Chicken Update

Some people asked me what ever happened to Shawna the bad girl chicken.  Well, it's like this.  I was awfully sick and tired of her putting her beak into everyone's business and eating up the eggs.  She also led more than her share of girlies astray, so yep, girlfriend had to go.  The problem is, I live with a bunch of wimps.

I finally got the nerve up to do it.  I researched how to butcher her.  Let me tell you something about butchering a chicken:  you don't want to do it.  It's a messy, messy process, and that's not even talking about the defeathering, which is a nightmare of its own.  I'm pretty sure, after researching it, that I never lived in a third world country in a former life.  So yeah, I was killing her for the sake of knocking her off, cause she was, quite frankly, pissing me off.

So I researched ways to do it.  Broomstick method seemed the easiest way, but then again, I have a helluva stun gun, and why not put it to good use?  I was concerned, however, that the million volts (I'm not joking -- I asked for one that was big enough to put a crazy person on their ass) might just be too much.  I mean, I might find myself wracked with guilt if she exploded.  And I sure as heck didn't want to end up power spraying her off the house, or worse yet, me.  But I slept on it and decided to do it anyway.

But how does one use a stun gun on a chicken without hanging onto them?  Cause yeah, holding onto anything you are stunning with a million volts would not be advised.  I ended up in the garage, found some weedwhacker string, and made myself a chicken noose.  Not for her neck, mind you, but to hang her from.  Because hey, did you know that if you hang a chicken upside down, they chill out?  I had it all figured out.  So then I snuck into my bedroom where Jim was sleeping.  He's a Marine, remember, so although he was snoring when I went in, he popped wide awake within literally two seconds, and said "what are you doing?" in a rather firm voice.  "Nothing, boo.  Go to sleep."  "No.  What are you doing?"  "I'm gonna kill Shawna."  "What?  How're you gonna do that?"   "I'm getting my stun gun."  

The voice got noticeably louder as he said "don't you kill that chicken while I'm here."

It was at that point that I realized that you can be trained to kill someone in 72 different ways, but still be a softie when it comes to a troublesome chicken.  And so it is that Shawna The Problem Chicken was donated, still kicking to the Poultry Project.  And dontcha know, I took two more chickens there two weeks later, and darned if that stupid bird didn't run right up to me from amongst a crowd of about thirty chickens.  That darned bird never could mind her own business. But oh well, she's someone else's problem now.

And that's the way it is.

You Know What's Funny?

Watching a chicken eat a lemon.

Several friends are saving their table scrap fruits and veggies for the chickens.  I have found that they will eat cantaloupe down to a rind so thin you can almost see through it.  They will grab and entire tomato and run off with it like it's a Faberge egg.  I haven't figured out whether they like lemons or not, but after watching them today, I think not.

In the past, I usually just dump a bunch of stuff in at the same time, and let them pick out what they want.  I find some leftovers later on:  onion peels, the aforementioned cantaloupe rind, and citrus peels.  OK, so they aren't crazy about the peels, and that's ok.  I've seen them picking at the innards at times, so I knew they weren't absolutely averse to them.  But a friend of mind made two gallons of homemade lemonade for his granddaughter's birthday party.  (Now, that is love.  Or a total lie.  I'm still threatening to check his trash for the Corona bottles...)  I was the happy recipient of the leftover lemons, and you know what they say -- when life gives you lemons, give 'em to the chickens.

I tossed some into the pen with Shawna and Beyonce today.  They're the two bad girls, so they are out in the pen most of the day, to keep them from eating eggs.  We had just moved the coop the other day, and I cleaned it out of all of the leftover yucky stuff, so I wasn't jumping at the chance to add the peels and have to do the whole thing all over again.  I stayed around to watch, curious to see what the reaction to the lemons really was.  It was hilarious.

I threw a couple down, and they landed upside down.  The chickens sniffed them and then turned up their noses.  From past experience, I figured it was that they didn't want the peels, so I flipped them over so they could get to the guts, then added a couple more.  The girls wandered over, looked over the situation (probably sniffing it, but I couldn't tell), then gave a tentative peck.  Their heads immediately shuddered, then they backed up, put their heads to the ground and started wiping their face on the ground, first one side, then the other.  Vigorously.

Picture a chicken shuddering and madly wiping its face on the ground.  It's free entertainment that guarantees a laugh, trust me.  So yeah, I spend my time after work watching chickens doing stupid things, but trust me, it's a great bonding experience for me and the girls.

Even if Shawna is definitely headed for the chopper.  Beyonce?  I'm not quite sure yet.

Stay of Execution

So, I have chickens.  I got six back on Palm Saturday.  One went to chicken heaven a couple of weeks later, leaving me with five.  They are White Rocks, and they are very sweet.  A couple of weeks ago, I decided to add a couple more, so I got two Red Star Sex Links and a Barred Rock, plus two baby Easter Eggers.  The Red Star (Thelma and Louise) and the Barred Rock (Mabel) were already laying, so we have been having a nice little influx of eggs.  At least one of the White Rocks (as yet unnamed, but keep reading) is laying now, so we get to have eggs a lot. 

The only problem is that two of the White Rocks are chicken stalkers.  As soon as one of the laying girls goes up into the coop, the two stalkers follow them up.  As soon as the egg hits the coop, you can hear peck, peck, peck, and those two bad girls eat the eggs.  BAD girls, I tell you.

Now, I have read all of the solutions to this problem, and they are few.  I put a couple of Easter eggs in the coop with them, and they rolled one of them right down the ramp, just to let me know that they knew it was fake.  Add to it that the girls don't lay early like the books say they should.  They lay between 11 and 2, which makes it impossible for me to stalk the coop to grab the eggs during the day.  It's been a challenge.

I had built a little pen for the girls to free range in during the day, but they fly out, so the past couple of days, I hung a sheet over the top to keep them in, till I could figure something better out.  This, while reading up on how to butcher a chicken, just to keep my options open.  But every time I put the girls into the pen, one of them flies out, and sometimes two.  I sat out there for a couple of hours this morning -- it's really quite relaxing to watch them -- and watched as the same silly bird kept escaping.  And yep, she was one with egg yolk all over her.  Busted!  So I quarantined her to the garage.  Then another one kept doing the same thing.  One with even more egg yolk on her than the first.  ERRRGH!  So I threw her into the garage as well, and figured I would deal with her after church this evening.

Seth had been gone all day to GENCON, so when I got home, he was back, and one of his buddies was here.  I yelled down the stairs and asked if they wanted to help me execute a couple of chickens.  Seth said now, very quickly followed by his buddy yelling "I want to."  They came flying up the stairs.  Seth asked how I wanted it done.  I told him I'd been doing a lot of research, and couldn't decide.

The quickest way to do it would be to use my stun gun, but at a million volts, I'd be afraid that she'd explode, and what kind of bloody mess would that be?  Seth's jaw dropped.  Nick thought it was a cool idea, then silently picked up a hammer that was sitting on the kitchen counter and looked at me with an eyebrow raised.  "That's another option," I said.  "Yeah, or we could hit them on the head with a baseball bat," Nick said.  At this point, I told him he might be a little too enthusiastic, and if he ends up being a serial killer, I am not taking responsibility for it.  So he started coming up with other interesting ways to send the girls to their demise.  This included dropping the garage door on them -- which would work, since I have an old garage door that doesn't stop if anything is under it.  Seth said no way, because that was just plain freaking him out.  I told them it would be too hard to hold the chicken down so that it worked, and that it was cruel.  I suggested the old bop 'em on the head, wring their necks, or the broomstick trick.

I think it was at this point that Nick suggested burying them alive, and Seth pronounced that that was one of his nightmare ways of dying:  being buried alive, or drowning.  I added dying in a fire, which Seth said wasn't as bad, because "at some point your nerves would die, and it would stop hurting."  No comfort, man.  No comfort.  Nick said that it would be even worse if some good Samaritan decided to rescue you.  "Hey man, my eyes got burned off, I'm missing four fingers, but hey, thanks."  

Meantime, Seth and I were still sitting there holding the chickens. 

His argument was that we'd raised them since they were babies, and we just couldn't kill them.  To him, that was even more true since they aren't fat enough to eat.  He said if we were gonna eat them, it would be different, so I said we could kill 'em but it would be too much work for the little amount of meat it would give us.  He said we needed to eat their bones, or we couldn't do it at all.  Nick decided at this point that he couldn't kill them, rendering his future as a serial killer useless.  And meantime, we are still sitting there holding the stalker chickens.

I told them that we could try clipping their wings so that they couldn't fly out of the pen, and try leaving them out during the day while the other girls laid their eggs, and see what happened, but if they kept causing problems, they have to go.  They agreed to this, but we couldn't tell these girls from the other White Rocks, so I grabbed some nail polish and some scissors.  We clipped their wings and painted their legs and a stripe on their heads, then tossed them into the pen.

The two stalkers have been named Beyonce (because her nail polish is blue, like Ivy Blue) and Shawna (and if you don't know why, don't ask, but Seth said he wouldn't have as much of a problem killing Shawna).  Meantime, the patio looks like a chicken massacre, because you know what?  Feathers aren't easy to sweep up.  And the girls are back in the coop with a stay of execution that will last only as long as it takes before they eat an egg.

And we still haven't decided how to do it.