Poor chicken husbandry and pig news.

In my last post, I described, complacently perhaps, how the boss chicken, who is now called Shaniqua (thank you Manuel) had tried out living next door, but had returned the next morning after getting short shrift from the neighbours- (the chicken neighbours, not the lovely vicar who would have made her welcome, I have no doubt.). 

Well a couple of days after I posted it, I lost one of the two white Legbars. Again, she was missing over night, but I left for work the next morning pretty sanguine about the chances of her returning unscathed. I have had them for a month now, so I am basically a very cool, experienced chicken keeper…”unflappable”, you might say…until I got home from work and found that the white one had returned but it was now soaked from beak to claw in its own blood. That was not cool. And I was definitely very uncool.

My first thought was that I had read that chickens can’t resist the smell/taste of blood and peck their pals to death if they get a whiff of it. I was quite keen to avoid that happening, so I grabbed the bloody chicken and ran it under the warm tap. I checked later in my chicken handbook, whether this was the right thing to do and it turns out it wasn’t, but I was properly panicking. I then kept the chicken in the kitchen, until it had dried off (are you imagining how helpful the dog was throughout this process?) and then I shut it in a spare rabbit hutch we keep on our porch for those eventualities when you suddenly need to contain an animal.

By the next morning the chicken had laid an egg, was no longer quite so soaked in blood and was making a noise that suggested it was not enjoying life in a hutch, so I released it and it returned to its duties as if nothing had happened. You will be reassured to hear that its sisters have not pecked it to death.

I think that this white chicken probably also got in with the chickens next door too. She had actually only a fairly minor wound, which had just bled very profusely. But the whole experience was very unsettling. And definitely seemed like a pretty potent illustration of why people contain their chickens.

I am grateful to everybody who was kind enough to come up with an opinion about the containment/non containment question. I think, after careful consideration, I am going to go for the clipped wings, fenced in option. These are the top 5 reasons why

1)   I find that loss and/or wounding of chickens makes me unhappy

2)   It is clear from what they have accomplished so far, in terms of their impact on the seedlings I planted out in the late summer, that truly free range chickens are incompatible with growing anything in a garden.

3)   Apparently even with wings, chickens tend not to fly away from foxes, but (according to chicken experts) they crouch down. (…so the fox can’t see them?)

4)   It’s probably annoying for the neighbours to have my chickens in their gardens, and they haven’t even begun to cause real havoc by getting on to the road yet.

5)   They have begun lurking around open doors in a rather sinister way. I definitely don’t want them living in the house with us.

I have bought some second hand electric poultry netting on preloved, so I am just waiting to get round to putting it up.

But now…for some PIG NEWS!!!!

Last week I went to see some pigs, that had been advertised on Preloved (are you detecting a theme emerging here?) I had been given careful directions which I followed meticulously until they led me to a yard full of partially dismantled cars, and a remarkable selection of poultry, including guinea fowl and Turkeys. Beyond the car yard, in the middle of the field was a cheery man, with a big gun. I think I was telling the truth, when I told him that I had never had a conversation with someone holding a gun before. He explained that he had just been shooting crows- and pointed out the dead one in the field. He is a proper gold star country person.

We went on a tour of his livestock and he showed me the piglets- a bunch of little pink middle whites, about six weeks old- and some bigger saddlebacks, that were about 12 weeks. When we stood next to the pen with the saddlebacks, they stood on their hind legs to have a better look at us. I have to say, they had beguilingly intelligent faces, which were all the more unsettling for having the same colour scheme as our dog, Rollo.

We stood next to them and discussed ham weights and bacon weights, and they stood on their hind legs, leaning on the fence, grunting in a friendly way, throughout the conversation.

The cheerful man, who had put down the gun by this point, was very cheerful and very enthusiastic about the joys of pig keeping. He said that he was happy to help with transporting the pigs to us, and would then be happy to help with transporting them to the abattoir- which is something I had been worrying about the logistics of. The man said that he thought about his pigs “just like children”. He certainly did seem to love them, and they seemed to love him. It’s just the whole eating them thing that is…complicated.

We are going to visit the pigs again this Sunday, so I will take more pictures then. I had originally intended to get Gloucester Old Spot pigs, but I think that the benefits of getting local pigs from cheerful, helpful people- outweigh the more esoteric benefits of being picky about the breed.

Please let me know if you have strong feelings about this “which breed?” thing- or about the chickens. Or about anything else. Although nobody is writing in the comments here, I did get quite a few responses to the last post, and I loved all of that.

Check back soon for more pig pictures. And if you are really lucky, a fencing update.