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This book ends, as it began, with sitting—or to be exact, with Zen meditation. One morning in July 2005, the idea for a book appeared in my mind, chapters and all, while I was meditating. I was keeping chickens at the time; just a week before I had added to my flock the two Cobb 700 pullets whose short lives I chronicled in the introduction. Bred for meatier breasts and easier deboning, they weren’t up to their hybrid breed standard, and had been scheduled for culling—that is until they were given to me by my friend at the Poultry Education Research Center at Penn State. The day I picked them up, I wrote this entry in the journal I keep next to my zafu, or meditation cushion: “Poor things are still babies—handle easily, and have naked, unfeathered stomachs. They were reared to be killed for meat at six weeks old. Awful.” Zen practitioners talk about “beginner’s mind”: the lack of preconceptions, eager openness, and anticipation with which a student approaches a new subject . Well, when I first planned this book, I was thinking with “expert’s mind,” and I planned it to be rather different from the book you hold in your hand. I felt pretty sure what I wanted to say in this book that came to me so suddenly. I imagined it as a history of poultry science in which I would show how the thriving academic discipline had fallen victim to the rise of corporate in-house science as the foundation for a critique of industrial poultry production. During the five years of researching, writing, and living this book, although I have continue to mourn the decline of poultry science as a field and to protest the damaging global impact of industrial poultry farming, I have gradually sloughed off some of the preconceptions, settled opinions, and assumed expertise of that earlier researcher. I have encountered ambiguities, complications and challenges as I have explored chicken culture, and in response I have 198 Conclusion Zen of the Hen “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.” —Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb returned to something closer to what Buddhists call beginner’s mind. “Beginner ’s mind is Zen practice in action. It is the mind that is innocent of preconceptions and expectations, judgments and prejudices. Beginner’s mind is just present to explore and observe and see ‘things as-it-is.’ . . . Without approaching things with a fixed point of view or a prior judgment, just asking ‘what is it?’” (Hartman 2001). That daily encounter with the question “what is it?” is essential to a journal, of course, so I turn now to a journal entry to demonstrate what it has meant to learn the Zen of the hen. July, 2009: It’s one thing to write about Nancy Luce’s methods for doctoring her hens and quite another to find myself out in the chicken yard, with the old bare-butt Buff Wyandotte on my lap, trying to figure out why she’s got poop all over what used to be a shiny bald pate of a butt. Turns out she had a prolapsed cloaca: the inner puffy tissue was bulging out about an inch. So I remembered Nancy Luce: “you have some wit and a slender finger” and I pushed the cloaca back in. It took a couple of tries, because it seemed to pop right out again; what did Nancy do about that? I wondered. Since then, I’m not sure my hen’s cloaca has stayed entirely in its proper place, but she does seem to have a cleaner butt. And I have a less arrogant perspective on old Nancy Luce: she’s not quite the naïve rural character she must have seemed to me before. Seems pretty brave and straightforward to fix a chicken that way. Or perhaps I’m seeing myself as much closer to Nancy Luce. I wonder who’s older at this moment: Nancy as she was then, or me now, less than a year from my sixtieth birthday? There she was, all by herself, making a living out of her chickens and her poems, and feeling alone, mocked, irregular. And here I am, two centuries later, profiting from feminism and the “marriage privilege ” to do what I want with only minimal mockery: my endowed professorship and married status keeping me from the ridicule of...

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