Chickens have very defined personalities, it turns out. Whenever Ray Solotki opens the shipping container-turned-coop outside Inuvik’s Community Greenhouse, one of her 22 hens will rush over and flatten itself down, eager to be picked up.
“They’re kind of like little dogs,” says Solotki, town councillor and executive director of the greenhouse. “I’m very attached to them, but I also would eat them. That’s just the reality.”
It was also the original plan for the birds. Last year, with funding from the United Way, Solotki and her team flew up 22 chickens to the hub of the Beaufort Delta. The birds would lay eggs while the sun was shining, provide fertilizer for the greenhouse and then be turned into soup come winter (to be donated to Inuvik’s homeless and warming shelters).