Swimming with the chicks
…there are 7 chickens in the picture—see if you can find them all…
Ed and I were so thrilled to be living in the country after 5 years of city living! We really enjoyed having cows and goats for our neighbors. At one point, when our daughter Brandy was still a toddler, we decided that we would like to have some chickens. I can almost hear you laughing…
We saw a sign in the feed/seed store that said they would give you 25 free baby chicks if you purchased a large bag of chicken feed. Well, I am the type of person who thinks more is better, so I talked Ed into getting TWO bags of food and 50 free chicks! What was I thinking??? We brought all of those cute little baby chicks home and the fun began! –Did I mention that there were 50 chicks???
Problem number one was our dog! He was part lab and he just loved to chase those chickens…
Brandy & chicken killer
He would play too rough of course, and several chickens met their demise due to the dog. It was a never-ending problem, until we got rid of the dog…
The next problem was finding out just how many varmints in the woods like to eat chickens. We had a never-ending assortment of intruders breaking into our chicken house at night. There was a never-ending line of opossums, raccoons, foxes, owls and yes, we even had chicken hawks attack our chickens during the day while they were in our yard!
Of course there was an enormous amount of chicken poop on the ground. We kept the chickens shut up at night in a chicken house, but let them run free during the day. All chickens do all day is eat and poop!
chicken poop
With that many chickens running in the yard, we had to really watch our step! More than once I felt a squish under my foot, which is really annoying, especially if you don’t have shoes on!
The biggest problem happened when we discovered that all of the chicks were white roosters! Anybody who knows about chickens will tell you that one rooster is all that you need! All roosters do is fight and crow. We didn’t many chickens left , thanks to the dog and the other varmints– our flock had grown small, but we still had a lot more roosters than we needed.
We asked around and found out that one of our neighbors was interested in our roosters–to eat! I’d raised these roosters from babies and held them in my lap. The thought of them becoming someone’s fried chicken dinner didn’t make me happy.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have a choice. Roosters will fight and kill each other if a bunch of them are kept together. Sadly, we took the roosters over to the neighbor’s house. Imagine the look on my face when I saw our neighbor beginning to wring the necks of my pets–before we even got out of the driveway!!! It was beyond awful! That was one of my worst animal experiences ever–and believe me, I’ve had plenty of them!…to be continued tomorrow…..
Reflections...by Kathy 
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