We are chicken people. We just love our chickens. We really don't care about the eggs, the chickens are our pets.
There's one thing we've learned over the past 3.5 years of raising chickens, and that is they make lousy pets. Especially for sensitive young children. Never choose an animal at the bottom of the food chain as a pet. Especially one as unintelligent as a chicken.
At the beginning of 2018 we had 6 chickens. I received 7 chicks for my birthday and G also brought home 3 Silkies this spring.
One of the chickens wandered off in April. I'm assuming she got snatched while the chickens were free-ranging.
My birthday chicks, which I have written about before, were very loved by the kids who each had their own special chicken. We kept very good care of them and were very protective of them after the previous chicken massacres of 2017.
(This next part is really sad, grab a box of tissues.)
GE had a very special chick named Green Layer Like Gecko Is Green. He held and fed Green Layer every day. He made sure Green Layer got special grass to eat. He watched Green Layer the entire time she was outside and always locked her up tight. He would talk about how he couldn't wait to go out and get her green eggs every day when she started laying. He was so excited for his special green eggs.
One night, despite the coop being shut up tight, a raccoon pulled a board off the coop and killed three chicks, including GE's Green Layer.
When he found out, he cried out, "Not my Green Layer! I need my Green Layer!"
GE is a very compassionate, sensitive little boy. He mourned deeply for the next several days. He wouldn't eat. He would just lay on the floor and sometimes fall asleep in the middle of the day. It was so sad.
G searched and searched for a replacement for this special breed of chicken. G can find anything on Craigslist and came home one day with not one replacement, but five. GE loves these Green Layers and he came out of his mourning period, but he has not been able to bring himself to get too close to these new chicks, which is sad considering how attached my boys used to get to the chicks.
At first GE named all the chicks "Green Layer." Finally he started to differentiate them. We now have Green Layer the New Real Green Layer, Green Layer Like Tractors Are Green, Santa (formerly known as Fluffy), and he gave two of the chicks to his siblings and GD named his Turbo and KM named hers Flower.
The other two chicks that were killed in that incident were my special chick Sunshine and one of the Silkies Josephine. Henrietta was also chicken-napped but managed to wander back later that day.
KM became very attached to Henrietta after that but a few weeks later Henrietta disappeared while free-ranging. We couldn't keep her in either of the coops because she was getting picked on. We later have concluded that the 3 Silkies were blind. None of them survived the summer.
Meanwhile, we tried putting the birthday chicks in with the big chickens and my Buff Orpington Watermelon, the one chicken I had specifically requested that I had plans to let become a mother, was killed by way of fear of the head chicken Blaze.
So, now our chickens no longer free-range, our children no longer forge strong attachments to our livestock, we lock the Green Layers in the workshop every night, and emotionally no one is up to raising chicks next year.
Also, if you're ever talking to one of the kids about the chickens, they think that Henrietta wandered off to find her sister Josephine and they are living a happy life together somewhere and we never mentioned Watermelon and let the memory of that chicken fade away.
(I really wish I could have made this post more enjoyable to read or funny or something, but really we're pretty bummed about our chickens and I felt like there needed to be some closure on the original Green Layer.)
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