Well, that was...an experience.
I love my dogs. I really do. Raven is our puppy-girl, our beautiful black lab-Chow who jumps on me when I come home from work and drops dead raccoons on our front porch. She's seven years old, and her bark has always been worse than her bite, at least until we moved here.
However, today was not a good day, not by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, sure, the first chunk of the day was fine, with me doing the work-thing and my wife at home doing the homeschooling thing. Nothing unusual at all.
When I got home, Dexter, the beagle, was all over me. But Raven didn't make an appearance right away. That in itself should have clued me in that not all was well. But she did come downstairs eventually, and got her lovin' and petting like she always does.
Honey-Bunny was cooking supper, Tanner was playing NHL21. After a while, my wife asked me to go up and check on the baby chicks, up in Tanner's room. No problem; I started up the stairs.
And then the theme from Psycho started playing in my head. I saw the first torn up chick-carcass at the top of the stairs.
And that was it for me; I was having Vietnam flashbacks, and I wasn't even born when that war started. I am not ashamed to say that I freaked out. I don't handle death well, even if it's natural death. Seeing a dead body just does not suit my mental well-being, especially one that died violently. I would make the world's worst homicide detective.
As I'm tearing back down the stairs, Raven runs down as well and jumps on the couch, licking her lips. This did not bode well.
My darling wife went up and surveyed the carnage. Out of forty baby chicks, eleven survived; one might not make it through the night. Raven killed nearly thirty of them, including nine of the ten egg-layers. We were angry enough to kill her ourselves.
Now, I suppose I can see things from her point of view; we were raising these birds to be slaughtered and eaten anyway, at least the meat-birds. She was just getting a head-start. But that excuse didn't fly with my wife.
So, my wife has decided to correct the problem by buying a hundred more meat-bird chicks. We'll be putting them in the garage, as we should have done in the first place. But it's starting to get cold, and they don't have their feathers yet. Well, three-quarters of them aren't going to get their feathers, now or ever.
Yeah, this was a rough day on the farm. Tanner's at least as traumatized as I am; I doubt he'll ever sleep in that room again. We're going to switch his bedroom to the spare room this week, and turn that one into a pantry/food storage room or something.
And no, I'm not posting any pictures of the slaughterhouse. In the first place, I didn't take any. In the second place, what kind of sick freak wants to see the torn-up carcasses of a bunch of baby chicks?
It's going to take a few days to get that image out of my head. Sometimes, having a near-photographic memory really sucks.
No comments:
Post a Comment