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10 pounds down 32 pounds to go!

Thursday, June 10, 2010

"You wanna be a badass, you gotta eat healthy!".

Dudes, we killed a chicken and I'm really upset about it.  I mean, not like in a slaughtering and butchering kind of way but in a holy shit we don't know what we're doing kind of way.  One of the hens had been broody for a while.  Broody means she sits around in her nest waiting for baby chickens to hatch.  Only we take away all the eggs and we don't actually have a rooster so there isn't any possibility of baby chickens unless Jesus is coming back to earth with feathers.    So yeah, we knew she was broody and has been for weeks.  Like 8 weeks.  What we didn't know is that broody hens who don't get chickies after 21 days start to go insane and brood even harder and then it kills them.  They actually starve and dehydrate themselves to death waiting for chicks that will never come.  

Of course this only happens when the hen is being raised by morons.  Morons who wonder aloud about that broody, broody hen but never think about googling "broody hen".  If you google "broody hen" it will tell you to "break up" the hen, or discourage her from sitting on an empty nest till she kills herself or you can give her chicks at about 21 days in.  We didn't do either of these things, what's the refrain...oh yes, because we're morons and we didn't know any better.

This is a lesson we learned the hard way, unfortunately.  That hen was my third corpse of the week and it's starting to remind me of Clue the movie where after the third or fourth candlestick in the library incident everyone starts to get blase about the bodies.  Another body, oh gee, how inconvenient!  We're actually not sure what to do with them there are so many.  How screwed up is that, we're running out of room to hide the bodies!  It's not a good problem to have.

4 comments:

The Fat Foreigner said...

Argh, sounds stressful! I'd say there's bound to be a learning curve but I'm guessing that won't make you feel better.

Well, at least you know when another problme arises your first thought will be 'To the Google-machine Batman!' (ahem, or something to that effect).

Amy said...

We just thought she liked sitting there...it did not occur to me she would starve to death waiting for babies. maybe it was infertility depression...

Laura said...

LOL! I can't say anything else. I grew up with chickens so this is pretty funny to me. :)

Anne H said...

Hiding the bodies is always the hard part....
So I've heard...