"It's just a chicken, Patti."

"Yeah, right."

~~~~~

Some people just don't get it. I didn't even buy these chickens - they were already living in my front yard when I moved in. But they are living creatures, hilarious to watch and full of personality. And I felt responsible for them. The first thing I did when I moved in... before unpacking, before even setting up my bed... I went to Home Depot, bought some supplies and asked my house-mate to help me build them a roomier pen. Here were my five girls back in January, having their first taste of yogurt in their new, spacious pen. Ida is the red one on the left.

 


I never would have thought that something as simple as watching chickens eat bananas could be so entertaining!

And those silly dirt baths they take...

In return, they gave me lovely gifts like these every single day.

Then one day I noticed that Ida was droopy and lethargic. Her comb was withered looking and she wasn't interested in food, which was not like her at all. She could barely keep her eyes open. "You know," I said to my house-mate, " she's been sleeping in the laying box the past few nights rather than hopping up onto the roost - I wonder if she's sick." 

We picked her up and sure enough - Ida's belly was warm and swollen.

We put Ida in a box in case whatever she had was contagious. We put her outside during the day, and at night we brought her in to my living room. For the next ten days, she mostly just stayed in this box with her tail down and her head bent forward. 

I went online to see if I could figure out what was wrong with her. The consensus seemed to be that there were five possibilities, four of which were fatal. The fifth, a stuck egg, could also be fatal but there were things you could try... there was hope. 

We tried all the remedies we could find and then some. We went to CVS to buy a syringe and vaseline and tried (**gross alert**) pumping olive oil into her vent to help lubricate any egg that might be stuck.

Nothing.

We tried warm aromatherapy baths combined with gentle abdominal massage. Aromatherapists claim that real Bulgarian rosewater has healthful, antiseptic qualities, so we gave her the good stuff. She got one of these each day for several days in a row. I also shaved about a third of a Naproxen into her yogurt twice a day. I think the baths and the people-meds did actually help.

About a week into her illness, Ida finally made some cautious forays out of the box and into the garden. She also started to drink water on her own again - for about a week, we had been spoon feeding her water as she seemed completely uninterested in it. That did make us wonder - were we interfering with a natural process because we couldn't bear to watch her die? Was it for her benefit or ours that we were trying to keep her alive? What was the right thing to do? As it happened, there wasn't really a moment of decision, though... she was sick and we tried to help her. The instinct to do that came from a place that didn't involve thought or logic.

Ida's tail and her head were still down, and she stumbled rather than walked, but she chased down a bug or two with spurts of vigor and that gave us hope that maybe she was on the mend. I had read that chickens can sometimes get over stuck eggs or egg yolk peritonitis, and that their bodies can, in some cases (though not the norm) reabsorb whatever offending bits have gotten themselves into the wrong places. In that case the hen, though permanently disabled, can potentially live out a reasonably comfortable life.

After sleeping in my living room for two weeks, Ida seemed well enough to go back to the chicken pen. Chickens are social creatures... I knew she was ready to go back because she stumbled over towards her cohort one day and looked enviously through the fence. It seemed like she missed her friends, so I carried her back into the pen and let her re-integrate with the other girls. I swear she told them, in her own chicken way, that she knew she was at the bottom of the pecking order and was just glad to be back.

One thing I found fascinating about this period in Ida's life is that she seemed to know that it was going to take her longer than before to climb the ladder up to the coop. Getting onto the roosting pole was out of the question for her at this point, but even to get into the nesting box she needed to climb a small ladder. It was a slow, laborious climb. Her body was thin at the top and still swollen at the bottom. She slipped and stumbled walking on firm ground, so getting up that ladder posed a real challenge. Every evening, without exception, she began the journey about 15 minutes before sunset. She just knew it was going to take her longer. She seemed to want to be settled comfortably into her nesting box before the sun went down and those energetic crazies came running up.

Things went fine for about a month. All five girls seemed adjusted to the new normal. Then one day, the mood turned. Everyone started pecking at Ida. One afternoon, about 20 minutes after I had tossed some apple slices into the pen, I noticed that Ida was crouched on the ground, as flat as she could go. All four of the other chickens were pecking at her mercilessly. I ran into the pen and shooed them away. "What's going on over here, Ida?"

She looked up at me and very, very slowly she stood up. Under her swollen belly was a single slice of apple. Those mean girls had been trying to steal it from her!

I took a step back and thought about the situation as I watched Ida take some tired pecks at the apple. It's time, I thought. She's suffering. 

The problem was, I didn't know how to humanely euthanize a chicken. I had watched a woman do so in Kenya once - she sang to it, stroked it slowly, evenly, mesmerized it, and after a long while a knife appeared in her hand and she pressed its tip into the chicken's neck and the chicken, as if in a trance, barely responded.

I didn't feel confident that I could do that.

I did, however, have a trip planned to camp out on the property of some friends who live on a farm. They have lots of chickens and they eat their chickens. They can show me how to humanely put Ida out of her misery, I thought.

So I strapped Ida and her things into the car and off we went to the farm.

It was a four-hour drive so we stopped a couple of times along the way for road trip snacks. I brought two of her favorite things to snack on - bananas and collard leaves.

I was completely unprepared for what happened when we arrived at the farm. In my mind, my friends would tell me how to put her down and I would do that sometime before nightfall. Then we would bury her in the woods. It never occurred to me that there might be a delay in doing these things, or that I might need a place to keep her overnight while there on my visit. But that's exactly what happened.

"Do you think she's in pain?" my friend asked.

"I thought she was," I replied... "but now I'm not so sure."

"Maybe she just needs her own area in the chicken pen. So the other chickens can't get to her."

"Like a hospice?" I said.

"Yes. They'll peck at her if she's sick - that's just what chickens do. But she doesn't look like she's in pain, and if they can't get at her to peck at her, then she might be fine like that for a long time."

"So maybe I don't have to kill her..."

"Maybe not."

Well that would be great, I thought, but what will I do with her here at the farm for the next 3 days?

Once again, I found myself asking what my motivation was. I brought her here to put her down, I considered. Did I do that because she's too much trouble to take care of? Because I'm too lazy to think of other solutions? Because I only ever wanted her for her eggs? 

"It's up to you," my friend continued.

On the flip side, I reflected, if I hesitate to put her down, is that because it really isn't necessary, or is it because I don't have the will to do it? Am I letting her suffer because I don't have the guts to put a knife in her neck?

I decided to think about it overnight. Fortunately, I'd brought my backpacking tent just in case my new big tent didn't work out. I set up the small one for Ida. By the following day, she no longer seemed as deflated as she was when she had to acquiesce to the bully girls pecking at her. She seemed tired, but she didn't seem to be in pain, so that's where she stayed while I visited with my friends for the next few days.

Aside from the people friends Ida made during this road trip and camping adventure, she also made an unlikely feline friend. Noir, the farm cat, abandoned his daily routine to sit near the entrance of Ida's tent much of the day, just staring at her. Once in a while, he'd go off and bring back a gift... a mouse, a lizard, a small bird (oh the irony). He never attacked Ida, and really he seemed to appreciate having some company.

I did not kill Ida at the farm. At the end of my visit, I packed Ida back into her crate and drove her back home with me. I cordoned off a section of the chicken pen to serve as a Hen Hospice and she stayed there day and night. Just like my friend had said, as long as the other chickens couldn't actually get at her, they were all just fine together. In fact, the other girls would join her for their dirt baths and afternoon rests, all snuggled up next to each other through the fence. Here they are hanging out together through the fence. 

Ida almost started looking like she was back to normal - even her comb perked up again. I thought maybe she could live like this for the rest of a more or less normal lifespan - disabled and a bit misshapen, but with the now-redeemed companionship of her former tormentors, who were prevented by the fence from succumbing to their baser instincts. That was not to be, however. A couple of weeks after I brought her back from the farm, Ida went into a rapid decline. She started going into her box earlier and earlier, and sleeping in later and later. One morning, she didn't come out at all. 

We buried Ida under a rock in the chicken pen. All in all, she only lived for another two months after getting sick. But in those two months, she indulged in as many of her favorite treats as she could eat, she was pampered and massaged, she took a lovely vacation to the other side of California, she learned what it's like to camp outdoors and make friends with someone from another species... maybe she experienced the healing power of forgiveness and the deep friendship that can arise in its wake. Certainly she experienced the power of human love, and the lessons she taught about caring for others, even if the other is "just a chicken," will live on for me and my house-mates for a good long while.