Well, if you would have told me this a week ago, I would have argued with you, but now I’ve got to face the truth. My chickens are racists.
I always thought they swung a little toward the liberal, which by tradition would have made them accepting and loving of everyone and everything, even axe-murderers and the like. (Whoops, that was a serious faux pas. You try not to mention axes to chickens. They get agitated.)
Joyce and I thought Thelma and Louise must be kind of liberal because they seem to be, shall we say, differently oriented. Well, what would you think if you saw two lady chickens living together in a house with no fellas ever around?
Hey, I’m not judging. I bang on the chicken house before I go in to feed every morning, not necessarily because I am afraid to see something that might be better left private. It just makes sense to avoid things you really don’t want to know.
It’s the same reason you don’t look under rocks if you don’t like bugs and you don’t give the serial number of your rototiller to the manufacturer if you’re not really sure where it came from.
We got Thelma and Louise, our two Rhode Island Reds, last year from our friends who are chicken pushers. The police won’t let them within 300 feet of a playground if they are wearing raincoats that seem to be leaking feathers.
They got us hooked with a “taste.”
They had more hens than they needed, so they offered us a couple, free of charge. The first ones are always free, you know.
Neither Joyce nor I had managed a poultry operation for several decades, but I proceeded with my usual planning and preparation. Before going to get our chickens, I constructed a state-of-the-art henhouse with passive solar heat, exemplary cross-ventilation and luxurious nests with an automated egg-gathering robot. We purchased feed and installed an automatic watering system. Security would be provided by a private contractor that specializes in defense against hawk and neighbor dog attacks.
Well, all right, we really didn’t do any of that stuff. We just went and got the chickens. Our friends lent us a pet carrier to take them home in because we hadn’t even thought that far ahead.
On the way home, we agreed several times that the chickens were cute and funny, but we avoided the subject of where they would live and what they might eat.
For a couple days they lived in the pet carrier on the freezer in the house. The dogs, who are used to us packing in odd creatures, just rolled their eyes in resignation and went back to chewing up dead things on my side of the bed.
We got a box built onto the side of the shed, stapled a tarp roof onto the plywood and fenced in a little area for them to peck around in. Turned ‘em loose. They seemed happy.
Unfortunately, they keep laying eggs. As I write this, there are four dozen sitting in the fridge. We don’t eat that many eggs, and Thelma and Louise were depressingly productive even during the winter.
That said, it may come as a surprise that we couldn’t wait to get more chickens. We’ve become addicted.
Our chicken source approached me one day when nobody else was around and whispered that she and her husband had gotten their hands on six Barred Rock chicks. “Primo stock,” she said in a low voice, looking around nervously to make sure no one else could hear. “This is good stuff.”
If I had been wearing a wire for the Chicken Enforcement Agency, she would have been busted right there.
Joyce went and picked up the new hens last Saturday. Sunday morning, we released them into the pen to watch Thelma and Louise welcome their new friends, Lucy and Ethel.
The welcome wasn’t warm.
The little black and white hens stick together. The big red hens stick together. The big red hens terrorize the little black and white hens, driving them away from the feed and water. Several times a day, Joyce or I quote Rodney King at them: “Why can’t we all just get along?”
At night, Thelma and Louise crouch, clucking furiously, together on the south side of the roost in the chicken house. Lucy and Ethel, quivering in terror, huddle on the nests or wedged between the water container and the wall.
It bothers us to see them all so unhappy. I’ve tried playing my old Al Franken Air America tapes for them to teach them some good old-fashioned liberal tolerance. They just squawk and squabble more. The only difference I’ve seen is that they seem more in favor of taxing and spending.
The poultry experts we’ve consulted assure us they’ll settle down after a while and get along better. Until then, I reckon we’ll just have a henhouse divided by racial hatred and oppression.
Ken York's column appears in The Daily Record in Lebanon, Mo. It is reprinted here with permission.
No comments:
Post a Comment