Why I Love to Farm, Part III

Checking in on the meat chickens one morning this summer, I found several drowned in the water hole. At first I assumed it was just a fluke. Perhaps a terminally ill chicken had staggered down to quench his thirst and bought the farm just as he leant over for a sip. One of the other early victims had obviously been put there by the weasel, as he was missing his head but otherwise intact. Admittedly the hole was steep on one side, but the other three sides were gently sloped. And at two or three feet wide, it wasn't exactly the English Channel. A conscious chicken making any effort what-so-ever couldn't possibly manage to drown with outsome stunning stupidity.

But it was not a fluke. Turns out stunning stupidity is an indemic afflication of meat chickens. I'd make a joke here about large breasts sapping energy for brain function, but have some lovely friends with big bosums, so will restrain myself. Soon I was fishing out five or eight a day. I'd approach the watering hole with a few plastic fence posts, drag out the floaters and then poke around the bottom for sinkers. As unplesant as chicken fishing is, you had to be thorough or a chicken would suddenly rot just enough to become boyant, and you'd be explaining to a family of New Jersey suburbanites why the animals' drinking water was full of bobbing corpses. Not great for meat sales.

Once retrieved from the depths, I was supposed to walk the chickens out the the bone yard in the back end of the nature preserve for the wildlife to enjoy. They had a real hoot with the forty chickens killed by that bear, and decorated the surrounding forest with a festive sprinkling of chicken feet. But a long trek to the bone yard with ten to thirty pounds of dripping wet dead bird just sucks on a hot summer day, so I got a lot of practice winging them as far as possible into the downwind patch of willows. I found it's essential to keep the release smooth or you lose all the momentum of your wind up when the leg pops off.

Wait a minute, what does this have to do with loving to farm? I love to farm because I have to solve bizarre problems, which is interesting and challenging and humbling. There is nothing written in any text book about how to prevent chickens from drowning themselves in a puddle, so I was forced to tap into my creative juices. Turns out my creative juices were not flowing very freely after three months of unchecked ranch chaos, so my first idea was to install ramps. I had lots of old boards on hand and thought that maybe if they just had something solid under their poopy little dinosaur feet, they'd be able to walk to safety.

The next morning I was greeted by more carnage, and many of the bodies were actually wedged under the ramps. Apparently, swimming chickens not only can't navigate ramps, but find them particularly deadly. I rearranged the ramps so they were lower in the water and added boards entirely blocking off the side of the puddle with the steep drop. I suppose if my options for the future were limited to death by weasel, bear, coyote, owl, illness and consequent butt pecking from my flock mates, or - at the ripe old age of 10 weeks - a knife through the roof of my mouth, I might also jump into a pond. If it wasn't depression, perhaps aggression was responsible for the drownings. There you are, waddling over for a drink, and that bitchy chicken who pushed you out of the feed tough at breakfast is leaning over the edge, oblivious to your approach. Just one clumsy hip check to bump her over the edge as you casually toddle by and you'll be sitting on as much breakfast as you want to tomorrow! (physically sitting on food while you eat it is the perferred poultry method of gluttony)

The next morning I found the barricades had been ineffective. It wasn't lemur-like suicides or a rash of murders to blame. Evidently, the chickens were strolling in the shallow end for a drink and finding themselves unable to compute an exit strategy beyond ever forward, up and onward.

And... here's where the real creativity came in! I was standing there chicken fishing in a dejected manner when my favorite community service volunteer looked up from feeding birds and asked me why I didn't just cover the hole with chicken wire. Why indeed? Because I was not thinking outside the box, and chicken wire was not inside my box. I landscape stapled some mesh fencing over that puddle, and never lost another bird to drowning. As convinced as I was by that point that they were drowning just to spite me, I was surprised that not a one figured out how to get it's head stuck in the mesh or at the very least break a leg. All this goes to show that a fresh perspective is worth a lot of chickens. Also, never underestimate a sassy highschool delinquent.

Haha, just you try to keep me from throwing myself into the lethal depths, I dare ya