A few years ago..........I decided to take up chicken raising. I don't eat very many eggs and I never eat the chickens, so the reasoning for this is unfounded. I just wanted some chickens. I went to the local cooperative ,and picked out 10 Black Sex Link chicks and three Rhode Island Reds. I just wanted red and black chickens. I spent a small fortune on my newly acquired chicks, making sure they had proper feed, water,and living situations (the previous chickens did not have such nice accomidations so I wanted to do it right this time). Not to mention a heat lamp and of course a heavy duty electrical cord. They were probably about $200 after everything was added up. I brought my new chicks home and set them into their special little pens with the glowing red light bulb. An hour later I went out and noticed they were all panting because I was cooking them with the heat lamp. So I adjusted that and went back inside. They all did pretty good for the next three weeks............until the jack russels came for a visit.
Mom and dad had three little jack russel dogs at the time, Spot, Lucy and Buddy. Spot and Lucy kept with you really well, but Buddy is the demon dog from hell on all critters. He'd circle a mile around you while you were driving down the road, searching for anything that would run. This particular day dad came up to do something with the fish logs, which meant he was close by. I came out of the house to find Buddy eating a corner out of the chicken house. After some persuasion he went back to dad and I went back into the house.
About 20 minutes later my cousins Dylan and Collyn came to the house. I believe they said "there are dead chickens everywhere!" The boys had gone into the chicken house to check out the baby chicks and Buddy had followed. I don't know the details of the slaughtering, all I remember was that one chick somehow made it all the way to the end of the field and the rest were no more. I think I had 5 when this was all said and done. Defeated, I went to dad and protested the chicken massacre (packing multiple peices of evidence)......where I got little sympathy, in reality they are chickens.
That afternoon I had made an appointment with a local 4H girl to go clip her steer up for a jackpot show. The steer looked great before and after the clip so there was little talk about what she needed to do differently. Instead the discussion focused on poultry and dogs. To my suprise, her mother was thinning the flock and she wanted to get rid of a white chicken, a black chicken and a red chicken. I was really excited, the co-op doesn't carry white chickens. She was deemed whitey, another blackie and another brownie.........I'm not very creative with names. They loaned me a dog kennel to take the chickens home in.
I forgot to mention I already had 5 older chickens prior to the chicks, I thought that like cows you should keep replacements every year.................I know...............so when I got home we (my husband and I) crudely built a little pen in the chicken house to keep the new ones from fighting with the old ones. Victory! I had new chickens and one was white. So I went into the house to make something to eat.
I don't remember why he went in, but Dan (husband) went into the chicken house to get something and accidently knocked over our chicken pen. He did this unknowingly. So I am sitting at the dinner table looking out over the driveway and all of a sudden these three chickens attempt to merge with my flock. If you have ever introduced chickens before you can probably visualize this before I go into detail. My old ones had whitey down tearing feathers and picking at her comb all the while she's screaming for her life, the other ones were attacking my red chicken who was running for her life. And the black chicken was having a solo battle with another hen. It was a disaster. Chickens flopping everywhere, white feathers flying in the air, my dog trying to kill the ones running away. The girl in me had had it.
I stomped down the driveway, right through the battle grounds, caught my dads horse and jumped on. My husband wanted to know what I had planned on doing, I tried to ignore him and take off................the only problem was that my horse wouldn't go forward. He would only go backwards....where the electric fence is. So I turned my head to see how far we were from getting fried on the fence and right then he hit it. Bam! The horse lept forward and I got my first taste of whiplash. Now injured and angry I whacked the horse, went for a ride up the canyon, took a breath and went home.
To end this day, I brought the horse home walked up the driveway, changed clothes and went to bed with a bowl of ice cream. And yes, the chickens all survived, though you would have never thought it walking past the piles of feathers. Dan had gathered them up while I was away pouting. Anyone considering buying chickens, just don't. They live past 6 years, or have so far, and they are just a pain in the (sentence enhancer) ass.
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