chickens

recently i did something that was very hypoctritical. i read a ghastly how to book! as you know i have mercilessly cut down these books.

my mom recently moved to the country so i live part time in the city (which i adore) with my dad, and part time in the country (which i tolerate) with my mom. anyway at my mom's house we got chickens. three hens and a rooster. well anyway my mom and step dad bought one of those foul how to books called CHICKENS IN YOUR BACKYARD... well anyway i got sucked in and persuaded to read bits of it... and immediately it gave me unbearable anxiety about everything we weren't doing exactly like the book said. ugh so now i have a personal experience under my belt that i can use against those books. hate them, hate them, hate them.

on a more pleasant note, i love my chickens. the rooster is called kinnicky, and the three hens are murphy, rosalba, and rizzo. it's pretty cool cuz when the rooster first came rizzo was the first one he layed. lol. we are eventually getting meat chickens as well, and i've resolved to call all of them "din-din" or "supper". but when i told my friend, who has urban chickens, that we would be getting meat chickens, she stopped in her tracks got bug eyed beyond beleif and almost went into cardiac arrest. she was like "how could you do such a thing?". the most obvious reason for this being so ridiculous is that she eats chicken! she eats chicken that you buy in the store, and unless you buy the awesome free range kind (which we do), i can guarantee you that meat raised in my back yard is going to taste better and be more humanely killed. the second reason came recently when i racoon broke into her chicken coop and mutilated and brutally killed one of her chickens. i was showering her with sympathy of course but she said flatly "i wasn't that sad"... one of the reasons she didn't want me to get meat chickens is because she thought it would be way to sad to kill your own chickens. but honestly, if you're not that sad about a chicken that you have bonded with and named getting violently ripped to peices for no good purpose, how could you possibly be sad that a nameless bird gets humanely killed to feed your family?