Backyard Chickens: Emotional Support Animals, Or Evil Right-Wing Trad Plot?

Once the radical vanguard of an ascendant local food culture, backyard chickens have become common enough to be effectively conventional. Countless people from all walks of life have had backyard flocks. It is no longer strange to hear gentle clucking from the other side of a privacy fence while on your Sunday walk in your suburban neighborhood. Everyone has seen the green Araucana eggs. We’re all familiar with the same 10 or 12 names everyone gives their chickens: Henrietta, Dorothy, Pecky, Elvis, Red.

Backyard chickens are a bipartisan affair. In a long era of near-total polarization, the issue has been propelled by what George Washington called “joint counsels and joint efforts.” Left-wing foodies and Right-wing traditionalists are united on the chicken question, at least in practice. The former might see a backyard flock as an anarchic strike against a capitalist food system; the latter could view it as a return to a home-and-hearth normalcy. Neither is technically wrong, which ultimately amounts to saying that motives don’t really matter. A backyard chicken flock is just a nice thing to have either way.

So it was a happy thing to see Vice President JD Vance’s family come into the backyard chicken movement earlier this year by building a coop at their Washington, D.C. home. The Second Family spared no expense: Their sprawling chicken coop cost as much as $120,000 and was built to reflect the architecture of the Naval Observatory, the vice president’s official residence.

For those of us backyard chicken farmers who build coops out of old plywood and scraps of 2-by-4, the setup seemed positively luxurious (to the chickens themselves it must seem like Versailles). But the Vance family’s heart was in the right place, and, in any event, the coop cost taxpayers nothing, so who could complain?

Well. Last month, the Washington Post ran what can only be described as a searing exposé on the vice-presidential chicken coop. “Who will be raising the hens at the Naval Observatory?” the paper asked. “And why are the Vances taking on this project?” Vital questions, to be sure.

The paper consulted “former and current backyard chicken keepers” in order to “gather insights on what may be going on at Number One Observatory Circle.” The outlet said one “possible reason” the Vances opted to raise their own chickens was to eat the eggs they lay. It’s certainly possible!

The paper also speculated about possible “political motivations” behind the backyard flock, including implying that the Vances might be adhering to the ultra-conservative, ultra-online “trad” lifestyle, of which raising one’s own chickens is often a part.

Not everyone, thankfully, has such insidious far-right motives. The Post cited one Utah-based chicken farmer who goes by “they/them” pronouns, who views chickens “almost as emotional support animals,” and who will sometimes “cuddle up” with a chicken after a bad day. “You wouldn’t think a chicken could be such a comfort,” this amateur chicken farmer told the paper. (Surely the chicken being cuddled would agree.)

Let us stipulate something important: None of this is really reflective of what is ultimately the unremarkable and historically normal practice of keeping a small flock of chickens in your backyard. Most of us can’t afford a six-figure chicken coop. Fewer of us are adherents of the trad aesthetic, which is mercifully on the decline. And only a vanishing minority of us would ever attempt to cuddle a chicken, and even then probably only once.

At their best, chickens are thankfully not political tools or social statements; they are neither “emotional support animals” nor signifiers of a “trad” custom. Like all domesticated animals, they can be an incredibly useful part of a domestic repertoire. They recycle food scraps and turn them into eggs. They can help build compost for your garden. They’re quirky and at times hilarious to watch as they run around your yard looking like a cross between a Weeble-Wobble and a dinosaur. In short, they can be a wonderful component of what the farmer Joel Salatin calls “the wisest of wise traditions.”

There’s nothing inherently flashy or glamorous about raising backyard chickens. You don’t need a Cadillac of a chicken coop, and you don’t need to treat them as an internet lifestyle choice; they can just be a part of your life as they’ve been part of the lives of countless homeowners throughout history, taking part in a redemptive and normal ecological arrangement that benefits everyone.

Of course, if you don’t want backyard chickens, you don’t have to feel bad about not having them, either. It’s up to you. Just, whatever you do, please don’t try to cuddle them. It won’t end well.

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Daniel Payne is a senior editor at EWTN News. He lives in Virginia with his family.