Her abdomen was torn as though fierce talons had grabbed ahold, but had lacked the strength to carry her beyond the top of the chicken run. One hen was the victim of a suspected chicken hawk snatching gone awry. The other rooster was torn apart by roaming neighborhood pit bulls just a few days before Christmas 2006 all that remained were feathers strewn across the lawn. JR gave one rooster away, as we found there could be just one alpha fowl. We ordered hens-only, but received 23 hens and 2 roosters. We now have fourteen chickens, reduced from the high of twenty-five. We don’t keep the palatial chicken mansion, which is far larger than my kitchen, illuminated, so often in the winter, our daily take of eggs drops precipitously to one, two, or three, down from one egg per chicken in the warmer and brighter seasons. Egg farmers who wish to get the most eggs out of their chickens will often leave the light on inside the coop all night long. They are also notoriously bad at egg production in the wintertime, both because of the cold and the lack of sunlight. When chickens molt, or shed their feathers, they do not produce eggs. And the lack of fresh eggs for the last two months is what brought us to the threshold of chicken slaughter. I prefer to leave the mundane feeding and watering chores to JR, but I am thrilled to have fresh eggs on hand at all times. Admittedly, I am not a very good chicken husbandress. They are captivating, calming, and compelling in their own, not-quite-a-dog-or-a-cat kind of way. Then we got chickens, and I began to understand. Judging from her enthusiasm, I was led to believe that this was the most exciting new development in her life at the time.
Another chicken-rearing friend screamed out, “Oh! And I’ve got chickens,” during a long-overdue catch-up phone conversation.
Chickens are fascinating when you first acquire them – ask anyone who has them or has had them – there is a tranquility to their prehistoric bird-bodies’ movements, so much so that one chicken-owner I know confessed to sitting in the chicken coop observing the birds any time she was under stress. I decided that the woman working at the post office was more than deserving of quiet at that time of day, and so quickly forgave her the pre-dawn call. Grumbling, I drove my bleary-eyed, caffeine-deprived self the five miles to the post office, and as I entered the lobby, I heard a constant flurry of “peep, peep, peep, peep, peep, peep, peep, peep, peep, peep, peep” (hopefully these 11 peeps get the point across.
We were warned by the chicken company (really, what else am I to call it?) of an approximate arrival date, but I was still unprepared for the phone call from the post office at 4:45am on the morning of their arrival.
When JR was a wee person, he worked at a neighborhood farm, and had slaughtered chickens using the old “axe-and-tree-stump” method, but, in addition to being plain old messy and dangerous, it’s not terribly humane, and so we wanted to seek out a better way. Not to the gallows goes the Buff OrpingtonĪ little over a week ago, at JR’s behest, I began researching humane ways to kill chickens.
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