One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned. Small chickens, just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one up in one’s judgements of life. If disease does not kill them they wait until your expectations are thoroughly aroused and then walk under the wheels of wagon-to go squashed and dead back to their maker. Vermin infest their youth, and fortunes must be spent on curative powders. In later life I see how a literature has been built up on the subject of fortunes to be made out of raising chickens. It is a hopeful literature and declares that much may be done by simple ambitious people who own a few hens. Do not be led astray by it. It was not written for you. Go hunt for gold on the frozen hills of Alaska, put your faith in the honesty of a politician, believe if you will that the world is daily growing better and that good will triumph over evil, but do not read and believe the literature that is written concerning the hen. It was not written for you.
Sherwood Anderson, “The Egg”, 1921
