Instinct Supplied to Hens

"Instinct Supplied to Hens" by Charles Battell Loomis is a humorous and satirical exploration of human nature and the absurdities of modern life, framed through the lens of poultry. The book presents a whimsical narrative featuring hens endowed with human-like instincts and emotions, allowing Loomis to cleverly comment on societal norms and the quirks of everyday existence. With a blend of wit and charm, the author invites readers to reflect on their own behaviors and the quirks of humanity, all while entertaining them with the antics of his feathered protagonists.

• Short story

								
A company has just been formed in New Jersey for the purpose of
supplying instinct to hens. Such well-known farmers as Frank R.
Stockton, Russell Sage, and Bishop Potter are stockholders in it, and
if filling a long-felt want is all that is needed, the success of the
company is already assured.

No one who has ever dabbled in hens needs to be told that the
gallinaceous birds have no instinct whatever. Some have blind luck,
but a hen with instincts in good working order would be an anomaly.

I visited Mr. Stockton at his extensive farm in New Jersey in
order to find out what I could about the project. I found him in
a frock-coat and overalls, training a squash-vine up a maple-tree.
He greeted me cordially, and asked me to come and see his
tomato-trenches. He also showed me quite an extensive area covered
with birch poles for his radishes to climb on. He was very urbane,
and willingly told me all about the company.

“No man,” said he, sitting down on one of his largest cucumbers and
motioning me to a seat on another, “who has ever kept hens but has
wondered why they were not provided with a good commonsense brand of
instinct. No animal needs instinct more than a hen. It was to supply
this need that our company was formed. You know that if you put a
hen on cobblestones, she will brood over them with all the devotion
possible, and if at the end of three weeks you put a baby chicken
under her, her--what you might term false instinct--will cause her to
cluck and call to the cobble to come forth and follow her.”

I admitted the force of his remark, because when a boy I had once
set a hen on some green apples, and she had covered them without a
murmur for a week, when I took pity on her and replaced them with
real eggs. The following day, not liking the feeling of the eggs,
she left them, and gathering together the apples that I had left
scattered upon the barn floor, she sat on them again.

I told this experience to Mr. Stockton, and he said: “If she’d had a
few of our instinct-powders before sitting she would have repudiated
the fraud at once. Is it instinct, or the lack of it,” he continued,
“that makes a heavy Light Brahma plant a ponderous and feathered foot
upon her offspring and listen calmly to their expiring peeps? It’s
lack of it; she needs one of our powders.”

I made a mental calculation of the number of chickens that I had seen
sacrificed in that way by motherly and good-natured hens who would
have felt hurt if you had told them that they did not know how to
bring up their young.

We had risen, and were now walking as we talked, and we soon came to
Mr. Stockton’s corn-trellises. He is a great believer in climbing,
and it was a pretty sight to see his corn waving in the breeze that
blew through the trellis netting.

“Poultry-raising would be an unmixed joy,” said he, as he picked a
turnip and offered it to me, “if a fellow wasn’t constantly running
up against this lack of instinct on the part of the fowls. If a hen
had instinct she’d know enough to keep her mouth shut when she laid
an egg; but as it is, she cackles away like a woman with a secret,
and before she knows it her egg is on the way to the table. But the
aim of our company will be to furnish each hen with a sufficient
amount of instinct to render her profitable to her master. When she
has that instinct she will not sit on her nest long after her eggs
have been removed; she will not walk off through the long grass,
calling to her brood to follow her, when the chicks have all been
swallowed by the treacherous domestic cat; and she will not do the
thousand and one things that any hen, no matter what her breed or
breeding, will do, as it is.”

I told Mr. Stockton, as I shook hands with him in parting, that there
was not a farmer, either amateur or professional, in the whole Union,
who would not be glad to purchase a package of his instinct-powders;
and as I left the genial granger, he was putting cushions under his
watermelons so that they would not get bruised by contact with the
earth.
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