Ruler of the Roost
Songster
- Mar 10, 2024
- 295
- 725
- 146
As chicken people, we love our chickens! Their quirks and mannerisms often seem alien to us sapiens, but they are also entertaining, endearing, and seemingly magic at times. Plus, there is the added benefit of free food every morning when we go out to feed them. They take many days and hours from our lives, feeding and watering them, caring for them, entertaining them, obsessing over their health an d nutrition. Dare I mention the coop building and maintenance, predator proofing, researching better feeders and waterers, and the debt that seems to always follow those ventures no matter how many recycled materials you seem to throw at a project. But they shower us in eggs, love, and entertainment. In the cosmic scheme, it some how all comes together to make sense in this delightfully masochistic night-dream-mare-thing. One of the ways that chickens, and all other poultry for that matter, is what psychologists call Factitious Disorder Placed on Another (FDIA). This means that that we essentially become hypochondriacs, but for our birds rather than ourselves. We worry about Marek's disease, over-breeding, mites and parasites, bumble foot, numerous chicken disorders of the buttocks, and the list goes on and on and on. One can only ask if these behaviors are detrimental to our so-loved flightless birds. Hagrid the Haggard, a one year old male cream coloured silkie, would certainly think so this morning. I went to the coop to feed my birds and found Hagrid stumbling around. This made me look closer and I noticed missing feathers and a general more-haggard-than-usual appearance. I immediately said to myself that he's egg bound and hurt...then it occurred to me that he is a rooster...so it can't be egg related. So he must have been being picked on in the most horrible of ways and gotten hurt in the process. So I grabbed the net, scooped him up like a super hero, and rushed him inside as if he were on death's door. I turned him all over and noticed that his ear thingy was all swollen to and he was missing even more feathers than I initially thought. Moments raced by laced with panic as I continued my inspection. His feathers were really dirty and so into the bath he went so I could get a better look. After an hour of soaking, scrubbing, rinsing, towel drying, and then an all out blow dry I found the culprit to all of his problems. There had been poop stuck to his foot and he didn't like it, which explained him walking funny. Both of his ear lobes were the same size and color and were actually normal for HIM. And the coup de gra... he was molting and dirty. So, Hagrid got pampered for no reason at all as far as he was concerned and well...there are no pictures to commemorate this even as he was livid and just not having any more of it. The things we do for our chickens, to our chikcens, and ultimately, to ourselves. Am I right?
