[Spareribs]

Sometimes I talk to elderly people and they would tell me that when they were young, they would own live chickens and actually slaughter them. I think it's a facninating skill to properly slaughter a chicken and to remove the feathers yourself as in a DIY type of thing. I like the idea of picking my own quality pigeon, chicken or goose and eating it like how people did a hundred years ago and cooking it on an open wood fire.

 

[WraithApe]

This is one decline I don't mind. I live in the inner city and it's a really bad place to keep chickens - very inconsiderate to neighbours. One guy has a chicken coop in his back garden and every time they see a fox skulking around (which is often), all hell breaks loose - a cacophonous din of screeching and squawking - and that can occur at any time of the night.
 
On the wider subject though; we've developed job specializations precisely because we no longer have time to be jack-of-all-trades. There was a time when knowing how to keep and butcher animals was an important life skill, but in the world we've built for ourselves, such skills are unnecessary. If it's something you have an atavistic yearning for and want to pursue as a hobby, that's fine, but having a good understanding of technology (for example) is more important for day-to-day living.
 
If When the apocalypse comes though, we'll see a reversion to people lighting fires with sticks and hunting / slaughtering their own meat and then the modern-day chicken-keepers will be in their element.

 

[ProtegeManiac]

The real problem there is that the time it takes you to commute and work will make it nigh impossible to actually do all this. Back then it was easy - traffic wasn't a problem because total population figures as well as density were not problems. Back then all work was done at work, because few people could really be expected to do otherwise. Except that starting with people having their own typewriters at home and now computers, and then email/IM and phones, made the economy work even faster. Even if you have a strict "wont take calls from my boss after office hours" thing going on the reality still is that the economy moves a lot faster, you might work until well past 5pm, you have to go pick up milk or whatever from the store. Even that thing with milk is part of this change because it's not the 1950s anymore - women were marshalled to work in the factories while men fought in WW2, which was a war of production, but when the men returned the women were shoved back into the kitchen. They wait on their husbands hand and foot, and so as they work at home they can answer the freaking milkman. Now, the milkman can't exactly just drop the milk by the door because spoilage (and if they're going to go through UHT processing anyway then might as well do so in large quantities and sell them at the grocery stores) the same way that our hectic lives plus the need to cut as much of the middlemen costs means that you shop online and UPS just dumps your package at home.

 

Add to that city regulations. Nowadays some buildings restrict the cats and dogs you can have, how much more tolerant will people be of chickens? Will you keep them in your flat, especially when they can't exactly be trained to use a litter box or wait for you to walk them outside? (hell there are pro dog walkers now again thanks to our work scheds) Add to that the risk of migratory birds bringing bird flu, which can spread to cats and humans, maybe even rodents (while we neuter/spay and vaccinate our pets). There's a good reason why these regulations are in place.

 

The only way to really live with those skills is to be live in rural areas, or be rich enough. And by "rich" it won't necessarily be just farmers with a lot of land; anyone rich enough to buy land given it's not like we're globally still feudal for landowners to be richer and more powerful than the mercantile/capitalist class can get into all that. It's kind of the same thing when city people actually know how to ride horses - they're either rich enough to get a pony on their birthday and play polo at the country club, or they own a farm somewhere where the horses are, and again there's good reason for that as far as laws are concerned. Before we worried about smog and global warming, New York was dealing with horsecrap. It was an urban area with stone or concrete streets, no cars yet, and the population density basically made manure the pressing issue of the time. Tell your hippie friends every time they whine about cars and buses that it was basically a solution to a more visible and stinkier problem that seemed too good to the people at the time.

 

And speaking of horses, our relationship with that animal is actually a better and older form of the changing dynamics than chicken and other livestock. Why? Look back a couple thousand years and compare armies back then. Highly urbanized cities like Athens and Rome had armies built around infantry; if anything, between then, Attica was small compared to Italy (although the people in the heel of the boot were more Greek than Latin) and so Rome was able to field larger numbers of Italo-Greek cavalry (long before the Iberians, Gauls, Germans, and Scythians were drafted) than the state-funded Hippeis garrison of 300 horsemen (magic number since 480BC). China except perhaps the Han was a lot like this also. Now compare all these to the central Asian and Steppe nomads - heck the Mongols, Turks, and Persians didn't even use infantry until they settled in cities or assimilated more urban nations. At the same time look at how Peter Jackson increased the emphasis on the economic differences, as the Rohirrim in the films were all horsemen given their vast tracts of grazing land, compared to how Gondor has either heavy infantry (the standing army at Minas Tirith, kind of like the Praetorian Guard, plus the Rangers who were more like the original Dragoons, ie, mounted infantry) or rich people in gleaming armor (like Imrahil and the Knights of Dol Amroth; or the cavalry of the "Praetorians" led by Faramir). In the film's Rohirrim you can see how even poor people have horses due to their economy (ie selling war horses to Gondor, maybe even horsemilk for drinking as well as cheese making like the Mongols) - the children who ran away from Saruman's forces as well as the light cavalry at Pelennor fields. You can clearly see who doesn't have money to buy armor: Grimbold and the royal guard, Gamling, Eomer and the Eorrid wore ornate plate armor and plumed helmets, with lances, ornate swords, and bows (arrows were more expensive to ancient peoples than rifle ammo is to us thanks to factories vs how many geese you have to kill for their feathers) while some of the other horsemen had only chain mail, a boring and scratched up helmet, and they used axes which are probably the same axes they used on firewood if they weren't fighting Orcs (or hell, they were probably the ones who had to light up camp fires and kill fowl when the Rohirrim were mustered).

 

[Spareribs]

Good point. In the old days like a hundred years ago, pigs and chickens would roam the ally ways in the Lower East Side of New York City. It probably wasn't the best idea since there was already sanitation problems, reported odors and disease.

 

[ProtegeManiac]

Good point. In the old days like a hundred years ago, pigs and chickens would roam the ally ways in the Lower East Side of New York City. It probably wasn't the best idea since there was already sanitation problems, reported odors and disease.

 

The problem really is that hippies (like Thoreau) and Marxists (who just hate capitalists but totally forget how bad it was to be a worker in China or the USSR) tend to romanticize whatever isn't like what is the dominant reality, and often without regard to the rationale for how we got where we are in the first place.

 

In a way I can't totally blame them for it since I kind of do the same thing - I grew up in the city and my idea of a sweet life is to wake up in the morning to breakfast with fresh eggs and bacon or ham cured in my own facility, then go out on my horse  and ride around the country side. Then if the head of state says there's an a-hole by our borders I ride with my relatives while the sons of the farmhands will march on foot with us. The problem obviously is that this kind of feudal economy isn't sustainable. For one, even if laws are enacted to protect peasants, their lifestyle would not be conducive to educate them on how to live with the same laws properly (likely they can't even read), and even if I was a good lord, the reality also is that life choices would be extremely limiting to the peasants. The only way they can see the world is by fighting in the army.