Friday 6 December 2013

Published at Mother Earth News

The venerable Mother Earth News has just published my first article, "How Not to Keep Chickens." Unlike Grit, Resilience or some other publications, they have requested that I not duplicate the article here except for an excerpt, like this: 



"You might think your chickens might see you as dogs do, as a god who strides among them tossing manna. You would be mistaken: chickens don’t think you are the same person who wore that different shirt yesterday. Chickens don’t think that your moving parts are part of a single life-form. Let’s be honest, chickens don’t think. What I’m getting at here is: don’t walk into a chicken run barefoot, or the birds will see your toes and give you what we in the business call 'the full Hitchcock.'"


... and go read the rest here. 


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Love it! This reminds me of many of our own chicken experiences, especially the cannibalism and the finding many ways to die.

One other thing that blew me away with chickens is that they are true omnivores. In addition to leaves and seeds ours also eat anything they can kill, including big grasshoppers, mice, and snakes. Funny how no one mentions that chickens make good rodent control...

gretchen said...

now i know where your daughter gets her ability to express herself and her sense of humour. after reading the entire article, any thought of raising chickens in my backyard (which we are now allowed to do here in my small mid-western city) has now gone right out of my head. forever. no chickens.

Brian Kaller said...

Anonymous, I love the warmer months when we can let them loose in our garden and they gobble up every pest they find. Of course, the down side is finding eggs they laid months ago - on a shelf in the shed, in the tall grass, anywhere. :-)

Gretchen,

Thank you! I hope I haven't shot down your dreams by painting too dark a picture -- I have my chickens, after all, and we're quite attached to them. Glad to provide the full story, though.

Anonymous said...

My parents used to call my brother a garbage disposal system given the wide variety and sheer quantity of edibles he would shovel down after school but truly, that label belongs to the chicken. Ours eat pretty much everything and precious little ends up in the compost. What tehy don't eat (banana skins, apple cores and orange peel although they do try to eat them) the goat eats with relish. Feed in garbage, reap eggs. And the fun of the surprise egg is part of the fun. As long as they don't float...