A Chicken Story

I live in my own little world, and it’s safe here.  But occasionally something will happen that rocks my little world, and I’m reminded of the ugliness on this third rock from the sun.

We have some friends who recently bought some chickens.  They didn’t order baby chicks through the mail, but instead went to a nearby town to a fellow’s house where he had too many chickens and needed to get rid of some.  These folks didn’t have a coop, but they had a barn.  The chickens were all over the place.  Every day, the chickens climbed up on haystacks in the barn to lay their eggs, so every day was  like an easter egg hunt just to gather the eggs.  There were so many chickens clucking around, that some of the chickens lived in the trees outside the barn, because the barn chickens had established a pecking order and wouldn’t let the tree chickens in.  Barn chickens vs. Tree chickens.  Following me?

That reminds me of my old middle school bus stop.  We moved to the wrong side of the tracks when I was in middle school and had to start riding the bus.  My sister and I used to catch the bus at a church in our neighborhood.  There were some big boys, high school age thugs, that also rode the bus.  Many mornings it was cold when we got to our bus stop, and on these cold mornings, the wind would cut you to the bone.  Rather than wait by the curb for the bus, there was a little covered porch attached to the church that we huddled in out of the cold.  These big boys (the barn chickens) decided to establish a pecking order and wouldn’t let us younger kids (the tree chickens) on the covered porch (the barn) unless we gave them candy first.  So every day, we had to take candy to the bus stop in order to wait in the barn out of the cold.  This went on until somehow our big brothers got wind of it.  We got off the bus one afternoon and our brothers were waiting there to have a “talking” with those barn chickens.  After that, we didn’t have  to give them candy anymore.

But I digress.  Back to the friends who got some chickens from a nearby town.  Chickens in the barns, chickens in the trees.  Here a chick, there a chick, everywhere a chick, chick.  The owner had a dog, a Border Collie who understood Spanish.  The owner would speak a little Spanish to him, and that dog would crouch down and wait for a chicken to fly  out of the tree, then he would pounce on the chicken, hold this neck in his mouth, pin him down with his paws, and just lie there until the owner got the chicken and put it in a gunny sack.  Then the owner spoke a little more Spanish to the dog, and the dog would catch another chicken to go in the sack. 

Our friend ended up with 9 chickens and a rooster with a crippled leg.  He was a fighting rooster but he had lost his last fight.  The rule is, the owner of the winning rooster gets to snap the leg of the losing rooster and hand him back.  His fighting days are over. 

I can’t believe this sort of sport still goes on.  I mean, I knew there were cock fights.  I just didn’t know they were happening right down the road from my safe little world.  And I never imagined that they would break the losing chicken’s leg.  That just seems barbaric.  I thought we were a civilized people.

And that’s all I have to say about that.