we ask chickens to help; we ask chickens to harm.

The chickens I raise in my backyard are useful and helpful beings. They till the soil, eat the weeds, lay eggs, fertilize the soil which, because of a chicken-tractor coop, will serve as next summer's vegetable bed. They are part of a small system.

We also implicate chickens in large-scale systems, a very different design. They try to go about their lives in either system. Yet the manure that so richly feeds my small garden is violent if it is plentiful, such as the manure that moves from factory farms on the Maryland's Eastern Shore to the Chesapeake Bay's ecosystem.