Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and anyone who knows me, knows I'm a morning person.

I often share my mornings with a few special girls. Almost time to wake my girls up. Just heading out to my backyard to visit my chickens. There's Harriet and Tracy, Snickers and Janet. Oh, yes, Buff Orpington Becky. She's the chicken with the good feathers. Now actually, it would take too long to introduce them all. Good morning, ladies. Oh, nobody's up. Too dark. Okay, here we go. Come on.

Like so many before me, I'm a victim of something known as chicken math. You see, you start with just a couple birds, but pretty soon, it's impossible to resist getting more. Before you know it, you've got a whole flock. In my case, what began as a 2016 Christmas gift of three original hens is now a bustling coop with 25 girls and one mean little roo, named Rockim, and I found a kindred spirit.

Tove Danovich: Currently, I have eight chickens. That number has fluctuated over the years. I started with three. I thought, it's just my husband and I, we just need some eggs, three is a reasonable number of chickens. Then as will happen, it's such a well-known phenomenon, people refer to it as chicken math, we wound up with a lot more than three times over the years. They got a lot less practical in terms of breeds as the years went on as well. Now I just want to have the silliest-looking chickens out there.

My name is Tove Danovich, and I'm a freelance journalist and the author of "Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People who Love Them."

Melissa Harris-Perry: It might seem a little strange to keep chickens in our backyards, especially in the urban landscape of Portland, Oregon, where Tove lives. Chickens aren't exactly what we think of as cuddly pets. For many, they're just nameless, faceless food, but once you get to know them, it's clear there's so much more to these feathered fowl. I sat down with Tove to explore the wonderful and sometimes weird world of chickens, and the people who love them.

Tove Danovich: You don't expect to fall in love with them. Like they're just chickens when you get them. I knew I liked them well enough to take care of them, do all the things a responsible owner should do, but I really didn't think that they would kind of capture my heart. Once you start spending time with them, and you learn more about chickens don't just come in those classic chicken colors, they have poofs on their head, they have funny bustles, the ways that they're shaped makes the move differently.

You just become really enchanted by the world of chickens, and suddenly, you have to have all of the chickens [chuckles] around you all the time. Three just doesn't seem like nearly enough to see running around your yard.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The world of chickens includes chickens, but also the people who are chicken people. One of your first chicken people in your life was your grandmother. Tell me about her and her chickens.

Tove Danovich: My family came over to settle in North Dakota, we have multiple generations of farmers. She started telling me stories about how her mother had chickens when she was growing up. She raised them for what was known as egg money at the time and is a hugely common phenomenon if you have any farming family in your history. That's where the women got to contribute to the household by raising chickens. She was so excited to tell me all these stories about chickens.

We started bonding over them even though her experience of having chickens back in mid-century America was very different from the world of chickens today. By and large, these were food-producing animals, you would have a flock of maybe 100 or so, three is a big difference. Having chickens on this small scale in our small urban backyards with the zoning requirements and everything that comes with it, allows us to get up and close with chickens in a way that I think was not possible in the past. Backyard chicken people like myself, we're naming our chickens.

We're building fancy coops for them, giving them treats. I take my chickens to the vet when they get sick. This is all very unrecognizable to someone from my grandma's generation.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm speaking with Tove Danovich, author of the new book, "Under the Henfluence. These are a few of Tove's chickens. Now, Tove and I are just two of the millions of people in the US who raised chickens in our backyards. We are chicken tenders. While we love the fresh eggs our hens give us, well, we also just love our hens, and they just might love us too. You see, chickens can recognize our faces, and when they're happy, they can even purr. It's no surprise that many of us form an emotional connection with our chickens, just like with any pet.

Tove Danovich: People often ask me what the worst thing about having chickens is. I think it's that they die. They die for all kinds of reasons. Everything wants to eat chickens, and they can get sick. You don't expect the depth of your connection with these animals. I had these three chicks initially. I got them as day-old chicks, I raised them, they were in the coop outside. I was trying to train my dogs and chickens to get along, and unfortunately, that didn't happen. When I lose this first chicken, I start just crying, and I'm surprised by how sad I am.

Then more than that, I'm surprised by how sad my other two chickens were. It was that moment seeing how they were grieving for their lost flockmate that really made me reframe my relationship to chickens the way that I saw them. I think when we see animals that are grieving for the loss of another animal, that's a life that is important to them, and it's hard not to have that life be important to you as well. That was the moment when I realized that all my pretense about these being just like food-bearing animals had completely flown out of the window, was when I lost that firsthand.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Listen, I have for four years now put up with the meanest little rooster. Oh, my goodness, but gosh, the ladies in the flock like him so much. I know not someday so much grief the loss of Rockim, but absolutely keep him safe. Make sure he's in the coop at night. Make sure he's well-fed, because they're a little crew, right?

Tove Danovich: Yes, and they're flock animals. A lot of people are familiar with the term, the pecking order, which of course, comes from chickens. Someone was studying chickens and realized that they had these very specific relationships to each other and a social hierarchy. There's very social animals. My flock is always having these little dramas where they have friendship cliques, and then someone falls out for some reason, and someone's getting picked on briefly, and then they're back to being friends again. It's like a little soap opera in the backyard, which was amazing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As the backyard chicken-keeping boom continues to boom as more and more of us are doing this, we also find that unlike our beloved dogs, cats, and other often furry animals, there isn't the same kind of medical support for our chicken friends.

Tove Danovich: Yes, chickens occupy such an interesting place in modern life, because obviously, billions of them are raised for food every year in these commercial settings. We still very much think of chickens as livestock, agricultural animals, and yet there are these hundreds of thousands of households, and increasing, they keep chickens in a backyard setting. For many people like yourself, like me, they're pets. The way that we take care of pets in modern society is when they get sick, we take them to the vet.

The first few times something happened to my chickens that was beyond my capability to take care of with my little first aid kit and some YouTube videos, I started looking for a vet that could treat chickens. Even when I found some places where they said they treated them, they had never seen chickens before. I had people take pictures of me in the waiting room holding my chicken because they're like, "This is crazy. [laughs] Why is there someone at the vet holding a chicken in their arms?" They've maybe never even seen a chicken in real life.

We're at this funny stage where people are just now really wanting to seek out veterinary care for chickens and vets, of course, need experience treating these animals and being around them. It can be really difficult to find someone great. I'm lucky enough to be in Portland, Oregon, which of course backyard chicken makeover here, and we have an absolutely wonderful avian vet.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There's another part of chicken-keeping that I just love the stories of, and this is about show chickens. Tell us a little bit about that part of the chicken world.

Tove Danovich: I think people that don't know chickens have this idea of like, "You have the little red hen. You have the white chicken. You have the black and white chicken, and they're all chicken-shaped." In reality, there are several 100 breeds color varieties of recognized chickens out there. Then outside of that, you have all these mutt chickens that come in different shapes and sizes. Much like dogs, most of us are familiar at least with the fact that dog shows exist, those actually go back to chicken shows.

Chicken shows were the first place that we were showing animals and saying, "My animal is a little bit better than your animals, let's get some breed standards where we can prove it." Today, there are chicken shows, all over the world. There's an amazing documentary called Chicken People, in addition to, of course, the chapter in my book that really goes deep into the world of chicken shows in a hilarious way. People try to breed these chickens to be the closest to what is known as the standard of perfection as they can get,.

It's this ideal that someone came up with for what this exact breed of chicken should look and be shaped like. They take their birds all over the country to these shows where they can meet with other chicken people and judge these birds. It's a really delightful environment. If you have one of these chicken shows in a place near you, I think it's a lot of fun to just go in and see what's out there. A lot of these people, they're friends with the other chicken people that they meet at the shows. The only time they get to see them is this once a year in Ohio or in Boston, or wherever else the big show is that's near to them.

They catch up and they talk about chickens, and it brings people from just so many walks of life together in a way that's really delightful and wholesome.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Don't leave the nest just yet. We're learning about how chickens can be used in therapy, next on The Takeaway. It's The Takeaway. I'm MHP. We're on a journey through the wonderful and weird world of chickens. Our guide today is journalist, Tove Danovich, author of the new book, "Under the Henfluence."

Tove Danovich: In the book, I went out in search of a couple of programs, where they use chickens as therapy animals. I find my chickens extremely therapeutic. It's very meditative, it's calming, but in a lot of these programs, the chickens function as a social bridge. It's kind of like when you see someone on the street with a dog, and you maybe don't want to talk to this complete stranger, but you'll say, "Can I pet your dog? Like, tell me about your dog. What's their name?" In the same way, you come together over these chickens, and it's a way to communicate with people.

One of the programs that I visit is in Minneapolis at the university, they have a therapy program for the college students where they bring in a number of different therapy animals. Some people come every week, and they pet the dog. They want to go visit the cats but there's some people who are there for the chickens. The person who runs this program, Tanya Bailey, has silkies which are like the muppets of the chicken world, they don't look anything like a chicken as most people understand them. They're just fuzz balls.

They come they're in this little basket and they sit on the table and the students come around and they pet this soft chicken, and they ask questions about the chicken. Tanya who's doing the program is asking them about their day and their classes and how they're doing. If someone is struggling, she directs them towards resources that might be helpful for them. That's something that's super hard for anyone to seek out help when they need it, but having this ability to come together over chickens can be really helpful.

They're using things like that in nursing homes and other types of centers as well because so many people have a connection with chickens in their past. Chickens show up in every culture all around the world in some form. They're small, they're approachable. People have stories about chickens and it's easy for them to share them with other people.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I mentioned my mean little rooster Rockim, and in so doing, gave away I suppose that not only is chicken life fragile, but particularly the life of roos. Can you talk a little bit about all the boys and a little bit about what we know about what happens with them?

Tove Danovich: I had an experience a few years ago which many people eventually do, where even if you try to get chicks that are sexed ahead of time, it's not 100% accurate. Eventually, most people, you will get a rooster even if you try your hardest not to. In many urban and suburban areas, roosters aren't allowed. As the backyard chicken movement has been taking off, it's meant even more so than before, there are a lot of these roosters with nowhere to go, and there are only so many places that can take in roosters. This is becoming a huge issue.

Roosters, by and large, are really suffering under the way we treat chickens today. In the egg industry at large, we have a flock in the United States of 300 million hens that lay all of the eggs that you buy from the grocery store, wherever you are. These chickens are bred just to lay eggs, so we don't have anything to do with the roosters. They're worthless under the system that we've come up with and so they're killed. It's a sad part of having chickens. Roosters used to be the flock protectors.

There's so many myths about the rooster in history, and today, they're just this worthless add-on to backyard chickens, even though they can be really sweet and wonderful or sometimes annoying.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There's so much more in the book, but maybe as you're going to take us out, you could tell us the story of Thelma & Louise.

Tove Danovich: Thelma & Louise were my two rescue hens. They came from a battery egg farm. That's how most hens in the United States that lay our eggs, they live in cages their entire lives, and around the time of their first malt at about a year and a half to two years old, they're killed. As I mentioned earlier, we have these chickens that are bred just for egg-laying. These are the ones where the males are useless, and then we have chickens that are raised for meat, which are known as broilers.

Because those broilers grows so fast, so quickly, the price of chicken meat has gone down astronomically. When you have these egg-laying hens that are considered too old to lay eggs anymore, it's not even worth it to kill them for food. A lot of them are just landfilled, and it's really sad. As I was researching this book, I came to find out that in the UK and Australia, there are these really popular organizations that rescue hens. Instead of having them be killed, they bring them into people's homes.

I drove six hours or so round trip to Washington to get these two scraggly red hens who like were scared of the sky when they got them from this farm, they didn't understand treats. It took them a while to figure out how to do things that most chickens do naturally. They arrived at home, they're missing feathers all over the place, one's neck is just completely naked, but over the years that I had these hens, who I named Thelma & Louise, of course, they learned how to become chickens. I got them in 2020, so I'm stuck at home along with everyone else.

The thing that I did for fun is I watched these chickens and how they came to really like blossom in this new environment and learn how to be members of the flock. They couldn't fly when I got them at first, and eventually, their wings got strong enough that they managed to get some lift running around the yard. It was just such a celebratory moment when they did all of these things that the rest of my flock did so easily, but it was something I really had to watch them come into. It was a delightful experience and they had laid like 500 eggs between the two of them before.

They both did pass away after I finished the book from various cancers which is very common in these chickens that are bred to lay a bunch of eggs.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In the book, you ask the question, what is a good life for a chicken? Do you feel like you found an answer?

Tove Danovich: A lot of the things that I discovered really made my flock happy are just meeting their basic needs. As a human, it's really hard for me to think that like that's all it could be is food, shelter, a place to go exploring, nice bugs, and a little patch of sunshine, but I think for chickens that's really all it comes down to. Is like they want a group of friends that's stable, they want a safe place to sleep. They do really like a treat, and especially more so like everyone else does.

I think their needs are really simple and that makes it all harder to see how much we don't give that to a lot of chickens in our agricultural system. Their wants are so simple and they're so happy and they really thrive when we give that to them when we give them good lives, where they get to just be safe and give us some eggs in return.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tove Danovich, freelance journalist and author of "Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People who Love Them." Tove, thanks for sharing your stories with us.

Tove Danovich: Thanks for talking about chickens with me.

[00:20:36] [END OF AUDIO]

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