‘Under the Henfluence’ book chronicles backyard chickens and their human enthusiasts

When Tove Danovich began keeping chickens in her backyard in Portland several years ago, she didn’t realize that what she was actually starting was research. That research would become a full-fledged book investigating the role these birds play in the larger culture and economy. Danovich also started sharing her journey on her Instagram, where most of the photos feature her “girls,” Loretta, Emmylou, Peggy and many more. Tove Danovich joins to talk about her book “Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them,” and why she became obsessed with chickens and their place in our lives.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Allison Frost: This is Think Out Loud. I’m Allison Frost. When Portland writer Tove Danovich began keeping chickens in her backyard in Portland just a few years ago, she didn’t realize that what she was actually starting was research. That research ultimately grew into becoming a full-fledged book, reflecting on the role the birds play in the larger culture and economy. From those first few eggs she ordered by mail hatched her book, “Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them.” Danovich shares photos of her ever changing backyard flock: Loretta, Emmylou, Peggy and more on the chicken’s Instagram at Best Little Hen House. Tove Danovich joined us to talk about how and why she says she became obsessed with these birds, and their place in our lives. I asked her how she thought about the kind of in-between place chickens occupy; not quite pets, not quite livestock.

Tove Danovich: So when I got chickens, I had been doing a lot of food and agriculture reporting for many years primarily, and people were really into local food in the early-2000s. I don’t know if you remember this, but ‘Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food’ was this bumper sticker that you saw on every other car it seems like. And people were really interested in growing food, whether from animals or plants, where they know where it came from and, and how that was raised and the effects it was having on the planet. I was living in New York City for a while at the time, so having chickens was not quite as possible. But when I moved to Portland, I thought getting chickens just seemed like a really wonderful idea. And who doesn’t like eggs in the backyard, they come in all different colors, so it’s not just the white or brown you get from the grocery store, but you can have green eggs and chocolate covered colored eggs and speckled eggs and it’s very exciting. So I went down that road thinking that kind of like a crop, they were just going to be animals that I kept and they would pay rent in return by giving me eggs. And then I really fell for them, and here we are five years later.

Frost: Five years later. Did you in truth pick Portland in part because of this zeitgeist that includes having chickens being normal, to have chickens in your backyard?

Danovich: It probably had something to do with it. At the time we were kind of going through a checklist of places where my husband and I might want to live and I lived in the Pacific Northwest for a while growing up and I always really loved it. Seattle, of course, is very expensive and Portland is lovely and has all of the things that we wanted, including people who loved dogs a lot, which we also have. So it was probably more dog focused than chicken focused, but they were a happy bonus.

Frost: You can be a dog person and a chicken person.

Danovich: You can, there’s a good overlap between the two.

Frost: And this lifelong dream which you talk about at the beginning of your book, to have chickens and when you talk to your grandmother about it, she actually gave you some food for thought. Am I right, in terms of the background?

Danovich: Yeah. So my family, back in the day, they are midwestern, immigrants who came and settled in the midwest, and were farmers and they, like many farmers, kept chickens in addition to the dairy that they had in North Dakota initially. And when I was telling my grandma about these chickens that I was going to bring home, she started telling me all of these stories I’d never heard before about how her mother had actually raised chickens for what was known as “egg money.” This was essentially how women, especially in the midwest, paid for all of the household expenses, was through chickens.

Frost: Oh, just the little household expenses.

Danovich: Yes, just all the household expenses. So the farm would pay for things like rent and the mortgage, but it was often chickens and women’s work which, still undervalued, that paid for things like food and clothes and groceries. And was this really interesting bit of history, both at large, and in my family that I hadn’t known anything about. So my grandma had all these stories about helping her mom process chickens, collect eggs, bring them to market in town. And when I told her I was getting three backyard chickens, she was a little appalled because you can’t have three chickens, because that’s too few. That’s not enough chickens, and she had a point.

Frost: I did notice on the City of Portland website that four is allowed and actually encouraged. It says that you do not want to have just one.

Danovich: You don’t, they’re flock animals. So they are very social. That’s a pretty important thing to them, to feel like they’re part of a group and they have little friends and hierarchies. The term “pecking order,” which many people are familiar with, that comes from chickens. So you definitely want them in a group.

Frost: Well, you mentioned when you went to get three, you decided on three. How did you decide on that number and which ones to get? You mentioned all the different kinds of shapes and sizes and colors of eggs. But that’s also because there’s so many different kinds of chickens, which I really hadn’t given it much thought at all and I thought, oh, well, that actually does make sense given the biodiversity of the planet. But how in the world did you decide among so many choices?

Danovich: There were a lot of tabs up on my computer for a long time. I wasn’t familiar with this until I went down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out what chicken I wanted, but they have these hatcheries which are places where people, whether they’re doing small farms or just a couple of chickens in the backyard in their suburban house, where often they go to, to pick which chicken they want. Of course, there are hundreds of chickens and you may want a different kind of chicken if you live in a cold place versus a hot place, you might want a different type of chicken if you have a family and you want them to be really friendly or kind of fun and easy to handle, versus ones that are really big or lay a lot of eggs. So I was kind of shocked and overwhelmed by the sheer variety and it was really just a matter of closing one tab after another until I felt like I had a good overview of the chicken world to bring back home. And that was a combination of chicken history. I got a Dominique, which was a barred black and white chicken, considered to be the oldest chicken breed in America, which felt a nice bit of history. And then I got one that laid olive eggs and blue eggs, because why not have a little bit of fun with that?

Frost: And go ahead and continue to describe these chickens, if you would the first three, the first girls in your flock and what you named them.

Danovich: So they were named Peggy, Betty and Joan after characters from the TV series, Mad Men, which was very big at the time. It gets rewatched often in our household. And I had been having a lot of trouble coming up with names for the ladies. I wanted to name them after country music females initially. But it didn’t feel like quite the right fit for these hens. So I was really thinking deeply about it and I just loved the characters and the variety and it fit them so well.

Peggy today is the only one who is still with me in the flock. She’s five and a half now, which is getting old for a hen and she, from the beginning, head hen of the flock. She was the first to do everything: the first to figure out food and water, hopping on top of the heat plate, escaping from the brooder where I didn’t expect them to be escaping and just perching, looking at me when I went into the bathroom.

Frost: And the brooder is?

Danovich: The brooder is the little box where you keep chicks when they are too young to maintain their own heat levels. So you need to put them in a small enclosed area with the heat source, if you don’t have a hen to take care of them. So, yeah, and she’s still the head hen of the flock today.

Frost: There is so much work that is involved. When you describe how much work this was to raise the chickens from the hens, and maybe this just indicates that I’m a very deeply lazy person but had I thought about actually having chickens, which has occurred to me from time to time in a very, very, very broad stroke kind of way. It would make me think twice or three times given the amount of hands-on care that you have to take until, how long before the chicken will actually start laying eggs?

Danovich: It depends on the breed a lot, but it can take up to six months.

Frost: I thought it was a while.

Danovich: A lot of people are surprised. If you do get a production breed, the kind that’s going to be laying close to 300 eggs a year, so those tend to start laying a lot earlier than fancier breeds that maybe aren’t going to lay as many eggs, but a lot of people are surprised by that and during the early days of lockdown when people rushed out and got chickens because they really wanted eggs, I was kind of looking at them a little suspiciously, wondering if they knew just how long of a commitment and time they would be waiting before they actually saw a return on their chicken investment.

Frost: I saw an article that you wrote, urging people to rethink this if that was why they were getting their chickens, to save money, for their supply and then they’re saving money. I wasn’t going to get into this until a little bit later - but can you just, since we’re on the topic now, it seems like besides the six month waiting period, why isn’t it true that you would save money owning chickens versus buying the eggs at the store?

Danovich: Economies of scale are a very real phenomenon, is the easiest way to put it. When you have a farm, even a lot of these cage free places, which maybe your eggs are a couple dollars more than the very cheapest ones that are available in the grocery store. Those hens are being housed in large warehouses where there can be tens of thousands, 100,000 chickens in one place. They are buying food according to those scales. The housing gets reused year after year. It’s very different if you live in a little suburb and you have six chickens or even if you have 25 of them and you’re trying to do a small egg business on the side. You just don’t have all of those deductions that these people are getting by way of doing this as a giant industrial business model.

Frost: It just doesn’t pencil out.

Danovich: No, it doesn’t at all. And part of the fun of having chickens is that you get to raise them well, and with space, which is another thing that’s not really possible to do in an industrial system. So I don’t think you would want to raise them in such a way in your own backyard, close to your house where you have to look at it all the time, in the same way that they do on these large farms. So there are a lot of reasons why they cost so much and when you see eggs in the grocery store that cost $12 a dozen, that’s not far off from what the true cost of raising chickens, where they get to have a chicken’s best life looks like, and still probably even a little cheap.

Frost: And we’ll get into more about the factory farming after we explore your backyard chicken experience a little bit more.

When did you know that this was actually something that you were going to dive into as an actual project? This was just more than a project, and there was so much here that you had to write about it.

Danovich: It was pretty early on in the process that I started feeling like there was more here. And some of it started even when they were just chicks, who were living in the bathroom, across from my office in the little tote that I used as a brooder for them. And I would just walk in all the time and look at them, as you do when you’re on deadline or have other things you should be doing. It’s much more fun to look at baby chickens and I just had so many questions about what they were doing, and why. And I love research, I’d gotten a lot of books on chickens from the library in Portland. Our library, a lot of books on chickens, it’s wonderful. But while they all had really great guides to raising chickens, they didn’t really talk about who chickens were, why they did the things they did. What was our history with chickens? Why do we have this connection with them that goes back 3,500 years ago now? We domesticated them. And as I started asking these questions and not finding a book that answered them in the way that I wanted to, that really showed kind of this love for chickens that I was also discovering, not just myself, but many other chicken keepers had. I realized that I guess I had to write the book I wanted to see in the world.

Frost: Yeah. Write the book that you would like to read if it doesn’t exist.

Danovich: Exactly. I think that’s how a lot of people wind up writing their first book.

Frost: Well, I love the way that you describe their behavior and certainly there’s some anthropomorphizing in there, just in the way you name the chickens and of course, so much more, some of the animal behavior. But I was particularly moved by the two descriptions, the lost chick call and the egg song. And I wonder if you could take those in turn and just describe the lost chick call, they’re both self explanatory to some degree, but tell when you first experienced that lost chick call. And it sounded like you were a little surprised by the intensity; the loudness, the intensity and the duration.

Danovich: That is all true. Yeah, when you get baby chicks, especially hens, you’re not really thinking about how much noise they make, but because they are flock animals,

they’re kind of constantly in communication with each other. And oftentimes, it’s these very lovely, soft little cheeping burbles that they just make all the time and it’s so relaxing to just sit with them and listen. But if you pick one of these chicks up for a little bit, because you want to handle them and they’re adorable, suddenly it turns into this just shrill shriek that they do over and over and over until you put them down and they get to be with the rest of their friends again. And it was one of the first calls that I figured out because the cause and effects of when it happened was very apparent to me. And I felt bad, keeping them from their flock because of it and it’s something -

Frost: They all make the sound, not just the one that’s removed, but the ones that are missing.

Danovich: Yeah, but mostly the one that’s removed. And it’s something that, in the wild when you have a hen with a brood of chicks that are following her, just throughout the grass or in the forest and jungle where they live, if one chick gets separated, it’s important for them to be able to find the rest or for the mother hen to be able to find them. So it’s just a call that’s kind of like “come and get me, like here I am.” So you want it to be loud and it is very loud. I could hear it sometimes when they would do it from a couple of floors away of our house. And we have an old house, so preventing sound from traveling is hard. But yeah, it was quite loud and I was really surprised again - which I talk about in the book - there is an overlap between people who like dogs and people who like chickens, but sometimes that doesn’t end very well as I discovered when my dog got one of my chickens early on and it was just really heartbreaking. I mean, I felt terrible, the chickens felt terrible. It was just bad. And this is also not uncommon if you keep chickens, whether it’s a dog accident, something like, things tend to happen.

And that’s probably the hardest thing about keeping these animals is that they can be really fragile. But I was burying this chicken and all of a sudden I hear this sound coming from the yard and I realize that it’s the lost chick call and the rest of my little flock of the “Mad Hens” were doing it and it just broke my heart to hear the sounds that I knew so well in this context. And when we were talking about what the time was that I realized there was a book, that really changed my relationship so deeply with these animals, to realize that they had these connections with each other that were so deep. We talk about them as flock animals and the pecking order, but it’s really different to see animals that have relationships enough with each other where they grieve. And how can I not respect those relationships if they are so important within the flock? And it really made me look at chickens in a very different way than I had before, even after months of having them at that point.

Frost: Did you think that you were going to eventually eat the chickens that you got when they would stop laying?

Danovich: Initially, yeah, that was my plan. Like I said, it was going to be a very transactional relationship, which is what a lot of people have. After about two-ish years, they slow down their laying. Most industrial laying hens don’t live very far past about 18 months, which is quite short, though not as short as the meat chickens. And so I assumed that was what I would do with them because what could you possibly want with a chicken that isn’t laying eggs all the time? And then I realized that there was so much more to these animals than just their ability to produce breakfast, and I joke that,

I’ll be having a retirement home for chickens once they start getting older, someday. But for now it’s still more eggs than I can ever possibly hope to eat.

Frost: And you in fact, stopped eating chicken, am I right? You were a chicken eater when you started this and then the loss of that one chicken, one of the effects of that was that you made the choice that you would not eat chicken.

Danovich: That is correct. And then I switched to not eating any poultry because it’s easy enough. And yeah, it really made me rethink a lot of my relationship to how we use animals for food and animal agriculture at large. But the way we treat animals in farming has always been incredibly important to me. And it is just overwhelmingly evident that the way we treat chickens and poultry is by far the worst of any animal in our industrial farming system. So that was something that was really easy for me to just make the choice not to be part of anymore.

Frost: [Can you] explain what the term free range means and doesn’t mean?

Danovich: Yeah. So egg labeling is very difficult to parse. There’s so many articles out there that are really great talking about, if you want eggs raised from hens that have happy lives, this is what to look at. And it’s so confusing from a consumer standpoint, which is very much on purpose. But the main categories, in the United States, the majority of our eggs still come from chickens that are raised in what are known as battery cages, about 70%. And those are small cages where chickens get, the equivalent of like a sheet of paper of space for each one. And when they are old enough to start laying, they are put in these cages with a number of other chickens, they lay eggs and eventually they are too old. And those barns are, quote unquote, “depopulated,” and the hens are all killed.

They’re usually not even killed to go into the food supply, because of the way the meat industry works with chickens and how cheap chicken meat is. It actually costs more money to slaughter these egg hens than you would get back in the meat. So it’s just a waste of millions and millions of hens every year. Not to mention all of the male chicks that are killed right after they are hatched and then sexed. And that’s a couple 100 million of them every year.

Frost: A couple 100 million, wow.

Danovich: So there is just an incredible amount of cruelty in that system. Cage free is becoming more popular. About 30% of our eggs are raised cage free now in the United States. In those cases, the chickens typically live in a kind of barn-like warehouses. They might have some places to perch or dust spaces, but essentially, it’s a lot of them crammed into a small area where they are still indoors all the time. Overall they have a little bit more space than chickens get in these battery cages, but it’s not amazing. And you still have all the same things like their beaks are trimmed to prevent them pecking from each other, which, the beak is kind of the primary way that a chicken senses its environment. And there are a lot of studies showing that they have a lot of nerve endings in those beaks and that can be quite painful for them. And they’re still killed, the male chicks are still killed.

All of the same general cruelties are still taking place and what we have left over, people having chickens in the backyard, your farmers market chickens that might get time out on pasture. That’s really a rounding error in the overall market for eggs in this country today.

Frost: And one of the reasons that is so cruel is not just the discomfort but also the prevention of letting the animal do the things that it needs to do, to feel normal, like dust bathing. Now, can you describe dust bathing a little bit for those of us that are non-chicken.

Danovich: Dust bathing is really funny to witness in a chicken. When I first got my flock and they did it for the first time, they flop in all these weird positions in some dirt that they decide is like the best dirt in the yard. And I thought that they had died because they’re contorted in this strange position. And then you realize, oh, they’re moving around, it’s fine. But they rely on dust kind of the way that we use showers, where instead of water that’s washing off all the dirt and other particles, they are getting the dust all up in their feathers, getting all the like oils, parasites, other things and then they shake all the dust out and that stuff goes with it. So it’s a really important part of the chicken staying healthy, clean, free of things like mites, which can be really bad for them. I mean, how a chicken gets around in the world, how they regulate their temperature is based on their feathers being in good condition and dust bathing and preening are both major parts of that, which they need access to dust bathing facilities and beaks for preening.

Frost: And battery chickens, another thing that you talk about later on in the book, is they lose their feathers altogether.

Danovich: Yeah.

Frost: I’d like to go back to the egg calls, because we kind of lost that there because we got so involved in the lost chick call. But one of the things that you discovered, as you were raising your own chickens at the beginning of the journey, was that they all had unique egg songs.

Danovich: Yeah.

Frost: Did that surprise you?

Danovich: I didn’t know the egg song existed until I got chickens.

Frost: I didn’t know there was such a thing until I read your book.

Danovich: Everything was so surprising to me about them, which was why I found the subject so delightful. But the egg song, which I can talk about a little bit more, it’s an interesting musical song. But it is a sound that hens make after they have just laid an egg or after another member of the flock has laid an egg and it’s this very loud, discordant call. I like to liken it to a John Cage kind of symphony where it’s like, clearly there’s something musical happening but it’s also not like a Taylor Swift song musical. It’s a little difficult, you have to think about it, but they all join in together and it’s so interesting because their voices, I can tell Peggy’s egg song versus Emmylou’s egg song versus Franny’s egg song. Their voices are all just a little bit different and they all kind of come together from different parts of the yard, wherever they are when this kicks off, and do this little two minute long egg song.

Frost: Two minutes for each egg?

Danovich: Yeah. And they don’t do it every time. And there’s a lot of theories about what the egg song is. Is it like a celebration that they laid an egg? Is it based on trying to lure predators away from the nest? No one really knows the purpose of the egg song. It just is this thing that happens in flocks that they all like to do together when they are part of a flock, which I find really lovely.

And it’s funny because I learned that the egg song and whether or not chickens do it is very cultural. So some people have flocks of chickens where no one likes to do the egg song and you bring new chicks into that flock and they also are like, oh, we’re not doing the egg song. That’s fine, we’ll leave it. But in my flock they all do and all of the newcomers do the egg song. I’m sure my neighbors would rather they were one of the flocks that didn’t, but I still think leaf blowers are a lot worse than chicken sounds. So, yeah, it’s quite lovely and I think people are surprised to learn that hens make this loud call because we usually think of like roosters and the cockadoodledo. But this is the ladies equivalent to that.

Frost: Well, there are so many interesting things that I never knew existed. One of them being the show business of chicken shows, which I guess, I’ve been to county fairs and you see these competitions. So you went to the, I guess the sort of mother of all these shows for poultry, the Ohio National Show. Why did you want to go to this, the ultimate competition? Why not something…

Danovich: If you’re going to go to any of them, why not?

Frost: The biggest and best, why not?

Danovich: The biggest in the United States, certainly, though other countries have a very long tradition of chicken shows. So when I was doing research for the book - I mentioned earlier, I love research. So I was reading a lot about chicken history and I found out about this thing called the Hen Fever that happened in Victorian England, where someone gifted the young Queen Victoria some very fancy chickens. And then everyone else had to have really fancy chickens and they had to find a way to compare whose chicken was fancier than the other chicken. So of course, they invented shows, and things like breed standards, where they could do that. And this all actually happened before things like dog shows. So the reason that we have something like Crufts or the Westminster Dog Show is because we had chicken shows first.

Frost: Fascinating.

Danovich: And I loved it. And the prices for these chickens back in the 1800s were just astronomical, like $600 in 1850s money for two chickens, which people think that we get a little crazy about our backyard chickens today in 2023. And I’m like, look at the Victorians, please. So I really wanted to talk about that history and I also wanted to see what was left of that today and that was how I wound up going to Ohio in November, and it’s very cold.

The Ohio National takes place at the fairground, off season. So it’s just these barns that are filled with, not just chickens, but all kinds of poultry. The people who breed these animals for show truck in from all across the country to go to these shows and they have friends that they see every year at the Ohio National and know each other. And if you have ever wanted to know, like, would I like this chicken breed versus another and you don’t want a lot of tabs, go to the Ohio National or another big chicken show because you will see every single color, shape, size, variety of chicken just about that is out there. And for me who already was really obsessed with chickens at that point, it was just a delight to walk around and see all these chickens and watch other people watching these chickens too, because of course, if you’re going to a chicken show, you are probably a chicken person, right?

Frost: I was going to say here’s obviously an economic angle here, but the people that are showing these chickens clearly love the animal.

Danovich: Yes.

Frost: And want to talk about it and have groups and they stay in touch, right throughout the year. Do you think that you might ever be tempted to?

Danovich: I don’t think so. It’s a lot of genetics once you get into it and then you have to think about breed standards and I enjoy too much having one of every kind of chicken,

kind of like Pokemon. So I just want to collect them and see all of their different personalities and things like that. That’s what I find really fun. But I’m very glad that there are people out there that breed these chickens so that people like me can have them and bring them home sometimes.

Frost: Well, I don’t want to let you go before talking about the latest addition to your flock, Thelma and Louise, who were rescue battery chickens. When you first decided that you wanted to do this, there weren’t a lot of options, right? Even though there’s millions and millions of chickens that are killed. Where did you start looking?

Danovich: Yeah. So these battery hens are killed at about 18 months. And in the UK and some other countries, people have, for several decades now, been trying to go to smaller farms and rescue at least some portion of these hens and put them into homes with people who want to care for them, want to give these chickens really their first chance at having a good life and seeing what it’s like to be a chicken in the world and go in the sun and have dust baths and things like that, treats. And so I started looking. In the United States, we have a number of wonderful farm animal rescue organizations and sanctuaries, and so I started emailing them to see if they ever rescued and adopted out these hens.

Frost: In Oregon and Washington?

Danovich: Yeah, in Oregon and Washington specifically, and of course, a lot of the egg industry is really, still concentrated like in California and in the Midwest, but we have chickens everywhere. There are always chickens who could use a home. And it took a really long time, I think about a year, in which I wasn’t emailing full time but I would email one place, wait to hear back. They wouldn’t have any chickens or they had at one point and now they didn’t anymore, and finally I found this rescue in Washington that had just rescued 300 hens from somewhere in California. They couldn’t tell me a lot about the farm other than they raised them in battery conditions.

Frost: And that was on purpose because the farms don’t want that information?

Danovich: Exactly. At least not this particular one, it must have been part of that specific deal. But so I drove the very long way all the way up to Washington and picked up these two very scraggly red hens who had just been rescued, I think, maybe three or four weeks ago, at that point. And I drove them back home and they were missing feathers all over the place. Louise - who wasn’t as badly de-beaked as Thelma, her beak looked almost normal - she didn’t have any feathers at all on her neck and she looked a lot, there is a breed of chicken called the Turken, that is bred to look like that. And when I started posting pictures of her online, people thought that she was actually a Turken and I was like, no, no, she is supposed to be a normal red hen, she just looks terrible. It took a good two years for their feathers to grow in the rest of the way and it was such a pleasure, I got them right in the middle of lockdown summer, nothing else was going on. And so I just spent so much time outside watching these chickens learn how to be chickens and see how their world was expanding, this time when like all of our worlds had gotten so small, and it was just such a beautiful thing to get to watch.

And I’ve been so excited to learn about more organizations that are actually rescuing and adopting out battery hens since then. There are a number on the West Coast. There’s someone in Missouri that’s starting an organization like this. And I think it’s a really great way to get into chickens, in a way that is really like giving something back to hens, who we’ve never even thought that we needed to give anything back to them. And I think if this book has shown me anything, it’s that they have played such a deep and important role in human lives in so many ways and they really enrich our lives, not just with the eggs they provide and things like that, but with their companionship and just their silliness and the way that they live their lives and just do these nice burbles when you’re outside with them and are so relaxing. And so I just really love having that as a way that we can do something nice, for chickens who need it.

Frost: Tove Danovich, thank you so much for this book and thanks for joining us on Think Out Loud to talk about it.

Danovich: Yeah. Thank you for letting me talk to you about chickens.

Frost: Tove Danovich is the author of “Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them.”

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