What You Do When "SHE" is a "HE"

I have never claimed to be an expert in much of anything. Granted, I know a lot, about a lot of different stuff, but that mostly results in me spewing out odd facts and having people look at me like I'm overmedicated.

Now back to what I don't know. I don't know how to sex a chicken. Apparently, neither do the farmers that provide the baby chicks to IFA, because we recently discovered that my lovely Speckled Sussex hen, Eliza was actually a loud, ornery rooster; Ebeneezer.

When we put our two newest hens into the mix in early June, there were a few hiccups, but we have done it before and there is always a struggle to re-establish the pecking order. None of the other hens seemed to like Eliza; except for the other newbie, Rosie, who will heretofore be known as the "chicken-bitch." We thought she was looking for protection because she is a smaller breed. Turns out, big bad Eliza owned her! Anyway, our hens started making fewer noises, some of the established ones started losing their tail feathers, there was one morning the feeder was covered in blood and our feisty leader, Leslie, with her lieutenants Maud and Alice started to become very broody; having to be removed from the nesting boxes to collect eggs.

Fast forward to the last weekend in July when we brought "Eliza" out for show-and-tell while we had some neighbors over for a barbecue. Wow, look at her feet; they're huge. Her feathers are beautiful. My chicken dream come true. And then.... Monday morning, really early, I heard an unfamiliar noise coming from my hen house.

Let me tell you, to begin with, that hens like to make a lot of noise after they lay eggs; kind of like a daily birth announcement. But I had never heard this noise before. Well, it kind of went on all day, and I'm thinking, "that's weird, maybe one of the girls has something stuck in their tailpipe."

Next day, same story; only louder and more frequent. Matt does a little research, and low and behold, Eliza is Ebeneezer. Matt comes upstairs and says, "it's not so much that I'm sure we have a rooster, but I'm sure we don't have a hen." Oh, and he throws out, "I'm going to slaughter it."

Okay, if any of you have cars that don't run, bring them to my front yard and I'll have the blocks to put them up on. My boys will be in their wife-beaters and the girls will be wearing their Daisy Dukes! We are WHITE TRASH! Do you think I'm kidding? Nope, he killed the thing.

Word spread throughout the neighborhood and we acquired an audience. I can't tell you how many phone calls I made saying "I need your explicit permission for your child to watch my husband kill a chicken so that we can't be sued to cover the cost of therapy."

Now a few words of advice, in case you ever find yourself needing to kill a rooster. It doesn't matter that your husband thinks your kitchen knives are sharp enough to cut their neck arteries; they aren't, unless your husband is Bill the Butcher. I've since heard the best way to kill a chicken is to grab it by legs and step on it's head, so I'm filing that away for next time.

Ugghhhhhhh...... we named it! It was a pet!

Anyway, plucking a chicken and culling the guts is disgusting. Dachshunds evidently like chicken spinal cords and it WILL give them the runs.

Because the knives weren't sharp enough, Ebeneezer actually had his brains scrambled... THREE TIMES. It's true, they keep twitching after they're dead, hence the multiple scrambling.

Because of this trauma, his little muscles seized and the meat was pretty tough (I'm told, because I didn't eat him.... WE NAMED HIM!)

Well, I will say that I am impressed by the resourcefulness of my sweet husband, but there's a reason I buy my chicken on a styrofoam plate at the grocery store. I have always said that I would have been one of the pioneers who begged to be left on the side of the trail to make my peace with death, and this chicken experience confirms it. I was born to be pampered!

Needless to say, through all of this, order has been restored in our hen house and things are going well for all the girls. All of them, except "chicken-bitch." She's still owned!