This is actually an email I wrote recently, but I think it's amusing enough to be worth posting as part of my philosophy, as I feel it illustrates some of my deepest held beliefs in the philisophical realm.
Lol, okay, I was thinking about it on my way home and I have WAY too many ways of explaining how/why I would raise chickens a certain way, and the upsides and downsides. Chicken raising is the perfect metaphore for government, individuality, and in general system stablity and optomization problems. It gives a very clear delineation between factors you control and factors you don't. I realize how incredibly hilariously brewer'ish this sounds :P. Possibly all of my ethics are actually derived from experiences raising chickens... or maybe it's the other way around!
Anyway, let my try one more time. Here's an incredibly general model for any multi-agent system.
We can a) attempt to control all factors or b) attempt to fail gracefully We can a) micromanage b) distribute
Keeping chickens in a coup is attempting to control all factors, micromanaging. Free range is full distribution, with elegant failure cases but more probable failures.
We can discuss politics. We can claim the individual knows what's best for them, free range chickens. Or we can attempt to make everything perfect for everything, authoritarianism.
The micromanagement will always be the most efficient, if you can do it perfectly and don't count in the effort of micromanagement into the equation. The Free system will always waste some, but will also be very consistant in how it does so.
In all cases a balance works out to be the best. Figure out the factors you can control, and how tightly you can control them, if you can get failure rates low enough on some dimension maybe it's worth the catestrophic failures when the happen, and the extra management headache in return for lower failure rates and higher efficiency. Like with any system it's tradeoffs. You come up with a function and optimize for it.
We have 3 choices really, fully free range, couped at night, or couped all fo the time.
So taking the system stability/efficiency angle. At night a coup closes the chickens in. You have a central point of failure presenting a fairly large attack surface. So I'd either want that surface to be bulletproof, or go with the stable and less efficient approach where failures are non-catestrophic. I.E. fully free range. Note that fully free-range chickens need to be more robust, and thus cannot be as good of meat birds as well.
I'm not going to insult your intelligence by going any deeper into the political angle. I think it's pretty obvious where that's going. Freedom of choice etc. But what it comes down to is that if I'm going to take away the chicken's ability to choose, to protect themselves, I feel I damned well better do a perfect job of it, which is why I'd be quite paranoid about getting that cage closed up perfectly, and I think why my parents gave up and let some of our large chickens run free after the chicken-house got raided.
As in politics the middle road is generally best, an elegant mix of all of the above. I'd probably try a closed coup with chickens free-ranging in the afternoon first, and see how well it works. If I could actually keep the hen-house a safe place, that seems optimal, if I can't though I'd bail back to free-range.
It of course depends on the chickens and other plans I think. If you are going to manage your chickens with fences you want basically flightless domestic birds, which means they can't defend themselves well and you probably want a coup, to manage their protection as well. Lots of factors weigh into the optimization problem.
And yeah, my parents kept chickens both ways, as i said, and I think they tried the middle-road before I was born and it just didn't work - probably they didn't do it quite right.
Anyway, chickens are a wonderful metaphor for oh so many things :P
- mbrewer (KB1PMC)