When his wife gave him a box of day-old chicks as a birthday gift, David Waltner-Toews realized his years of lecturing about public health as a veterinarian and as an epidemiologist working with animal-to-human diseases had come home to roost. But how hard could it be to take care of these adorable little multicoloured puffballs? In this warm, funny memoir Waltner-Toews shares his experiences as a backyard chicken keeper: from building a coop, to composing an elegy for a chicken snatched by a neighbourhood hawk (the chicken later turned up alive), to collecting eggs. Along the way he also shares memories, from his first encounters with chickens on family farms to working around the world to stop the spread of avian flu. But A Conspiracy of Chickens isn’t just about chickens. Waltner-Toews thinks deeply about all the animals that live alongside us – on our farms and in our cities. He shows us the world we have created for them, and for ourselves, and he asks us to think deeply about all these issues as well.