The mayor's secretary has a slot open at eleven in the morning tomorrow.

That will work he supposes, if there's not anything sooner.

If it's an emergency the mayor could stay in the office late this afternoon? What's wrong?

There was an incident at the farm he took amaliens with that he was having trouble resolving with the manager of the farm.

Is somebody hurt?? What happened???

"Yes, some amaliens had a pretty bad time. There were disagreements about how to help the chickens."

"- help - the chickens?" says the secretary, wrongfooted.

"Yes. .... If you don't have an easy answer I think it should wait till I talk to the mayor. Tonight if that's possible."

"...I'm not clear on how that's an emergency and I am reluctant to extend his schedule for things that are not emergencies."

"... Fine, I can do tomorrow then."

He'd really rather not deal with someone who isn't the mayor about this, given how the last time went.

"Okay, he'll see you at eleven. Thank you for being flexible!"

"You're welcome," he says, in a mildly annoyed tone.

He... is going to cancel his meetings for the rest of the night and do some research about chickens in Amentan society.

Chickens are cultivated for their eggs and their meat. (These are mostly separate breeds, though egg-laying chickens past their egg-laying time of life are also eaten, they just don't tend to taste as good.) Most chicken farms are like the one he saw, though the hormone thing they do to make them all female is only for egg-layers, since male and female chickens have equally tasty meat. He can find a few pictures of chickens penned up more out-of-doors in some mixed-use farming arrangements where they can serve as pest control and skip the composting step of turning chicken waste into fertilizer but this only works with some crops that they won't damage and is lower yield in eggs. There are decorative chicken breeds that are sometimes turned loose in gardens and parks in some areas. Both outdoor uses are noted to have a higher risk of predation for the chickens and the eggs from pest animals like rats and most animals that will eat rats will also eat chickens, so you have to expect a high rate of chicken loss if you're going to keep them outside.

Lucien tries figuring out how much shorter the chicken lives are on average when they are kept outside so he can guess at the tradeoff between keeping them outdoors and indoors. He is crying a bit while he does this but he can keep wiping the tears away so he can read and figure out which one is better.

A decorative chicken kept indoors as a pet can live two Amentan years. Meat chickens usually live a couple months tops, they're bred to grow very fast; egg-laying chickens usually have a useful lifespan of one to two seasons. Outdoor pest-control-and-eggs chicken lifespans are all over the place but you can't keep them outdoors in winter anyway so generally they are eaten sometime in fall regardless of when they were hatched.

Okay, so the outdoor chickens might actually live longer on average. That's good to know. He is really confused about the decisions that the Amentans are making and sad and ... should probably sleep so he's ready to deal with things tommorow.

...

Instead of sleeping he keeps going back to researching. He's so confused and it's hard to sleep and and...

Eventually he falls asleep in front of his everything.

He wakes up when his alarm goes off. He has this morning set aside for talking to amaliens about planet naming but instead he's going to go and comfort them before heading to his meeting with the mayor.

The mayor is as ever in his office on time for the meeting! "Good morning! My secretary was so confused, you wanted to help us with something about the chickens?"

"Yeah, there was a rather emotional disagreement about how to house chickens at the farm we visited yesterday and I think there's a cultural gap that was hard to communicate across. I was hoping that we would be able to have a productive conversation about it."

"I hope so! Are the chickens bothering amaliens with - smells, noises -"

"No. Sort of the opposite. We are worried that the chickens are having a bad time because Amentans didn't consider this as a downside."

"...I assume if they're too stressed it affects how many eggs they lay but other than that, no, not really, we don't consider that a downside."

"We do, and generally we feel bad about chickens feeling bad. Not at all as much as we would about an Amentan feeling bad or an amalien feeling bad, but some."

"I'm sorry to hear that. I'm not an expert, but I'm not aware of any economical ways to take into account chicken distress - it could be there are some, especially if you can communicate with chickens and they turn out to want very easy things, but I certainly couldn't tell you what they were."