Very enjoyable + a good follow-up story if you liked it

My favorite part was Janet Bonney, the wonderful Maine woman, who resuscitated her frozen hen, Number 7. The redheaded lady in Palm Beach, honestly, seemed like a loon (no pun intended). I could've done without the fat guy in overalls imitating a rooster; that got old real quick. And Mike the Headless Rooster, gosh! Easy to understand why the owners got hundreds of angry letters.

The little white fluffy bantam, whose owner finally built her a separate house so she could hatch chicks was sweet. That preacher gave a nice talk about her, but he should've run outside with his shotgun when he saw that there was trouble and killed that hawk. Or even just ran outside to scare off the hawk or pick up the chickens or something, if he didn't have a shotgun (but if you live in the country and have a chicken house, you probably have a gun). He is a bad chicken caretaker, overall. But that's pretty much what you can expect from preachers: big talkers, bad at meaningful action.

And I don't blame those people in Oxford, Ohio, who sued the guy raising 100 roosters one bit. I can't imagine. That's the kind of thing where you wonder how people can be so inconsiderate of their neighbors. Just aggravating that it took three years to get it (legally) corrected.

I found out about this documentary in a wonderful feature about raising backyard chickens in The New Yorker, written by Susan Orleans. If you liked this documentary, you will love her story:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/28/090928fa_fact_orlean

If people saw a commercial chicken house in real life, most would never eat a Perdue or Tyson or any other commercially raised chicken again. The smell is intolerable, the piles of dead chickens, chickens cannibalizing each other, the flies—it is beyond disgusting. (See Food Inc, another documentary.) So I apprciated the free-range aspect of this doc.