There are chicken politics, and there is chicken love. Like life, it’s a balancing act. First the politics. Nine billion chickens in the US and almost one billion in the UK are killed annually for food. Before they meet their maker and are slid onto Styrofoam shrink-wrapped supermarket trays, most chickens spend their lives in super-sized, crappy (literally) sheds where they are force fed and so closely cramped together that they often cannot stand. The stress of poor nutrition and 24/7 confinement can lead them to peck each other to death. I’m not sure if those US/UK figures include male chicks annually culled (a neutral-sounding word meaning "killed"), but in Germany, some 45 million male chicks are gassed or shredded each year on Day Two of Life as if they were just so many concentration camp victims who had exceeded their useful lives. The purported economic reason for this planned extermination is that male chicks don’t lay eggs (surprise!) and they don’...