Fowl Play: Sally Coulthard's new book reveals cost of world's chicken addiction

The story is just one of many episodes recounted in Sally Coulthard’s fascinating new book Fowl Play, which chart humanity’s relationship with the chicken down the centuries.

The book’s focus in its latter stages on the impacts of factory farming and global mass consumption of chicken also prompts an uncomfortable nagging question for the modern reader – has our treatment of the birds really improved much beyond the “justice” meted out in 15th century Switzerland?

It highlights the “cognitive dissonance” of many of us who eat meat but use a variety of mental tricks to disengage with the cruel conditions that many chickens live and die in.

As Coulthard puts it in the book, an “increasing disconnect seems to exist between our affection for creatures, great and small, and the treatment of intensively-farmed animals, especially chickens, as a commodity to be exploited”.

Coulthard, who is originally from Leeds and but now lives with her family on a smallholding in the Howardian Hills near Hovingham, has already written more than 20 books about rural life and natural history. She says the idea for this book was hatched – quite literally – at the start of lockdown while going “stir crazy” with three children at home.

“We decided as a little experiment we would incubate some hens’ eggs and see what happened,” Coulthard explains.

“We’d never done it before – we’ve kept chickens for 15 years but incubated them ourselves. The end result was we got one cockerel out of the whole lot and we then hand-reared this bird. It was the first time I had really spent any engaged time studying chickens.

“So this cockerel, which ended up being named Andy after my dad, proved fascinating and extraordinary in lots of different ways. I had no idea how complicated and sophisticated chicken communication and behaviour is.

“You could watch him with the other chickens corralling them to do different things and vocalising things.

“It was the first time I ever thought to myself, ‘This animal is intelligent’. I was also hyper-aware lots of people had panic-bought chickens at the start of lockdown almost like they had with loo roll. For some people, it was a desperate attempt to become self-sufficient and feel secure about food.

“I just thought this is such an interesting topic to explore because on one hand chickens are kind of this symbol of the rural simple life and yet at the same time at no point in human history has an animal been as exploited commercially for food.

“As with other books I have done, I thought I would dig into that and see what was behind this kind of extraordinary journey from an extraordinary South-East Asian jungle bird right through from being basically a symbol of misery meat.”

The book is far from an anti-meat eating polemic – with Coulthard herself a meat-eater who has farming in the family.

But with global meat consumption projected to increase by 12 per cent by 2030 – with half of that figure accounted for by cheap chicken – the book highlights the financial realities behind what is happening.

It states: “If a supermarket can sell a whole chicken for less than the price of a latte, whoever is being paid to raise those birds is receiving considerably less. Cost efficiency has been one of the prime movers in industrial chicken production for decades. The goal seems an impossible one – to grow increasingly larger chickens, more quickly, and with a decreasing input in terms of feed, energy and other costs.”

The situation is having all sorts of consequences – not least in the field of vaccines where the supply of egg-based vaccines used to treat illnesses like flu are now vulnerable to increasing outbreaks of bird flu.

Coulthard says: “I’m really keen not to bash farmers – my husband was a farmer and I'm acutely aware farming is a really difficult industry to be in.

“British farmers in terms of animal welfare are streets ahead of lots of other countries. Yet when you have a trade policy that basically says c**p meat can come in from somewhere else, what are British farmers going to do? It is a race to the bottom, essentially. When we make trade deals with countries that have got really poor animal welfare records, it just makes me think, ‘What are we doing?’”

Coulthard was keen for her book to highlight the intelligence of chickens and the sometimes Machiavellian that cockerels can make false food calls to lure females and even alarm calls designed to put male rivals in danger from predators.

"I'm really keen that we don't over sentimentalise animals. I think that's where kind of problems start because you stop seeing the animal as an animal. I love the fact that chickens can be sneaky, they can be chatty, they can work as a group and have all these complex things.

"Chickens have been shown to be able to do simple maths puzzles and it is incredible for a bird that essentially we farm and harvest as if it were a crop.”

Despite her concerns, she is still a meat-eater herself. “I kind of wrestle with it a bit because I have so many animals and see they have personalities and intelligence. But I don’t think that’s an argument not to eat them, I think it is an argument for being kind and responsible. My policy now is if we are going to eat meat it has to be high welfare and the same with eggs and all animal products. Ideally it has to be British and as local as possible, within reason. I’m in the position to be able to afford it, which lots of people aren’t.

“I think we have got so used as a country and the Western world of eating meat as a massive part if our diets that we have kind of devalued it.”

Coulthard says she is “gently optimistic” public views will change over time.

“I think consumers are just in the dark a lot of the time. Most people think all eggs are free range and they don’t know what the current situation is and there is this kind of wordplay about enriched cages.

“Most people want the animals they eat to have had happy lives.

“The book was always going to be a bit gloomy because that’s where we are but it is also meant to be a bit of a celebrationand a wake-up call to say this is a bird with this intelligence and heritage that is a relic of the dinosaur age – we should be celebrating this animal and yet we are doing this to it.”

Fowl Play is published today by Head of Zeus. RRP £20.