Celebrating the Chicken With a Grain of Irony

We met in Maryland.

Her name was Bettina, and we bonded instantly. As I held her tenderly on this sunny June morning in rural Poolesville, she looked up at me as if to say, “Oh, my Howard.” The depth of feeling was mutual.

Oh, my chicken.

All right, I’m exaggerating. I was smitten, she wasn’t.

She isn’t really my chicken, after all. I’m only her patron. A 1 1/2-year-old white laying hen on the mend from horrific mistreatment, she’s now at Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary after being rescued from an egg factory farm some weeks ago. She was headed for extinction after reaching an age when hens’ egg yields drop, they are deemed spent and are slaughtered for meat.

I was at Poplar Spring with my wife to meet the beneficiary of chicken sponsorship--a year of feed, straw bedding and veterinary care purchased in my name--that my daughter had given me for Father’s Day.

Bettina had arrived in terrible shape, too emaciated and weak to eat or drink on her own, and almost completely bald, having lost most of her feathers when rubbing against the tiny wire cage where she had lived her entire life with perhaps half a dozen other hens. Like nearly all chickens raised for eggs, these tenement dwellers were packed too tightly to extend their wings or even properly sit, and were debeaked to stop them from pecking at each other when stressed. In addition, Bettina’s comb was bloated from malnutrition, and she had a large cyst above one eye.

Welcome to the reality of chickendom.

I mention Bettina now because of “The Natural History of the Chicken,” a distinctive, quite wonderful, at once touching and funny film by Mark Lewis airing Wednesday on PBS. What’s he up to?

“I wanted to celebrate the chicken,” the L.A.-based filmmaker said by phone recently.

Don’t get him wrong. He is no crusader or fanatical hen hugger like, well, yours truly. He eats chickens, after growing up with them on a farm in Australia. What bothered him, though, was the widely held belief that chickens were worthless and cowardly. “My knowledge of chickens really suggested the opposite,” he said. “I wanted to give the chicken a new round of respect.”

Mission accomplished.

Lewis does this by smoothly mingling a wide variety of chicken experiences, often with playful humor. First comes the intense devotion of Karin Estrada of West Palm Beach, Fla., for Cotton, the rooster she calls her “little soul mate.”

At this point, some of you may recoil, believing both Lewis and this flamboyant woman to be utterly mad or that his goal here is to ridicule extremist fowlphiles. Later in the film, moreover, Estrada recites a poem about Cotton, bathes and blow dries her “baby,” takes him for a dip in her pool and spin in her car (presumably seat-belted) and turns on PBS for him when she leaves him at home, because “he loves Pavarotti.” Go figure. I’d have thought him more of a U2 kind of rooster.

It’s soon apparent, though, that instead of making fun, Lewis is disdaining the pretensions of natural history and going mainly for irony and the eclectic. That includes soft-spoken Joseph Martinez, who expresses profound respect for the chickens he raises, and gives them the run of his gentrified farm in Virginia, closely observing their “happy” behavior and admiring “their own chicken intelligence.”

The compassionate farmer adds: “I know they communicate like you and I communicate.” Then he takes a pair to the barn and snaps their necks. Mealtime.

Lewis also flashes back some years to a headless rooster that went on to brief celebrity after somehow surviving the ax. And displaying his wit and narrative chops, Lewis is at a cluster of upscale homes in Oxford, Ohio, where suburbanites recall their bitter legal dispute with a neighbor over noise from 100 roosters (they counted 20,000 crows per day) he was raising as cockfighters.

Ignored here is the savagery of cockfighting, a practice allowed only in New Mexico, Louisiana and Oklahoma, yet carried on illegally elsewhere. But we do learn from one breeder, a deep thinker, that these birds have “two purposes in life--to produce and to kill other roosters. That’s the way they came out of the jungle.” That would be the rooster jungle, of course.

Lewis in no way depicts chicken life as mirthful. Throughout his film are grim factoids (“This year 8 billion chickens will be slaughtered to meet consumer demand”), and he touches briefly on the grisly dark side of the egg industry, filming a factory farm interior where 250,000 hens are crammed into wire cages, eight tiers high.

Even this is not the worst of it compared with what I saw recently of a large egg-producing plant in separate undercover footage from the group Compassion Over Killing: row after row of hens squeezed together, including dead, sick and injured ones dying slowly and painfully after getting heads and limbs tangled in the wire mesh of their cages. It’s cheaper to let them anguish and die, apparently, than to care for them.

Much lighter than this is the Lewis film’s visit with Janet Bonney, a Harpswell, Maine, woman who earned headlines in 1995 by giving mouth-to-beak resuscitation to Valerie, her free-ranging hen she had discovered frozen stiff in the snow and seemingly dead. She reenacts the rescue--and reports Valerie’s supposed brush with afterlife in a tunnel with a light at the end--using a dead hen that Lewis said he got from a nearby farm.

Reenacted, too, is the final segment delivering the film’s message about respect, with a pastor, Joseph Tauer, reading his ode to the late, great Japanese silky bantam hen, Liza, and her “great depth of chicken wisdom.” Rebutting that old saw equating chickens with cowardice, Tauer recalls witnessing Liza’s “supreme, heroic and selfless act” the day a hawk dove at her helpless chicks in rural Texas. So much for chickens being “chicken.”

Postscript on Bettina: She is making strong progress, thanks to doting care from Terry Cummings and Dave Hoerauf, who operate Poplar Spring. At this early stage of her recovery, a looker she is not. But what do I know? As I held her, an amorous rooster named Casper made his way over from the barn and tried to impose his own chicken wisdom on her.

And Lewis, whose previous films include “Cane Toads: An Unnatural History” and “Rat?,” envisions “The Natural History of the Chicken” being the first of a trilogy on farm animals. He thinks of himself as being most like Martinez, the gentle Virginian who respects the chickens that end up on his family’s dinner table. And who would argue against showing them kindness before they are killed for food?

My thoughts go to Bettina, though, and how the highest respect one can give animals is to treat them humanely--and let them live.

*

“The Natural History of the Chicken” can be seen Wednesday at 8 p.m. on KCET.

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.