“God could not be everywhere, so He made mothers”
Robert Louis Stevenson
Compassion in the Chicken Coop
My wife and I had a strange discussion on Sunday evening whilst travelling home from being with friends.
She was raised on a farm in the Philippines, where compassion found its way even into the chicken coop. When they collected the hens’ eggs each morning, they always left one behind. It was a small act of empathy, a quiet gesture of respect toward the bird’s maternal instinct, as though to say, we understand what these eggs mean to you.
A hen’s response when her eggs are taken can vary depending on her breed, her instincts, and how often it happens. Most commercial laying hens today have had their brooding instincts bred out of them. They lay, move on, and lay again, their cycle reduced to production rather than nurture. But the old, broody breeds; the ones still allowed to follow the rhythm of nature show something deeper. They cluck anxiously when the nest is empty, search the straw for their missing clutch, or even puff up and peck when someone reaches too close.
In such cases, it’s fair to say the hen feels a form of loss. Not quite grief as we know it, but an interruption of purpose. In nature, she would gather her clutch, settle down, and wait patiently for life to stir beneath her. To take the eggs away is to sever that maternal rhythm, to break a small circle of creation.
There’s something quietly sad about that, isn’t there? The thwarted instinct, the empty nest, the silence that follows. Yet there’s also something enduring in the way she carries on — scratching at the ground, foraging, laying again. Life persists, even when the pattern is disturbed.
Perhaps that’s what my wife’s family understood: that kindness isn’t only for people. Sometimes it’s found in the smallest gestures in leaving one egg behind as a token of empathy for a creature that feels more than we often imagine.
Image by Copilot