It's not about the chickens anymore

After finding Mark and Anjali's favorite chickens, Brownie and Sh-eagle, miraculously alive after a subzero night of exposure, I called Tim, and said, "It's no longer about the chickens.  It's about my kids.  We've got to do something about keeping those chickens warmer and safer today."

And we did.  We moved their coops out of the fenced and netted compound we'd spent hours setting up and put them in the greenhouse with deep straw bedding and a heat lamp.  

My chickens were going to be winter hardy.  My chickens would eat snow when they were thirsty.  Natural selection.  Prepared for hard times.  Keep themselves warm with their own body heat.  A few combs would be lost but heck, who needs combs?  We were not going to pamper our livestock.

We have now reinvented the barn but sunnier, more expensive, and breakable in the form of a greenhouse.  We lug warm water out three times a day and set aside kitchen scraps on top of feed rations and even defrost special goodies we saved for them in the freezer chest.  The fact that it's too cold and dark to collect more than about 3 eggs per week is just frosting on the cake.  Believe me, the irony of this is not lost on me. 

"We still have limits.  We still have some principles," I assure myself. 

We did not follow Joe's advice to "Keep warm.  Sleep with a chicken…."  Although we did have some good laughs about it on those record setting frigid days when we were housebound and chilly. 

We do not put diapers on our chickens like the people at the feed store in Forest Lake whose pet bantam rooster roams the store in his protective undergarment.  Houle's Feed Store.  Check it out.

Last year, I felt confident that I would never do certain things.  I even wrote a No-Can-Do List for my farm, the things I would never let happen when I farmed:

1.  Knee deep mud
2.  Old machinery rusting around the yard
3.  Nasty manure smells
4.  Animals in my bath tub
5.  Large equipment laying around disassembled and in disrepair
6.  Animal skulls nailed to the fence posts of the front gate

But then I got an old pick-up truck and brooded chicks in my basement bathtub.  I've also lusted after dirt, gotten jealous of corn, slaughtered chickens, chased ducks, killed three deer, and paid to eat road kill since then.  

Apparently, I have no idea what I'm capable of or what will happen next, so today I'm celebrating that it hasn't come to diapering our poultry.  Yet.

I still have my dignity. 
Well, a little.
So far.

I tell my dad the story of the lost chickens and the found chickens and the newly-ensconced-in-the-greenhouse chickens.  "It's no longer about the $5 chickens," I say a bit embarrassed.

"It's about a relationship," he replies without missing a beat or batting an eye.  Just so.  The wise grandfather knows.

It's not about the chickens anymore.  It's about my kids and their hearts. 

And me and my heart, too.  I can do better for them so I must.  If we couldn't, then they'd eat snow and huddle.  But we can, so we must.  

I told the kids, "How we take care of our animals says more about us than about the animals.  The chickens are just chickens, but how we take care of our responsibilities is about us.  Just like how we treat people says more about who we are than about who they are.  If someone is mean or rude to people, then that's about their heart and not about who they are talking to.  How we treat these chickens is about who we are."

Mark's still really hoping that who we are will eventually encompass Brownie sleeping in his bed wearing a diaper. 

I'm really hoping not.
But, heck, this is only Year 1.
Imagine where Year 2 might take us.