What a sweet note to receive! Unfortunately, we don't have chickens any more. It's a long story.
STRAP IN, FOLKS.
Let's start with the doggos. We have two mutts, Grover Cleveland and Birdie. Grover Cleveland is some sort of border collie/red heeler/ bunch of other random breeds mix. When we got Grover, he'd had a rear leg amputation from being hit by a car. When we adopted him, we did a lot of intensive training to make sure he had excellent recall and obedience.
Birdie is maybe beagle/shar pei/pit bull/some other random breeds mix. When we got her, she had been tied up to a post during Hurricane Harvey. We didn't do a lot of training with her because she didn't have much interest in misbehaving. She mostly just imitated Grover and stayed pretty close to us. (These facts become relevant later.)
GC was the one we were worried about when we got chickens as a Covid project, because of the time a neighbor's chicken flew into the yard and he killed it. It was sad and awful. So when we got 4 chicks, we were extremely vigilant about exposing them to each other and training him to understand that they were his to guard. I think the herd-and-protect genes were strong enough that he was into it, and he basically became their protector and rooster, running out to defend them against invading possums, hawks, and neighborhood cats. Birdie just wasn't interested at all. She mostly stayed inside on the couch, and when she did go outside she just ignored them, so we didn't do any chicken-training with her.
Fast forward 3 years, these are the world's hardiest chickens, survived a hurricane, a neighbor-dog attack and neighbor-cat attack, and all kinds of nonsense. Amazing. But then it was coming time for us to move to a new state (from LA to NC) and we knew it would be several weeks for us to get a new coop in place, and weren't even sure if we'd be allowed to have chickens in a rental, so we gave our 4 ladies to a friend with a farm. I was so sad, but it was for the best.
In the meantime, we found Birdie limping, got an X-ray, and discovered that she had a years-old injury wherein her femur had broken very dramatically and healed twisted together like a candy cane. We realized she must have been in constant pain, even though she had never given us any indication before--no whining or limping, no shying away from touch, no uneven gait. Dogs, like chickens, instinctually try not to show when they are in pain. The only weird thing was that she had always been very uneasy on smooth floors and really skittish around moving objects. We figured it was doggie-PTSD from her hurricane-history, buuuuut turns out she was actually in a lot of pain and we just didn't know it. So based on the vet's recommendation, she had a rear-leg amputation. After a couple of weeks, she started to have a new personality, just a lot more joyful and playful. It was so cool to see!
OK. So we move to NC. Lo and behold, the house we were renting actually came with 9 chickens. (The owners were to be out of the country for a year, and said we could either keep the chickens or re-home them. What luck!) All went well for a month or two. But then all of a sudden, chickens started dying.
We found a chicken carcass one day. Not eaten, but fairly mangled. Then another one a few days later. Then another one a few days later. And we thought we had a predator, but it was so weird because it was happening during the day when the chickens were free-ranging in the yard instead of at night when they were in their pen. Y'all know where this is going. One afternoon, I saw Birdie harassing the chickens...not actually attacking them, just running after them at an easy pace. And she was having SO much fun...just joyfully terrorizing them. I kept trying to interfere, but this rental back yard was HUGE and as previously mentioned we never did much training with her because she just wasn't inclined to misbehave. JOKE WAS ON US.
That's when we figured out that we did indeed have a predator, and that it was Birdie. Seems that once her pain level was low enough, her beagle genes kicked in.
We started keeping the chickens in their pen full-time except when Birdie was inside the house, but they were NOT happy to go from mostly free-ranging to mostly chicken-run-chickens. So we gave them to a neighbor with a ridiculously large yard and no bloodthirsty dogs.
Thus ends the saga of why we don't have chickens any more. When Birdie shuffles off this mortal coil, we will come back to chicken-life. I have enjoyed being part of this community, and have received some truly excellent advice and kinship. I will be popping in here and there to enjoy the stories and pictures.
Warmly,
Danielle
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