I am a miserable farmer.
I know this because as I sit here
writing there is a chicken hanging out in my basement in a dog carrying case
that is doubling as an infirmary. She has been sprayed with colloidal silver
and rubbed down with Neosporin after having the deep gash in her back rinsed
with peroxide. The gash exists because my other chickens are trying to peck her
to death.
They are doing this because I released her back to the coop with her
sister after the reek of two grown chickens and three still sort of baby
chickens jammed in a big bunny cage reached it’s nadir mid august. I know that
you can’t release a single chicken back into the pack, but I didn’t realize her
sister would run away and not come home that first night back (whether taken by
raccoons or hawks or other critters that live in Sagg Swamp I’ll never know)
and thus leaving my poor remaining chicken to be pecked down to blood and bones
by her old siblings. So she’s back in the basement, in a dog crate next to her
chicks, one of who appears to be bigger then the other two and thus is probably
a rooster (shhh, don’t tell my husband!)
I showed my husband the wounded chicken after I found her
huddled in the nesting box and the sight made him gag. It’s pretty bad wound,
so naturally, I asked him what I should do, and he told me to talk to some of
my farmer friends. A suggestion I,
of course, ignored. I know what the farmers would have told me, and I didn’t
want to hear it. Remember, I’m a girl who spent $140 taking my first sick
chicken to two different vets only to have it die on me anyway. This after I
carried it around to work in an igloo lunch box and fed it baby food with a
syringe.
I’ve gotten better, I really have, I didn’t name any of them
this time, although the neighbor’s little girls call one Mathilda and one
Lavender since they run down the driveway and skip their way across my cattle
grate just so they can go hang out in the neighbor’s yard (Lavender is among
the missing FYI.) but again, one of my sweet little chickens is in pain, and
that makes me crazy. So even though I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t pick up
the phone and call a farmer, I go online instead. You don’t have to worry about
being seen as a wackadoodle for having chickens in the basement, once you’ve
discovered there are people who have diapers for the chickens in the living
room. I sort of straddle the line between keeping then as pets and keeping them
as livestock -- not that I could ever eat one of my chickens, forget about
that, but I do enjoy their eggs.
Anyway, the internet chicken websites which offered diapers said
that chickens heal remarkably well and that I should separate her from the
others and give her time to heal. They
recommend the vet of course, but I’m trying to be tougher than that. I’m trying
not to be a bad farmer. Good farmers take damaged chickens and eat them, but
ever since I started raising and hanging out with chickens, I’ve kind of lost
the taste for them. It would sort of be like eating one of my dogs, or the cat.
I actually have had a bad chicken week, as two other
chickens decided to not come home one evening after a day free ranging in the
yard. I found the wing of one, so I know she’s in heaven, but the other could
be sitting on eggs somewhere in the back 40. Or not. I don’t like to think
about chicken death, but nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’ and tough on farm
critters that want to party under the stars. Then the dogs, who discovered the
chicken remains before I did, and who have been hanging out, slightly terrified
of the chickens, for at least a year, decided for no good reason whatsoever to
attack another of the chickens yesterday. So now I have a dilemma, I have run
out of infirmary room, and there’s actually more chickens in the basement then
in the chicken coop. So I’m trying to make her tough it out. I cleaned her cut,
and put her back in their coop and am crossing my fingers. Hoping for no more
carnage.
Oh and no one is laying eggs anymore by the way, or if they
are, they’re hiding them among the hydrangeas or under the porch and I can’t
find them.
As I said, I'm a terrible farmer.
Look, I’ve admitted previously that I’m a bad weeder, and
that every summer the vegetable garden gets away from me. This year all the
green beans grew too big and tough from a lack of harvesting. I have tomatoes
rotting on the vine and for the third year in a row, I missed picking the
bountiful crop of the not as sweet as I’d like them to be blackberries. I feel
bad about the veggies, but the chickens are a bigger issue. There’s pain
involved, and fear and death.
And guilt.
People hear that I have chickens and bees and a huge
vegetable garden and think my life in the country sounds idyllic. I’m not so
sure. The chickens ate all my lettuce and kale and Swiss chard and dug up half
the peppers. Two of the hives succumbed to that last ice storm in March. And
now I have three dead chickens on my conscious, plus two injured chickens that
are not having a good time. And three little baby chickens who think it is
boring in the basement, but whom I’m scared to introduce to the perils of the
outside world. My husband tells me I should just give them away as the process
of acclimation is not one that I’m good at handling. But I’ve grown attached to them already; I even have a good
name for the rooster.
