Brownie and Blondie

Oh, werd?
This week, Eric and I have been hosting two baby chicks in our living room as part of the "Adopt a Chick" program. As some of you know, we get fresh veggies all summer long from a Jersey organic farm. We also get one free range (like, actually free range, as in outdoors eating bugs) chicken per month in the summer. The chickens are raised and slaughtered by Farmer Ken, a genuinely nice guy who was concerned that the egg-laying hens he received from his supplier had had their beaks trimmed too much before arrival on his farm. For this reason, he decided to order newly-hatched chicks.
April, though, is economically tough on farms. There are no crops for sale. There are no meat chickens fully grown. The only profit comes from the sale of soup chickens. We had a soup chicken for dinner last week. Into these tough economic times comes Adopt a Chick. We paid Farmer Ken money to keep two baby chicks in our apartment this week. They will lay eggs on the farm for as long as they can. We will buy those eggs from the farmer and from Grace, the woman who owns Terra, a store across the street that sells local and organic food as well as fair-trade gifts. My first job was babysitting Grace's kids. The economy is local and sustainable and beautiful except for one thing: when egg-laying hens stop laying eggs they become soup chickens, and Eric and I could very well make a broth from Brownie and Blondie next April.
Oh, yeah... I named them. My first mistake.
Brownie and Blondie have taught me a lot about chickens. They poop a lot. They like to scratch and peck... a lot. They prefer to sit on a perch to sitting in even the cleanest wood shavings. They have distinctive personalities. Blondie, the bigger and possibly slightly older of the two is the brave one. She was the first to learn that she could fly out of her box and sit on the edge (after Farmer Ken assured us that they can't do that... oops.) Brownie is klutzy and less adventurous. The only thing that can move Brownie to heroic feats is when she can't find Blondie. This is where it gets painfully cute. When the pair cannot see each other, they break from their typical peeping and instead call out in distress. So when Brownie fell off the box backwards and landed in a grocery bag, it was Blondie's calls that alerted us to the problem. When Blondie started leaping from the box to the laptop's monitor while Eric or I worked on the computer, Brownie crashed into the armchair trying to reach her. (We have taken to giving Brownie boosts when she feels left behind.) Both chickens like to sit on a warm hand, and they love to cuddle each other.
So, the problem becomes, can I eat Brownie and Blondie? Because if I can't, then I really shouldn't be eating any chickens at all. Maybe I should not have named them. Maybe it's okay because in the wild they would stand no chance at all or in a factory farm they would be tortured. Maybe living on a genuinely healthy farm with Farmer Ken and his wife even if their ending will almost certainly be in a soup pot (possibly mine) is their best case scenario. Chickens would not even exist if people did not think they were tasty.
Farmer Ken emailed Eric and asked if we wanted to buy a soup chicken while we were dropping off Brownie and Blondie on Saturday (he probably did not refer to them by name in the email). We had enthusiastically praised the delicious soup just last week. Now the soup was sitting in my lap watching the Daily Show. Eric politely declined, for now.
We get our first roaster in June or July.
Brownie and Blondie are playing on the keyboard.