Tag: Fables

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The Medieval Fable of The Fisherman and the Fish

Fishing is a huge industry worldwide; every year about 1 to 2 trillion wild fish are caught, representing vastly more animal deaths than the annual slaughter of terrestrial vertebrates such as cows and chickens. Overfishing is a serious crisis. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in 2024, about 37% of monitored fish stocks across the globe were overfished. Additionally, a 2018 FAO report indicated that nearly 60% of fish stocks were “maximally sustainably fished,” meaning that these fish populations were being exploited to the very edge of sustainability.1 Regulations and guidelines aim to reduce “illegal, unreported and unregulated” (IUU) fishing, in order to mitigate the devastating effects of overfishing and maintain populations of these animals for future human use, but IUU fishing is still extremely widespread in practice.

Fish illustration in Der Naturen Bloeme, National Library of the Netherlands, KA 16, fol. 115r.

Below, I translate and discuss a medieval fable, that of The Fisherman and the Fish (Perry Index 18). The Fisherman and the Fish has a decidedly anti-conservationist bent. It depicts an individual fisherman who is angling (fishing with a line), seemingly for his own table rather than for recreation or profit. Though the man’s catch is given a speech, the fisherman gets the last word, saying that the more prudent thing is to kill and eat even a small fish that one has already caught, rather than to hold out for a larger one that may or may not come. Though the fable suggests we are meant to agree with the man’s judgment, I find the fish’s plea to the fisherman—one of many examples in fable where a vulnerable character begs a more powerful one for their life—quite affecting.

This version of The Fisherman and the Fish is by Avianus (ca. 400 CE); it is preceded by a Greek version by Babrius.2 I provide a Latin text of Avianus, and an English translation, below.

De piscatore et pisce
Piscator solitus praedam suspendere saeta
exigui piscis vile trahebat onus.
sed postquam superas captum perduxit ad auras
atque avido fixum vulnus ab ore tulit,
“parce, precor” supplex lacrimis ita dixit obortis;
“nam quanta ex nostro corpore dona feres?
nunc me saxosis genetrix fecunda sub antris
fudit et in propriis ludere iussit aquis.
tolle minas, tenerumque tuis sine crescere mensis:
haec tibi me rursum litoris ora dabit:
protinus immensi depastus caerula ponti
pinguior ad calamum sponte recurro tuum.”
ille nefas captum referens absolvere piscem,
difficiles queritur casibus esse vices:
“nam miserum est” inquit “praesentem amittere praedam,
stultius et rursum vota futura sequi.”3

The Fisherman and the Fish
A fisherman, who was accustomed to catch his prey hanging on a line,
drew up a little fish of paltry weight.
But after he had brought up the captive into the air above,
and a wound pierced through its hungry mouth,
the pleading fish said, “Spare me, please,” with tears springing up,
“for how much benefit will you get from my body?
Just now a fertile mother has spawned me under stony grottoes,
and told me to play in our own waters.
Remove these threats; I am young, let me grow up for your table.
This edge of the shore will give me to you again.
Soon, when I have fed on the depths of the vast sea,
I will come back fatter to your rod, of my own accord.”
The fisherman, replying that it would be a sin to set the caught fish free,
laments the hard conditions of fortune:
“It’s a shame,” he said, “to let go of the prey in hand,
and even more foolish to pursue future wishes again.”

The fish’s plea makes both an appeal to reason and an appeal to emotion. He reasons that his meager body is now of little worth as food, and that in time, once he has grown, he will make a better meal. He further suggests a sort of bargain: he will return “willingly” (sponte) to the fisherman when he is a well-grown adult.  

As for emotion, the little fish, in his abject entreaty, describes himself rather pathetically. The fish having been spawned“just now” (nunc) implies that he is very young and small indeed. Anthropomorphic touches, such as the fish’s tears, and the detail that his mother has told her children to “play” (ludere) in the waters, could prompt readers’ sympathy for the creature. The prospect of a playful “child-fish” having his life cut suddenly short is a pitiful one.

In terms of natural history, the premise of the fable—at least according to the fish’s speech—is that the fish is small (and of little worth to humans nutritionally or economically), but only because he is a very young member of a species that grows considerably larger. While the fish was spawned in “just now” (nunc), “under stony grottoes,” (sub antris saxosis), his life cycle entails feeding and growing in the sea, then returning once again to the same place, where he could perhaps be caught once more by the same fisherman. The word litoris in line 10 can mean the beach or sea shore, but it could also refer to a river bank.4 If one interprets it as the latter, the fish could be of an anadromous species (i.e., a type of fish which spends its adult life in the sea but returns to rivers or streams in order to spawn; examples of anadromous fish include salmon, sturgeon, and some smelt. Babrius’s version takes place at the sea shore). Avianus’s version of the fable doesn’t specify what kind of fish this is, only that he is currently a juvenile. Later versions deem the fish a flatfish or turbot (rombus)5 or pickerel (smaris).6

Fish illustration, British Library, Add MS 36684, fol. 27v.

Intriguingly, in a version of the fable found in the fourteenth-century Dialogus creaturarum, the little fish promises to bring the man a whole school of other piscine victims with him when he returns. In this version, the fish also persuades the man to cut off part of his tail, so that he can be identified when he comes back. The fish reneges on his promise to bring others along with him, and is killed by the man when he is caught for the second time.7

The moral of The Fisherman and the Fish runs rather contrary to the morals of some others (which is often the case in such a heterogeneous and adaptable genre). For example, in the fable of The Goose with the Golden Eggs, which I posted about a few months ago, the moral is to not be greedy and hasty, and, I argued, perhaps not to push nature past sustainable limits. In The Fisherman and the Fish, by contrast, the choice endorsed is to kill an animal as soon as the opportunity presents itself, regardless of whether this is an optimal use of natural resources (i.e., achieving “maximum yield”), because the future is unpredictable.

Fables often focus on interactions between individuals of different species, rather than commenting on species as collectives or populations (though there are exceptions, e.g., The Hares and the Frogs, The Frogs Asking for a King). The fable of The Fisherman and the Fish, too, represents a single encounter between two individuals. However, perhaps we can see this fable as a kind of microcosm of relationships between humans and wild fish. Fishing is essentially the last bastion of wild-caught food, for the majority of humanity, and, as mentioned above, we are exploiting these animals to their limits and beyond. Considering this fable versus The Goose with the Golden Eggs, this fable may speak to a harsher and more opportunistic approach to exploiting “wild” natural resources, compared to exploiting domestic animals and crops. Domestic animals and crops require the expenditure of human labor to raise or cultivate, for one thing, which may make them seem like more of an investment; perhaps, too, animal slaughter or crop harvesting is also viewed as more reliable, more under human control, than the outcome of a fishing or hunting expedition.

Though overfishing has increased significantly in the last several decades, the genesis of unsustainable practices can be found in the medieval period, argues Richard C. Hoffmann. “By the end of the Middle Ages, essential elements for present-day global fishery crises were in place in European waters…. Overexploitation, habitat destruction, selective predation on large or prestigious species, and human competition without regard for the resource were all part of medieval experience.”8 While The Fisherman and the Fish is a brief text and a small example, compared to Hoffmann’s sweeping environmental history, I think this fable can nevertheless be seen in light of medieval (and post-medieval) beliefs and practices regarding fish as natural resources.

Linnet Heald
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2018, p. 12. ↩︎
  2. Ben Edwin Perry, ed. and trans., Babrius and Phaedrus: Fables, Loeb Classical Library 436 (Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 10–13. ↩︎
  3. Latin text from J. Wright Duff and A. M. Duff, eds., Minor Latin Poets, Volume II, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press, 1934), p. 712. English translation is my own. ↩︎
  4. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Clarendon Press, 1879), s.v. “lītus.” ↩︎
  5. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Clarendon Press, 1879), s.v. “rhombus.” ↩︎
  6. Lewis and Short’s Latin dictionary defines smaris as “a small sea-fish of inferior quality.” Taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, in the mid-18th century, used smaris as the species name for a particular fish, the deep-body pickerel (Sparus smaris, now called Spicara smaris). ↩︎
  7. Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable (Brill, 2003), vol. 3, p. 747. ↩︎
  8. Richard C. Hoffmann, The Catch: An Environmental History of Medieval European Fisheries (Cambridge University Press, 2023), p. 413. ↩︎

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Reading Medieval Fables as Trans Narratives: The Ass and the Lion Skin Revisited

In an earlier blog post, I wrote about four fables where animals “dress up” as another species, and looked at these in terms of socioeconomic class—this is what medieval authors like Marie de France, Robert Henryson, and Alexander Neckam were clearly aiming to comment on, and these fables can be seen, I argued, in the context of medieval sumptuary laws and anxiety about social mobility.

From an illustration by John Tenniel, “The ass in the lion’s skin,” 1848. New York Public Library.

I’d now like to revisit the same fables, considering them this time through a different lens: trans experience. This way of interpreting these fables has been on my mind the whole time. In discussing the fables with other people, I have found that they readily come up with trans readings of them (i.e., they suggest to me that the stories about one species wearing the skin or feathers of another can be seen as metaphors for being transgender, and that a trans reading of them could be interesting). As someone who hasn’t really worked in trans studies before, I have felt underequipped, in terms of offering a theoretically-informed take that meaningfully incorporates other scholarship in this area (there is a lot of exciting new work being done in trans medieval studies; see “Further Reading,” below, for a very non-comprehensive selection).

Despite this hesitation on my part, a trans reading of these fables feels far more salient to me right now than a socioeconomic one, and I think there are more urgent ethical stakes; medieval sumptuary laws are obsolete (and were, at the time, apparently rather ineffectual), whereas trans people are currently a hypervisible minority whose rights are under attack.

The thing is, when you look at these fables as trans narratives, they send a bleak message. These fables essentially suggest, as many other fables do as well, that we can never escape certain fundamental, supposedly “natural” categories, and that trying is dangerous and inadvisable. I’d like to look more closely at a couple of versions of a single fable, The Ass and the Lion Skin (Perry Index 188/358), to illustrate how this message is set up, as well as the parallels one could see between what befalls these fictional animal characters and the experiences of trans humans.

The first version I discuss is a Latin prose fable from the thirteenth century, by Odo of Cheriton:

Asini uiderunt quod homines male et dure tractauerunt eos, stimulando, (h)onera imponendo. Viderunt etiam quod timuerunt Leones. Condixerunt ad inuicem quod acciperent pelles leoninas, et sic homines timerent illos. Fecerunt sic. Asini igitur, induti pellibus leoninis, saltabant, discurrebant. Homines fugerunt credentes esse Leones. Tandem Asini inceperunt recanare. Homines diligenter auscultauerunt et dixerunt: Vox ista uox Asinorum est; accedamus proprius. Accesserunt tandem; viderunt caudas illorum et pedes et dixerunt: Certe isti sunt Asini, non Leones, et ceperunt Asinos et multum bene uerberauerunt.1

The donkeys saw that humans treated them badly and harshly, striking them and putting burdens on them. They also saw that they [i.e., the humans] were afraid of lions. They decided amongst themselves to put on lion skins, and that way humans would be afraid of them. They did this. And so the donkeys, wearing lion skins, leapt and ran about. Humans fled, thinking that they were lions. Eventually the donkeys started braying. The humans listened carefully and said: “That sound is the sound of donkeys; let’s get closer.” After a while they got up close; they saw their tails and feet and said, “Clearly these are donkeys, not lions,” and they seized the donkeys and beat them very thoroughly.

Odo’s moral then proceeds to analogize the wayward donkeys to “false men” (homines falsi), particularly those in the Benedictine order; his fables often criticized the clergy.

Odo’s version of this fable differs from others in some respects, e.g., the earliest version, which is also in Latin (Avianus, ca. 400 CE),2 or the late Middle English version in Caxton’s Aesop.3 While in the latter two versions, a single donkey comes across a lion skin by chance, in Odo’s telling, the act of donning lion skins is a collective decision by multiple donkeys, a calculated response to their ill treatment by humans. These donkeys aren’t just taking on the appearance of a different species, they are taking on the appearance of a much higher-status species, in an attempt to protect themselves (lions often stand in for tyrants, rulers, kings, etc. in fables, whereas fable donkeys are typically quite abject). If we are reading species as analogous to gender, here, there are, of course, differences of power and privilege when it comes to gender, too. The fact that women and men are not simply treated differently, but unequally, has induced some feminists to assert that transmasculine identities arise as a response to the social pressures of misogyny (i.e., that transmasc people are trying to “escape” womanhood because being a woman in a patriarchal culture is painful). One troubling implication of this line of thought is that a lot of trans people simply wouldn’t exist as such, in an “ideal” society without gender inequality.

In The Ass and the Lion Skin, the wearing of a new skin is not just a matter of appearance; the animal in the lion skin looks different, and they behave differently as well, chasing others as though they were a feline predator instead of an equid beast of burden. Initially, those other characters react to the donkey(s) as if they were indeed a lion, until something gives the donkey away. If we choose to read Odo’s fable through a trans lens (though his aim seems to have been to denounce clerical misbehavior), the fact that it is the donkeys’ brays that give them away might sound familiar to anyone who has dysphoria about their voice not matching their gender identity, and anyone who has been misgendered after starting to speak.

The humans in this fable scrutinize, too, specific physical characteristics—the tail and feet—and on those grounds determine what the donkeys “really” are, and react with violence. I can’t help but think of “transvestigators” who pore over photos of trans people (or cis people that they think might be trans), insisting that a particular feature reveals that the photo’s subject is quintessentially male or female, at odds with their presentation and identity. I also can’t help but think that being “clocked” as trans can indeed be the prelude to experiencing hostility, from hate speech to physical violence.

Not only do the donkeys undergo physical violence, this violence is intended to restore the status quo. It is coupled with a kind of ontological violence—the (re)definition of the target in the dominant party’s terms. “Clearly, these are donkeys, not lions,” the men say before beating them. Even more strikingly, in Avianus’s version, the donkey’s master concludes by saying, “Maybe you can trick strangers with your imitation roar; to me, you will always be a donkey, as you were before” (forsitan ignotos imitato murmure fallas; at mihi, qui quondam, semper asellus eris, lines 17–18). In a trans context, this makes me think of a stubborn family member who insists that they simply can’t perceive or treat their relative as their actual gender identity, because they’ve spent so many years thinking of them as the gender assigned to them at birth.

So, when I look at these “trans-species” fables in terms of transgender experience, my takeaway is depressing. The texts promote a status quo in which no one really can, or should try to, appear or behave outside of the categories “nature” has assigned. They gloss the act of wearing a “new skin” as a form of untenable inauthenticity, and portray the “trans-species” characters as being inevitably put back in their place with violence. These are the lessons we are seemingly meant to learn.

I want to do some kind of reparative reading of these fables, and to find something liberatory or subversive, but I struggle to, because the texts themselves do work in the opposite direction—and transphobes have recognized that. Another famous fable of an animal wearing a different skin—the fable of The Wolf that Dressed in a Sheepskin (Perry Index 451), in which a wolf mimics a sheep in order to better prey on the flock—has been used in recent years by anti-trans authors and cartoonists (who I won’t platform with links—this should be easy to find if you wish). This kind of rhetoric often fixates on transfemininity, in particular, portraying trans women as deceptive and even dangerous. For instance, the trope of predatory men-dressed-as-women attempting to infiltrate women’s bathrooms has been used as an argument for anti-trans “bathroom bans,” which have been passed in 19 US states over the last four years, part of a larger wave of anti-transgender legislation. The “bathroom ban” laws purport to address what is in fact a thoroughly imaginary problem, making bathrooms less safe for anyone who is trans and/or gender non-conforming.

Woodcut of The Ass and the Lion Skin, from a 1479 incunabulum of Heinrich Steinhöwel’s Fables of Aesop.

What do we do with didactic literature, stories that aim to teach lessons—in this case, medieval fables with morals—if the lessons are not ones we want to endorse or to heed, and if the stories themselves are being weaponized against a vulnerable minority? I don’t know. I think one step is to acknowledge that these texts are “naturalizing” social categories by mapping them onto different animal species, in order to suggest that social differences (such as class and gender) are starkly distinct and immutable, impossible to change—as impossible as it would be for a donkey to become a lion, or a wolf to become a sheep. However, as I argued in the previous post, if these social categories actually were “natural,” “biologically innate,” and unalterable, there would be no impetus to tell stories, over and over again, warning people not to act “unnaturally.”

Nonetheless, if we want liberatory or subversive trans fables, we might have to write them, or rewrite them, rather than looking to the medieval versions of these particular texts.

Linnet Heald
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

Further Reading:

  1. Latin text from Léopold Hervieux, Les Fabulistes latins depuis le siècle d’Auguste jusqu’à la fin du moyen âge, vol. 4, Eudes de Cheriton et ses dérivés (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1896), pp. 198–99. All translations in this post are mine. ↩︎
  2. Duff, Arnold Mackay, and John Wight Duff, eds. Minor Latin Poets, Volume 2. Loeb Classical Library, vol. 434. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 690. ↩︎
  3. Lenaghan, R. T., ed. Caxton’s Aesop: Edited with an Introduction and Notes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967, p. 179. ↩︎
Tags: animals, Avianus, fables, medieval literature, Odo of Cheriton, transgender , , , , ,

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Medieval Golden Goose Fables: Eggs, Greed, and Demanding Too Much

Getty Museum, MS. Ludwig XV 2, f. 25v.

In the fable of The Goose with the Golden Eggs (Perry Index 87), the titular bird is killed by her foolish owner. This fable warns against seeking great, immediate gain over more modest, long-term gain—particularly when doing the former destroys a valuable, otherwise sustainable resource. The first extant version of this fable is that of Avianus, ca. 400 CE; earlier versions may have featured a hen rather than a goose, as fable scholar Francisco Rodríguez Adrados has argued on metrical grounds.1 But in Avianus, the creature is a goose, and so the tale was transmitted through the Middle Ages and beyond, becoming essentially proverbial.

As is the case with fable in general, medieval versions of The Goose with the Golden Eggs aim at providing a moral lesson to humans through a memorable extended metaphor. The plight of the bird who is killed in this story is not supposed to be the point. Nevertheless, below, I consider the real creatures behind the unrealistic analogy. Can we read the fable somewhat more subversively, as an admonition about the dangers of pushing animals beyond their physical limits?

British Library, Additional MS 42130 (The Luttrell Psalter), f. 166v.

Medieval and Modern Poultry

Chickens have long been kept for their eggs, at least as much as for their meat. Domestic geese, on the other hand, were valued in the Middle Ages mostly for their meat and feathers.2 Their flight feathers were used for quill pens and arrow fletching, amongst other things, while their down was used for insulation.3 When goose eggs did go on the market in the Middle Ages, though, they could be several times more expensive than hen eggs.4 Goose eggs are harder to come by; geese lay fewer eggs than chickens, and their strong pair-bonds make it infeasible to keep a flock with a very large ratio of laying females to males.5 Domestic geese nowadays might lay between 10 and 40 eggs a year, with the yield likely being somewhat lower than this in the Middle Ages;6 a medieval hen, however, might have laid as many as 100 eggs a year, or even more, “not far behind the level attained in the early twentieth century.”7

While domestic geese are still bred and raised for the resources their bodies provide, it is now predominantly chickens, “the most scientifically engineered of livestock,”8 whose eggs are the basis of an industry worth billions. A chicken bred for egg production can lay 300 eggs a year9—triple the rate of medieval chickens, or even early twenty-first century chickens. This high lay rate may be a cause for osteoporosis in the birds, exacerbated further by their inactivity when kept in “conventional” cages.10

The majority of the over 300 million “commercial laying hens” in the United States are housed in “conventional cage environments,” also known as battery farms. These birds are confined exclusively indoors, in tiers of stacked wire cages, several individuals in each cage, with eggs and waste collected via conveyor belts.11 This “convention” has only been widely implemented since the 1950s.12 Such systems were famously criticized by Ruth Harrison in an influential 1964 book, Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry,13 and since then, “factory farming” has only become further entrenched as a normative practice. In 2009, about 95% of commercial laying hens in the US were in “conventional” cages.14 That percentage has dropped to around 66% as of 2022,15 and is continuing to drop; battery cages were outlawed in the European Union in 2012, and are being outlawed in a growing number of US states, because of animal welfare concerns.

Bibliothèque Municipale de Chalon-sur-Saône, MS 14, f. 67v.

Medieval Fables of Golden Geese

Medieval versions of the fable of The Goose with the Golden Eggs imagine that there are firm natural limits to the bird’s production of precious gold eggs, which cannot be exceeded. “Nature had fixed this law for the magnificent bird, that she was not permitted to bear two gifts at the same time,” says Avianus’s Latin verse version (fixerat hanc volucri legem Natura superbae, / ne liceat pariter munera ferre duo, lines 3-4).16 In Avianus’s telling, the goose’s owner is portrayed as impatient and calculating—he is concerned that the “gifts” won’t last and eager to maximize profit from her body:

sed dominus, cupidum sperans vanescere votum,
non tulit exosas in sua lucra moras,
grande ratus pretium volucris de morte referre,
quae tam continuo munere dives erat. (lines 5–8)

(But the master, expecting the greedy offering to disappear, did not endure odious delays to his profits, and thought to withdraw from the death of the bird great value, who had been so continuously rich with gifts).

Upon killing the bird and finding her body devoid of treasure, he considers himself deservedly punished by the gods for his own avarice; the fable’s moral concludes:

sic qui cuncta deos uno male tempore poscunt,
iustius his etiam vota diurna negant. (lines 13–14)

(So, to those who wrongly demand from the gods everything at once, they deny even daily prayers more justly.)

A late medieval Middle English prose version of the fable, in William Caxton’s Aesop (1484), tells the story somewhat differently: the goose’s greedy owner verbally commands her to lay two eggs a day instead of one, and kills her, out of anger, when she protests that she can’t. Caxton’s moral is less pithy, but still expresses the sentiment that the man has only hurt his own interests by killing the goose.

The man of auaryce or couetousnes commaunded and bad to her/ that euery daye she shold leye two egges/ And she sayd to hym/ Certaynly/ my mayster I maye not/ wherfore the man was wrothe with her/ and slewe her/ wherfore he lost that same grete good/ of the whiche dede he was moche sorowful and wrothe/ how be it that it was not tyme to shette the stable whan the horses ben loste/ & gone/ And he is not wyse/ whiche dothe suche a thinge/ wherof he shalle repente hym afterward/ ne he also/ whiche doth his owne dommage for to auenge hym self on somme other/ For by cause that he supposeth to wynne al/ he leseth all that he hath17

(The man, out of avarice or covetousness, commanded and ordered that every day she must lay two eggs. And she said to him, “Truly, my master, I cannot,” and so the man was angry with her and killed her, and so he lost that same great benefit, of which deed he was very sad and angry. Nevertheless, it is too late to shut the stable when the horses are lost and gone, and he is not wise who does something that he will regret afterward, nor is he wise who does himself harm to avenge himself on someone else. For, because he intends to gain everything, he loses all that he has.)

Authors like Avianus and Caxton did not foresee the drastic “improvements” that domesticated birds would undergo through breeding, or the battery farms that would house them nearly immobile in tiny cages, with the aim of maximizing profit. “Today,” says Margaret E. Derry, “we use chickens in a more mechanistic way than all other farm livestock. We follow practices that are not good for the birds and do not necessarily reflect well on us, in spite of the obvious benefits of such practices” (i.e., cheap eggs for human consumption).18 The morals to the two medieval versions of The Goose with the Golden Eggs that I considered above ultimately frame the bird’s violent demise in terms of how this impacts the human killer financially; we are encouraged to view the slaughter as, above all, unwise, because the goose was profitable to her owner, rather than as an act of cruelty or injustice toward the victim. But despite these mercenary morals, the fables’ authors nevertheless presciently suggest that human greed can demand more of animals than they can provide us, and that this is destructive, to them and to us.

  1. Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable (Brill, 2003), vol. 3, p. 113. ↩︎
  2. Philip Slavin, “Goose management and rearing in late medieval eastern England, c.1250–1400,” The Agricultural History Review, vol. 58, no. 1 (2010), p. 4. ↩︎
  3. Dale Serjeantson, “Goose husbandry in Medieval England, and the problem of ageing goose bones,” Acta zoologica cracoviensia, vol. 45 (2002), p. 43. ↩︎
  4. Slavin, “Goose management and rearing,” p. 8. ↩︎
  5. Serjeantson, “Goose husbandry in Medieval England,” p. 41. ↩︎
  6. Slavin, “Goose management and rearing,” p. 16. ↩︎
  7. D. J. Stone, “The Consumption and Supply of Birds in Late Medieval England,” in Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition, ed. C. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson, and T. Waldron (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 154. ↩︎
  8. Margaret E. Derry, Art and Science in Breeding: Creating Better Chickens (University of Toronto Press, 2012), p. 4. ↩︎
  9. United Egg Producers, “Facts & Stats,” accessed January 4, 2025. ↩︎
  10. C. C. Whitehead et al., “Osteoporosis in cage layers,” Poultry Science, vol. 79, 7 (2000), 1033–1041; A. B. Webster, “Welfare implications of avian osteoporosis,” Poultry Science, vol. 83, 2 (2004): 184–92. ↩︎
  11. United Egg Producers, “Hen Housing Diagrams,” accessed January 4, 2025. ↩︎
  12. B. Yilmaz Dikmen et al., “Egg production and welfare of laying hens kept in different housing systems (conventional, enriched cage, and free range),” Poultry Science, vol. 95, 7 (2016), p. 1564. ↩︎
  13. Ruth Harrison, Animal Machines (Vincent Stuart Publishers, 1964). Reprinted with new commentaries 2013 by CAB International. ↩︎
  14. Sara Shields and Ian J. H. Duncan., “A Comparison of the Welfare of Hens in Battery Cages and Alternative Systems” (2009), Impacts on Farm Animals 18, WellBeing International, accessed January 4, 2025. ↩︎
  15. United Egg Producers, “Facts & Stats,” accessed January 4, 2025. ↩︎
  16. Latin text from J. Wright Duff and A. M. Duff, eds., Minor Latin Poets, Volume II: Florus, Hadrian, Nemesianus, Reposianus, Tiberianus, Dicta Catonis, Phoenix, Avianus, Rutilius Namatianus, Others, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), p. 732. All modern English translations in this post are my own. ↩︎
  17. Middle English text from R. T. Lenaghan, ed., Caxton’s Aesop, Edited with an Introduction and Notes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 190. ↩︎
  18. Derry, Art and Science in Breeding, p. 9. ↩︎