When I was a little boy, I remember following my grandmother out to the wooden chicken house on our family farm. There were eight or nine hens, softly clucking. We collected a few eggs every morning, stayed out of the way of the rooster, and I watched, surprised, when my tender, sweet grandmother slaughtered a hen from time to time.

In the early 1970s, I took a job at a brand new “industrial” hen house in Indiana. A friend of mine had told me about hen house construction and how I could work on the crew, building A-frame chicken cages and hooking up the snow-plow-like devices that would move the manure out of the giant manure pits. Everything was clean and spotless because there were no chickens there yet.

When the construction was done, I decided to stay on and help carry chickens upside down from the trucks and put them in their new homes. Chickens seem to become very quiet when you grab several of them and carry them upside down. But when they are jammed six to a cage, 20,000 to a house, 60,000 to the complex, their combined soft cluckings sound like a roar of a crowd after a touchdown at a football game.

One of my fellow workers loved to walk into the chicken house first thing in the morning and yell drill sergeant style, “Chickens!” For a moment, 20,000 chickens would go completely silent, then pick up one by one until the dense roar was in the air again.