On the Death of a Chicken

On the Death of a Chicken

A little context is needed for this blog post. Sometime in February of 2023 we became chicken owners. And this past week, one of those chickens, Moon, passed away unexpectedly.

As you may recall, the first several months of 2023 saw an astonishing hike in egg prices, which meant that for families like ours, who consume large quantities of eggs, the options appeared to be either a) take out a second mortgage, or b) get some chickens. We chose the latter, although in hindsight perhaps a second mortgage would have been the wiser choice.

Our chicken owning adventure began with eight adorable fuzzy chicks which we purchased from our friends, the Gillilands, who had braved the chick-purchasing frenzy at Shoppers on behalf of both our families and acquired a large brood of chicks for us to divvy up.

Why eight chicks, you may be wondering? Well, to be perfectly honest, given our status as rank amateurs when it came to the keeping of chickens, and our less-than-impressive record with living things like houseplants, we never in our wildest dreams imagined all eight of them would successfully reach adulthood. They did. All of them. Which means, until the recent passing of the aforementioned Moon, we have been raising eight chickens for over nine months now.

We have many friends who own chickens, urban dwellers all, and we have had this venture, nay this lifestyle, recommended to us frequently over the years. In the end all it took was the hyperinflation of egg prices to push us over the edge. So, with ample encouragement from our friends, we took the plunge.

In our friends’ defense, they were right about a lot of the benefits of chicken ownership – it is amusing to watch a flock of eight chickens that appear to share roughly two thirds of a brain between them, rushing around the yard in headlong pursuit of absolutely nothing, each chicken getting all worked into a frenzy because the chicken next to it had gotten all worked into a frenzy, none of them having the slightest idea what all the excitement is about.

And the eggs are great, when we get eggs, that is. One of the first lessons of chicken ownership is that the egg production of our flock of genius birds is profoundly influenced by such variable factors as how consistently our non-farmer children have been doing things like watering and feeding the chickens, and how frequently Becky or I have found time to clean out their coop.

Another lesson, also predicted correctly by our chicken-owning friends, is that no matter how wildly the production of eggs may vacillate, the production of chicken poo will remain amazingly consistent. And robust.

In case you are eating, or planning to at any point this week, I will spare you the details of the coop cleaning, but suffice it to say that if – by the grace and mercy of God – I should happen to make the cut for inclusion among the blessed in heaven, I think I have a pretty good idea what Purgatory is going to consist of, for me. And if I am in need of really serious purification there will be rap music playing in the background the entire time.

At any rate, back to the untimely demise of one of our (semi)beloved chickens. After the recently deceased Moon was discovered and properly disposed of – the humming of “Taps”, a cell phone video of a military flyover, draping the casket with the flag of Chickenlandia, etc. – all heck broke loose in the Greene family chicken flock.

Where previously we had owned a fairly well-behaved brood of yardbirds, suddenly Starlight, the only other chicken of the same breed as Moon, went crazy and started bullying and viciously attacking the other chickens, particularly poor Martygold (so named by our 13-year-old daughter because, after originally naming her Marigold, there was a period of some weeks where we thought she might be a rooster).

For those of you who have not yet embarked upon the thrill-a-minute romance of backyard chicken ownership, let me just tell you – when chickens attack it can be surprisingly brutal, and even a bit traumatizing for the children who care for them.

It was in the face of this crisis that our youngest son and youngest daughter, ages ten and seven, respectively, donned their chicken farmer outfits – consisting primarily of overalls and a flannel shirt for her, and an old, too-small soccer jersey for him – and took up the work of amateur poultry psychologists.

They could both be seen, for the better part of this past Wednesday afternoon, carefully observing the chickens from the netted safety of their poultry blind (formerly known as our backyard trampoline), and arranging and rearranging different groupings of chickens in the coop to see who the primary victims of bullying were.

In addition, our seven-year-old daughter, spent significant time carrying individual chickens around the yard talking to them, her shock of super curly brown hair partially obscuring the chicken/patient as she bent over it, speaking soothingly to the troubled fowl.

Not wanting to corrupt her research protocols, I didn’t intervene to find out what she was saying to the chickens, but I assume she was asking them double-blind control group questions about how the death of Moon had made them feel.

Anyway, their research continued apace, and by dinner time they had reached their conclusion.

Their professional opinion? That Starlight, suddenly bereft of her only breed-mate, didn’t know how to handle her sudden isolation, and was lashing out because she now felt she had no one left to turn to. Really. That’s basically how they explained it to us.

Pretty impressive for a couple of run-of-the-mill farm kids! Especially when you consider that their “farm” consists of the fractional acreage of a suburban Mesa, AZ backyard, and they have no formal training in psychology, chicken or otherwise.

And what, at the end of the day, are the lessons here? Well, first of all that - minus rational intelligence, free will, an immortal soul, opposable thumbs, the ability to fashion tools, make art, philosophize about existence, and the hope of heaven - chickens are basically people, too, prone to the same struggles with bereavement as the rest of us.

Secondly, when faced with a poultry-sized tragedy, and the ensuing Coop of Chaos, two kids who may or may not always be entirely on point with their more mundane chicken care responsibilities, can rise to the occasion, displaying empathy and concern for the wellbeing of both victims and perpetrator.

Finally, we have their astute observation about the need that chickens and people alike have for companionship and someone who understands us, and the reality that behind every difficult person (or chicken) behaving badly there is suffering, in need of healing and perhaps a little human kindness.

Not a bad day’s work, all things considered. Life lessons learned. And the opportunity to learn them cost us only one chicken.

Until next time, may God bless you and your families this Advent season, and may the Nativity of Our Lord find you in a state of joyful anticipation and peaceful preparedness.

In Christ,

Steve

p.s. As of press time the kids tell me that things have settled down and returned to more or less normal in the Greene family chicken coop. Starlight seems to have begun working through her issues, Martygold and the others are recovering from their trauma, and all of them are in the care of the aforementioned amateur poultry psychologists, so it would appear that things are “trending up”, to use the parlance of our times.

p.s.#2 For those of you who first read this post in its original form, and are now wondering why the chicken acquisition timeline I lay out at the beginning has changed, I should make clear that the changes came at the insistence of my wife, who a) was the one who arranged the actual acquisition of these chickens, and b) whose grasp of the chronology of our lives I willingly acknowledge is vastly superior to mine.