chooks

Chooks; I mean have you ever tried to look a chook in the eye?  You can’t.  Chooks are sneaky; they peer at you with one eye, no face to face with a chook.  So we have a sneaky feathered object that pecks.  Try to give it a bit of wheat and it pecks at your feet like a maniacal machinegun.  And talk about collecting chook eggs, well forget it. There are a few forgetful chooks that wander off leaving their eggs easy pickings, but most chooks are guard chooks. Just try and take their eggs I say and you risk the loss of a finger or an eye if you try to peer under them.  Why can’t you teach chooks how to share?  Say you take one egg and leave them one, but it’s all or nothing with them.  They don’t care if you want to share they will have your hand off just as easily for one or all of their eggs.  They even sound mean, like vengeful mothers-in-law.  “You can’t have my egg, it’s mine, you are not good enough for it,” and “You are only after what you can get,” they cluck, cluck, cluck.

I have had a love hate relationship with chooks.  When I was little I did not know enough to feel threatened.  I threw grain to them and mixed bran and pollard, that they enjoyed.  I must admit I was less than impressed when I saw someone chop the head off a chook when I was eight.  Someone must have forgotten to tell the chook it was dead because it ran round in circles looking for its head. Gross.

Chooks should stay in their own little cage.  People should not be expected to enter the chooks territory.  That is, people, namely me, should not be asked to brave foreign chook world to feed them.  Questions should not be asked about why the grain was thrown through the fence and not placed lovingly in their stupid feed dish. 

People should not get sick and expect people, namely me, to look after their spooky black chooks.  Said people should not get mad when the person, me, lets the chooks out by mistake. They should not expect me to catch the chooks and put them back.  They definitely should not be irritated that I forgot to turn off the water and flooded the coop.  Show me a chook who doesn’t love to go for an early morning dip when they fly off their roost.  It was because of this thoughtfulness on my part that the black chooks made me their new best friend.  Want an egg, take an egg.  Want to pick us up, no worries.  Want us to look you straight in the eye, well good luck with that one.