Keeping Chickens

It seemed like a good idea when Mike and Diane brought home the seven baby chicks: there would be one for each of them and the two boys, plus a few spares. There was plenty of room for a coop and ranging yard on their property. Mike planned to build a hen house and put up a fence. The chickens would have freedom to roam—more than the so-called free-range chickens you could buy at the co-op grocery stores that abounded in their town. The family would enjoy cheap, fresh eggs, and maybe once in a while they would dine on a chicken they’d raised themselves. The boys each named their chicken: Shane called his Tree, and Matthew named his Zorgon. But things didn’t go quite according to plan. Do they ever, when animals and small children are involved?

Kona, the family dog, is part border collie. He never sits still if there’s someone around to throw him a Frisbee. Herding the five goats on Mike and Diane’s two-acre property is his main doggie job. It turns out he’s also a pretty good hunter. He must have assumed that the new chicks were just one of the perks of his job. He caught and ate two of them before Mike could get the henhouse built. Kona is smart, though, and once Mike and Diane convinced him that the chickens were off limits and indeed were his new charges, he left them alone.

That didn’t stop the coyotes, however. Two more chicks disappeared within a week, even after the coop was in place. Mike figured that the chicks would bed down there and be safe at night, but that’s not how it worked out. Either the coyotes were smart enough to open the henhouse doors, or the chicks were caught wandering in the yard. So Mike started locking the chickens into their coops at night. During the day, Kona guarded the yard from predators looking for a tender, free snack.

Three hens survived to gorgeous, buff-and-gold-feathered adulthood and began laying. Most days you could open their coops and find one or two freshly laid golden brown eggs. Since there is no rooster, the unfertilized eggs would simply rot if left in the coop, so the boys gathered the eggs every day. Farm-fresh eggs—how fine! And they were, until the boys caught sight of what the chickens ate: they saw one of the chickens walking across the yard, a garter snake wriggling in its beak. In a few seconds the snake was gone, consumed in a few squirmy bites by the omnivorous chick. Now the only person who would touch the eggs was Mike: Diane and the boys were not interested in eating snakes, bugs, and worms, even if only by proxy.

Zorgon, Tree, and the nameless spare chicken now roost in the clematis vines under Shane and Matthew’s bedroom window and enjoy a fine life as family pets, protected by the loyal Kona and assured of a long life and, probably, death of old age. This family would rather eat a block of tofu than one of their free-range friends.