Misadventures of a reluctant chicken farmer

I am a chicken farmer, a description I use loosely because with me it is not as serious as it sounds. What I get from the chicken is only enough for my nuclear family. I keep chicken because I spent too many years out of the country eating bad eggs that had the egg ‘yellow’ same colour as the egg white, and tasted like what I imagine a sponge would taste like. I am just trying to ensure that never happens again.

Perhaps one day I may grow the flock enough to make money, after all, there are famous Kenyan millionaires whose wealth apparently grew from a couple of chicken. That can be me one day, no? Yes?

Also, I am generally an undisciplined person who hates routines and schedules, and the dogs and chicken I keep come in handy in instilling some sort of routine in my life. Whenever I am home, which is most of the time, I feed the dogs and the chicken. Animals generally work on schedules, and you feed them at the same hour every single day because if you do not, there will be mighty noise and disturbance.

I have trained the dogs enough and during meal times, they will wait for me to tell them to eat and if I do not, they will just unblinkingly stare at the food in their respective bowls. I do not need to, but I stay with them until they are feeding, because for years, I have fascinated about one of the male dog’s ability to finish eating in less than a minute, however much food I serve. He will then try to sneak to the younger female’s bowl but a growl is all it takes to get him to step back. Every single day he has tried to eat from another’s bowl, every single day he is repelled, but never gives up.

Slow eater

The older female, the undisputed alpha, is an extremely slow eater. Sometimes I feel she does it deliberately, just so she can have others look at her with envy as she savours the food, with the other two drooling, but not daring to go near the bowl. It is a daily reminder on who the alpha is.

With patience, it is easy to train dogs but chicken, in my experience, cannot be trained. They are worse than cats. Chicken do not listen to human sounds, they listen to food ones. Chicken solely decide if they like you or not, and most of their feelings are decided by whether you feed them or not. I had one jogoo that did not even care that I was the primary feeder and would attack me whenever my back was turned. It eventually made very good chicken soup and stew when I got fed up.

When I put the food in the chicken feeders, just like with the dogs, I stick around for a while to watch them devour. Did I tell you that these birds are untrainable and usually it’s a pandemonium during meal times? They step on one another when I let them out. They will run into me if I am in the way. They will step on the smaller ones.

I have one chicken named Fluffy. She is so heavy (fat), that she cannot jump to the upper coups unless there is a ladder. It is not her genes, it is the fact that she feeds and feeds with unimaginable greed. Fluffy cannot be a mother because she kills her chicks by stepping on them as she goes for the food. Her job is to lay eggs. Even in chicken world, not every chicken can be a mother.

The others are average feeders, just enough. But there is one. I call her Softie, as she is the softest one. She is bullied by all the chicken, including the resident jogoo. It is like they do not want her to eat and once in a while, I will lock her in the coup with her own food and water, otherwise she spends her time running from feeder to another, chased by other chicken.

Sometimes, I am tempted to slaughter her, just to put her out of her misery, but Softie is the best breeder. Am I being selfish? Should I slaughter her on Christmas day?

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