The Poultry God Speaks

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I was just the busiest Bisy Backson I could have possibly been yesterday.

Running around, giving rides, driving lessons, to the mall, back, around downtown (twice), and then a dinner for Mr. Husband’s grandma’s birthday that I didn’t even know about until we got there. I thought we we just going for a visit.

The chickens were roundly ignored, as they are sometimes, since they had been fed on Saturday. They are so wee they can only clean out their feeder every other day anyhow. I usually visit them every day…but yesterday I didn’t think much of them.

Well, they were very hungry this morning. The minute I started to open the curtains in the back of the house they started AWK AWK AWKING. I went out to feed them and found the Big Black Hen, my best layer, in a heap on the ground and partially picked clean. The Big Black Hen raised up my newest half-grown, orphan chickens that I picked up a couple of months ago. She was at the top of the pecking order.

I hate this. They’re just stupid birdbrain livestock, but that is part of what makes them so endearing. Before the fence was finished last summer one got ripped up by an esaped dog…it was the same sinking feeling.

I am the god in their little world, who giveth food and bread ends, and taketh away eggs. Pats are dispensed to the favored ones, and the ones who will sit still long enough. I always feel like I have failed them when one dies.

As I told Mr. Husband this morning, everyone’s a suspect. There are lots of crows who hang in the yard, when they catch wind of extra scraps. They seem to co-exist peacefully with the chooks, but I have seen crows turn on their own. I don’t think it’s my cats. I know that cats can lose it and get all feral, even the laziest housecats…but I saw my most “vicious” one, Hank, walk by the chickens the other day. He got about six inches away from them at their feeder and looked at them. The chickens talked about him (“awk awk, awk-aaawk”) but didn’t even move away.

I suspect it was someone else’s cat, who is actually a proficient hunter, rather than a hunter of dust bunnies like mine are. I will have to spend more time in the backyard, to establish a police presence. This goes without saying, but I hate burying animals. I mean, who doesn’t?

29 thoughts on “The Poultry God Speaks”

  1. Sorry. The whole animal caretaking thing definitely has that downside. Burying your animals is depressing. It’s hard to be a god–even to chickens.

  4. Gosh… first thing that came to my mind was those little orphan chicks went on a rampage… Becareful going out there alone, there’s more of them than you…

  5. Say, SJ. I know what will make you feel better. Let’s talk about me.
    Because when I read this, obviously my first impluse was to fire off a quick quippy comment to the effect of “Actually, I love burying animals. Sometimes I don’t even wait for them to die,” or something like that. Which is clearly my version of, “Yeah, that sucks man. Sorry about your chicken.”
    But then I thnought about this thing that happened last night.
    What happened was, I got my first piece of hate e-mail.
    Objectively this is not such a surprise. In the last ten days I’ve blogged that I think Mr. Rogers was a child molester, that I spent several years when I was a kid hurling hate language the only black kid in my elementary school and that the Holocaust was faked. I’m mostly joking, of course, but a surprsing number of stupid people can type and use the internet, and they are notoriously literal-minded about such things. So I finally got a bite on the child molester thing. Which, I really thought it was the Holocaust crack that was going to get me in trouble (it still may. it’s in process).
    But that’s neither here nor there.
    The point is, I was a little surprised how much the hate e-mail stung. Partly because I was immediately confronted by the realization that the person on the other end of the e-mail is completely insensible to any arguments I might put forward on my own behalf. But also there’s the creeping suspicion that I might not be a good enough writer to make jokes about child molestation and have people understand what I’m actually trying to say.
    It makes me cautious.
    It makes me timid.
    It weakens my asshole powers like asshole kryptonite.
    Ah well. It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll.

    I’m thinking alien chicken mutilations. Did you check for… you know… *probing*?

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