A Cabinet for the Kitchen- Right out of a Sinbad Movie

[Paul K. Murphy]

https://www.1stdibs.com/furniture/storag...CFQkJaQodQkQBBw

I remember a Sinbad movie where the Cyclops captured the good guys. They all had to live in a cage and watch while he cooked them one at a time. Of course in the movie, the good guys got away.
Here is a cabinet that forces chickens to live in the kitchen...the HUMAN kitchen. Forget about choking, this is real chicken torture.
;-)

[AHill]

I am pretty sure the chicken coop (if it really was used that way) was for laying hens, and not for chickens that were raised for Sunday dinner. It wouldn't make sense to keep the chickens intended for eating inside the house when you have to go outside the house to dispatch them for dinner.

[Paul K. Murphy]

I'll give you that.

[Ruler2112]

This is freakin awesome! It'd be sweet to just go over & grab a couple freshly laid eggs for breakfast. Always interesting to see what people in the not-too-distant past used that seems totally alien to most people today.

Several years ago, a buddy married an animal loving hippie. Last I knew, they had over a dozen animals (including a chicken) living with them. All of them of course were given free run of the house, so you had to watch where you walked as almost none of them were trained to poop in any one location. (Don't know if a chicken, goat, or pig even *can* be litter-trained...) It about floored me when I followed him into the house one day & there was a darn chicken staring at me...

Just not something I ever considered before & here's a piece of furniture designed around keeping chickens in the house.

[Paul K. Murphy]

I love the staring chicken story.

[handi]

For most of human history in Europe, animals lived in the same building as the humans, even in "castles" and "Keeps" where Lords lived.

The animals typically lived on the ground floor, the humans in a loft above. The loft typically had a ladder that was pulled up at night after retiring to bed.

The larger animals (cows, oxen, horses) provided a great deal of warmth on cold nights, and keeping the smaller animals inside reduced losses to predators.

The animals also provided an "early warning" to the residents in cases of marauders. The humans were safer from attack since they could not easily be reached up in the loft area.

Being very separated from our food sources is a pretty recent idea.

Ralph

[petertay15]

When I hear of the infant death rate in the gold days, I assume some of those deaths were attributable to animals in the kitchen where the toddlers put anything in their mouths.

[handi]

Yeah, well that and poor sanitation, bad diets, the fact that most people believed water was bad for you and a good coating of dirt was "protective", lack of medicines, diagnosing disease as possession, that health was controlled by four "biles", and bleeding as a treatment, usually with an unwashed lancet black with dried blood, no real dentistry other than pulling, etc

Life was a lot harder then.

Ralph