Monday, November 23, 2009

New Roommates

Having roommates is never easy. Even if you get along like like fried eggs and ham, there are bound to be some habits that grate on one another's nerves, for example, dirty dishes left in the sink, bogarting the remote, and singing along with every song played on the stereo. But, what if your list of annoying roommate habits included molting, pecking, and smelling like a chicken?Buzz and Auntie have recently been subjected to two new coopmates and to be honest with you, I am beyond disappointed to find that they have not only been picking on one of the new girls, but they have been brutally assaulting assaulting her.
The new chicks arrived Sunday evening and after evaluating their temperaments we decided that, due to her unflappable and cordial charm we would sneak the funny looking blackTurken, Bruja , into the coop while Buzz and Auntie were sleeping. This is a pretty standard integration tactic for new chickens and it seemed to work well enough forBruja. The next morning Buzz and Auntie picked on her a bit, but the climate of the coop had hardly been compromised.

The integration of chicken number two- Cinderella I'll call her for now - has proven to be more of a challenge. From the start she was very skittish and defensive, and for this very reason we decided to give her one more day to calm down before throwing her into the mix. The next day, when I brought her cage into the chicken run to set her loose,Bruja immediately ran over. How sweet, I naively thought, she's coming over to greet her old friend. I could not have been farther off the mark. As soon as Bruja reached Cinderella, she began pecking at her angrily. Buzz and Auntie soon caught wind of the assault and, like a pack of high school mean girls, backed up their new feathered companion by closing in on Cinderella from all sides. It was a barbaric display, one that has persisted all week long with early morning ambushes, heartbreaking cries for help, and many a rescue. It's hard to believe that my dear little chick-a-dees are capable of being suck bitches!
It's so bad that it has me wondering if I will be forced to put an end to this torment with a recipe I found in an old cookbook from 1909.
You hear that girls! You might want to re-think behaving in such an unlovable fashion so close to Thanksgiving... I do have 17 mouths to feed after all.

1 comment:

Régine GUION-FIRMIN said...

Could you do that recipe without killing the fowl? With tofu for example... No! It's so fun to kill the fowl!