Nature's Euthanasia

I was just commenting to Andrea the other day that we were getting ourselves quite the number of chickens: 5 foreign hens (Hot Wings, Cory, Sunny, Eggnog, and Terry), 6 local chickens (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snack, Welcome, and Moe), 2 roosters (John and Shambel) and 4 baby chicks (unnamed) – that’s 17 total. Well, I think I spoke too soon as this past week was a week of horror when it comes to the Gesas chicken project.

 

It started immediately upon our arrival back at Gesas. I got out of the truck, stretched my sore body and started counting chicks…1…2… that was it. As I looked into their house I saw chick number 3…dead. And number 4 was never found. When I asked the guy taking care of my chickens, he said “K’aasa-mata” – the Gmz word for “Mites,” which upon close examination, I saw had taken over my entire chicken coup. Armed with bug killer, I got “spray happy” and doused all the chickens, sticks, and every patch of ground around the coup. Down to 15.

 

The next morning, I took a closer look at the two remaining chicks and noticed one of them with black dirt caked all around its nose and eyes. My dad took it over to Larry (who is a veterinarian) who then gave the dismal prognosis – “well, when I was scrapping the crusted matter off of its face, the baby chick’s beak all but fell off! It looks like the mites had set up camp in its nasal cavities and pretty much ate from the inside out. We can give it medicine, but it would take an act of God for it to survive.” Hmmm…not the kind of report you want to hear from the doctor, but we never want to rule out the “act of God.” After all, Luke 12 says that God does not forget even one sparrow, so maybe He will intervene to help our little chick. And that He did, just not how we were expecting. You see, to keep the chickens out of the mite infested coup, I set up temporary housing on our front porch. Well, in the middle of the night, we heard the chickens go absolutely bizzerk, for about 10 seconds. Then it was silent. Tired and sleepy I went back to sleep only to awaken sometime later to a second ruckus outside our front window. This time I heard louder struggling and light footsteps run past my window. I grabbed a light and opened our front door, and immediately saw our welcome mat covered with feathers. Upon further investigation, I learned that one chick was taken as well as “Breakfast,” the hen who had hatched the chicks. It turns out the chick that was eaten was the sick one whose beak was falling off. When Larry heard the news, he commented “Well, I guess that’s just nature’s euthanasia.”

 

Dropping from 17 to 13 chickens in 3 days was not fun, but it didn’t end there. “Welcome” was supposed to be a special dinner for my parents 36^th wedding anniversary on August 23, however, when we came back from Addis, it was obvious that “Welcome” was not at all well. She was thin, missing a lot of feathers, had a massive growth completely covering her left eye, and a rattling cough like an asthmatic chain smoker. Over the next 3-4 days I watched her decline, until I finally ended her journey by the edge of my knife.

 

Down to 12, well not for long. It was that very next morning that Andrea and Micah returned from opening chicken coups with bad news – “your rooster was killed.” Apparently, something had gotten into our “fattening for feasting” coup and chose the fattest feast it could find – the nice big rooster I called “Shambel” (named after the guy I bought it from). Now, Shambel was on slate to take Welcome’s place at the anniversary meal, but apparently, this little varmint beat us to the kill. However, after eating its fill, the little bugger kindly left the head and lower half of the body for us if we so wanted. Needless to say, we passed on the leftovers. What type of animal has been terrorizing our chickens? Well, a cat-like animal called a Civet has been spotted in the area so we suspect that, but we can’t be for sure.

 

With 11 chickens at my disposal, I still had a chicken dinner to serve. So, on August 23, I unsheathed my knife and slaughtered Terry, the foreign chicken who had all but stopped laying eggs about a month prior. She was never a good egg layer, kind of a feisty brat toward the others and after eating a whole month’s worth of chicken food without more than 5 eggs to show for it, her rent came due and the next thing we knew, our population was down to 10. So after 8 months with only one chicken death (sickness-related), we grieved the loss of 7 in one week of terror. Well, I can’t say that we grieved over all of them, Terry was delicious.