I went away for the weekend and came back to hear extreme stories about my malcontent rooster. It seems that he stalked my daughter and her partner, their children were not safe, and everyone had to sneak out to the car armed with shovels, brooms, towels and stout shoes.
I came home to find all the last years work on getting Buck to calm down gone away with fights between dog & chicken, [chicken mostly winning] and high indignation expressed in my direction.
Every day this week I have had to pick him up and tell him that he is a nice chicken, scratch his neck and feed him grapes. When I put him back down, he stands nearby, grumbling, almost forgiving but I think, not quite.
The girls regained their equilibrium the instant the dog went away, but Buck is vigilant, and I expect will remain so for awhile.
The baby chicks were fine in the care of my family, until I got home. I managed to cause their deaths, and I'm not going to get over that anytime soon.
In spite of carefully following all directions, checking on them every 2 hours, changing their water, and making sure things were fine, in spite of buying the regulation objects to keep them in and keep them warm with as advised by Agway, the heat lamp started a fire in the bathroom, incinerating everything while I went out to buy groceries. I came home and Buck was standing in the yard screaming at me, smoke coming out of the front door. This week has been about cleaning up, and trying not to panic every time I get a whiff again of charred plastic, and memory of finding my little babies in a blackened mass in the bathtub.
Ignorance is dangerous, and I think instead of trying to increase the numbers of chickens around here by getting little ones, I'll adopt menopausal hens or wait to see if any of the girls who are already here will decide to sit on their own eggs, and keep the babies under their own wings, they clearly know more about how to do this than I do.
It is hard to listen to the news this week. Having been responsible for horrible violence in my own house I am even more at a loss than usual to understand the routine viciousness humans inflict on each other. This world's more full of weeping....
I came home to find all the last years work on getting Buck to calm down gone away with fights between dog & chicken, [chicken mostly winning] and high indignation expressed in my direction.
Every day this week I have had to pick him up and tell him that he is a nice chicken, scratch his neck and feed him grapes. When I put him back down, he stands nearby, grumbling, almost forgiving but I think, not quite.
The girls regained their equilibrium the instant the dog went away, but Buck is vigilant, and I expect will remain so for awhile.
The baby chicks were fine in the care of my family, until I got home. I managed to cause their deaths, and I'm not going to get over that anytime soon.
In spite of carefully following all directions, checking on them every 2 hours, changing their water, and making sure things were fine, in spite of buying the regulation objects to keep them in and keep them warm with as advised by Agway, the heat lamp started a fire in the bathroom, incinerating everything while I went out to buy groceries. I came home and Buck was standing in the yard screaming at me, smoke coming out of the front door. This week has been about cleaning up, and trying not to panic every time I get a whiff again of charred plastic, and memory of finding my little babies in a blackened mass in the bathtub.
Ignorance is dangerous, and I think instead of trying to increase the numbers of chickens around here by getting little ones, I'll adopt menopausal hens or wait to see if any of the girls who are already here will decide to sit on their own eggs, and keep the babies under their own wings, they clearly know more about how to do this than I do.
It is hard to listen to the news this week. Having been responsible for horrible violence in my own house I am even more at a loss than usual to understand the routine viciousness humans inflict on each other. This world's more full of weeping....
No comments:
Post a Comment
Glad to hear from you, but criticisms will be ignored. It's the beauty of the web. I will answer all friendly remarks. Buck handles the rest.