Once I found a whole line of eggs inside a hen, she adds. “It was like one of those Russian dolls.”

Oh babushka! Could I do this — gut, drain and pluck a dead chicken? Would I have to? Can’t I just hang onto the birds until they’re doddering around and die of their own accord?

Maureen’s comments are a wake-up call. She is utterly practical and I’m realizing I’m not. I’d figured I could probably take a deep breath and kill a bird — if I had to. But in my fear of harvesting a hen I hadn’t thought beyond the chopping block. I remind myself that I don’t particularly like chicken meat. Part of me, I realize, is bothered by the thought of the work that goes into raising — and eventually processing — hens. But another part of me is bothered at being bothered about the responsibility of it all. I’d clearly been thinking of chickens as egg dispensers, not pets. Harvesting them was the elephant in the room.

Later that afternoon, I step outside alone to take another look at the Eglu. The hens scatter nervously as I approach. Maybe I’m imagining it, but these birds don’t seem like pets.

As I leave, I backtrack to a poster hanging on Maureen’s kitchen wall, an original and a gift from her husband. “Plant a Victory Garden. Our Food is Fighting. A Garden Will Make Your Rations Go Further,” it declares.

***

Over at Bernal Beast, a nearby pet supply store, I talk about the full monty hen kill scenario with Abe, a store coworker. “I think it’d be kind of tedious,” he remarks, of having to pluck and prepare a bird. He has a point. The chicken is likely to be tough. A soup bird. No more than a meal or two.

Tony, the store’s owner, is more circumspect. He doesn’t own chickens himself but calls his customers “forethinkers.” “They can see that not only nutritionally but economically it’s the way to go,” he says. “It also goes along with having a garden.”

He thinks he’s onto something too. Demand for hen supplies has been rising over the past one-and-half to two years, if his sales are anything to go by. He now stocks 50-pound bags of scratch and crumble chicken feed. Customers come in from all over San Francisco, he says.

He seems wistful when he remembers the hens his extended family raised when he was growing up. “They just have the whole world to themselves. They’re just hysterical.”

***

I’m getting the sense this sentiment is pretty widespread. Dana, a friend of a friend, raises hens on a small urban lot in Gardnerville, near Lake Tahoe.

Her two 11-month-old Rhode Island Reds and her dog hang out — supervised — in the backyard together.

“I let them in the yard as they enjoy eating grass and bugs and if they can’t get back into their coop, they come up onto my deck and come to the window and holler at me,” she writes in an email.

But processing them? She doesn’t see herself killing unproductive hens. She’s considering retiring older birds to a friend’s 2-acre property on the other side of town.

***

So am I back to square one? Can I get out of harvesting my hens? Or am I just lazy and reluctant to face up to what farming is really about? I call up the first person I’d spoken to about chickens.

“I can’t imagine killing them,” Jeannine says. Her young daughters helped raise the soft, fluffy pullets in their home this winter and while the hens, now outside, don’t have names, the family knows each one by the quirks of its personality.

Raising birds, she says, is a fantasy of living in a rustic setting that can’t ever be played out. But it’s practical too, she adds. After all there are the eggs. And raising hens has inspired her to think about making other things, like a victory garden.

We are old friends and it’s her three hens, a Wyandotte, a black sex-link and a Buff Orpington, that have inspired me to try raising my own. One afternoon we sit on an old, salvaged cast-iron bench at the top of her yard watching the chickens go about their business. We’re inside an enclosure that crosses into her next-door neighbor’s yard, and which is shared between six hens in all.

Eric, Jeannine’s husband, tells a story about his grandfather, who as a young man immigrated to the California from Germany by way of a sponsorship that attested he could farm chickens. He had no idea how to raise hens, Eric says. He was busy reading chicken farming books on the ship. The older generation, he adds, are not caught up in the new urban romance of chicken-rearing.

It occurs to me that raising hens is a different way of being “practical” about food. If picking up a dozen from the supermarket saves time and money, how practical is it to build a coop from scratch, to commit to cleaning birdshit from a coop, to be OK with slowing egg consumption as the hens get older or the weather colder? I’d probably be happy to build a coop, to clean it, to wait for eggs. But chickens as pets? Is that practical? If I get attached to the hens, harvesting them at a year old seems unlikely. So when egg production tapers off within a year or two, then what? I’d hate to see my new hens as broken egg machines. I realize I’m still pretty entrenched in the rigid efficiencies of food production. Keeping old hens as pets might not be going the whole urban egg hog, but it seems the most practical path for now, a cautious reality of this generation’s new urban farm.