful egg-laying operation. But perhaps that had been a cry for help that I had missed.
When a friend visited, he told how all of his hens let him take them in his arms. Ours were much less affectionate. But still, you knew that they loved us. The white hen always let you stroke her if you insisted. And after the small black hen died the big black hen finally let us stroke her too.
More so than a pet, even, you feel a lot of responsibility for something like a hen. A cat or a dog has no real natural predators, at least in restive rural England. We cannot be at fault if an accident occurs because we have done our best. But with hens, it is a different matter. We could never have let them out, to begin with, we could have guarded them more carefully, and so on. Here, responsibility feels more firmly placed upon our shoulders.
Hens have personalities, you come to realise. Secretly, we’re glad that the white one survived because she is bossy boots and a real character. She is always bothering us. She comes and pecks my shins if her food is even a minute late in coming. She is always the most deranged, the wildest, and for all that the most human of the birds we had.
She survived a fox attack earlier in the year too. That was while I was away in Russia. She spent a week living in a little box on the side in the kitchen, and then went back to her business as normal. I am home alone, and boxes in the kitchen are beyond me, but I have brought her food and water, had various discussions and heart-to-hearts with her, and cleaned out her house. I even made her rice, which I was told is a particular delicacy among hens – and she ate the whole pan’s worth.
She limps now, but after a day spent hiding in the hen house, she now comes out into the larger hen run again and hobbles about. She is laying again and already talks. After the attack I was struck by how quiet she was – the only noise she made was terrible, heavy breathing. Understandable, given the circumstances, but so strange to hear coming from her when she is normally so chatty.
All this is to say that I was struck by how human she was. This is an obvious point, but still worth stating. In the relationship you have with these animals in your care they perhaps remain as animals – loved, but not quite fully human. And here the little hen was like a little child.
But the foxes were human too. This was the thing that shook me: the look in their eyes. There was something human about it, but not in any positive sense. We may, from Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox or else cute pictures on the internet, assume that all foxes are rascals with hearts of gold. Like wolves, we may secretly admire them. But these two foxes had a look of hatred, human hatred, in their eyes, mixed with what can only be described as bloodlust. They hated me because I had arrived and driven them off and in doing so had deprived them of their kill. And although I am often annoying, never have I seen that look directed at me. Never have I felt the full force of another’s desire to see hurt come to me, never until then. It is not a feeling I’d like to feel again.
The white hen will recover. She is a fighter, after all. When I was talking about the attack with our gardener, she told me a story about another house she had worked on which also had hens and also was the site of a tragedy. In this place, the hens, about twenty of them, roamed on a field with a pond in the middle. They were rescue hens, taken from battery farms – jittery, nervous, and undersized creatures who have experienced more than their fair share of suffering. But one day two foxes got into their field too, and it was a massacre. Every single hen was slaughtered, all but one. As the others were being ripped and torn apart, she had gone to the pond and flown in. She had gone against her nature out of an instinct for survival that even the battery farms had not extinguished. In a way, it’s inspiring.
Schopenhauer has a famous example to illustrate the truth of his pessimism. He notes that “one simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain… is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.” This is something we instinctively agree with (though as proof of pessimism it probably does not convince us), but I really felt its truth after saving the white hen. The fear, the terror of her eyes – and she had survived. How much more would the black hen have suffered, I can only guess. And all that for a tasty meal that would be forgotten soon enough. A soul extinguished for a full belly. The scales are not in balance, that’s for sure. But then again, neither the eater not the eaten is given much to philosophising. This is just nature at work.
The thought experiment, would you be willing to live your life again, is an old one. Nietzsche turned it around into a positive guide with his da capo (“let’s do it all again”) attitude, saying that the potential for eternally repeating your life should be the guide for how you live it. In the case of pessimists, they answered that we would not wish to live our lives again, and our certainty in this would only grow as we got older. Illness and grief are things the experience of which is simply too great, they argue, to let us want to see the other things. Mara Van der Lugt in her book, however, notes that the experiment uses a kind of sleight-of-hand. If asked whether we wanted to play our lives through exactly as they were, perhaps we would say no. But if we were asked whether we wanted simply to live again, then many more of us would say yes. No matter how well lived, our lives will always lack novelty to one who has already lived them. But a new life, with new pain and new joy, probably tips the scales towards life being something worth experiencing.
But still, would the hens choose to live again? Two or three years of roaming the garden, the drive, the fields, pecking at me and the ground, pestering the gardener and my mother, but ending up being literally ripped limb from limb. Would they choose that?
Our lives are unlikely to end in us being ripped limb from limb. But one thing that has stuck with me after the attack was how unnecessary violence is for us as human beings. We do not need to rely on the suffering of humans and other animals to get our food, our water, our clothing, and our shelter. That we do is simply a reflection of our generally inadequate attempts to build a better world. But still, it must be possible. Whereas for these wild foxes, at least for the moment, a reason not to eat our hens is not going to be forthcoming. All our feathered friends and we, their carers, can do is be extra vigilant.
When I went to see the white hen this most recent time, she was already racing to the door out from her hen run into the world, even with her limp. I have decided that she is no longer a symbol of a willingness to fight to live against the odds. Instead, dear readers, she is simply as thick as beans.