…there’s one thing I’ve seen before. When a hen buries her head in a corner and refuses to move, you’d better move her or kill her yourself because the other hens will peck her to death.
I don’t know why this happens but I’ve seen it before. So when I came into Landlady’s Big Chickenhouse yesterday afternoon and saw this one hen with her head stuck in the hole of a cinder block, refusing to move, I knew what to look for. I nudged her and she didn’t move. I examined her, and she had a big bleeding wound on her back.
They don’t fight, they don’t run, they just bury their heads and wait for it to be over. It makes me angry. I get angrier at the victim than at the oppressors. In my own way I guess that makes me no more rational than a chicken, for whom all this seems to make perfect sense.
Anyway. I separated her out, finished my chores, came back with a dog carrier and put her in with my pullets. She’ll either work it out or she won’t. If she starts picking on the pullets – which so far are relatively free of the more toxic psychoses – I’ll eat her myself. But I do hope she gets it together.
Did you know that chickens are the most numerous domestic animals in the world, outnumbering human beings by a really incredible factor? (I forget where I read that tidbit.) That’s even more astonishing when you consider how few and feeble are their survival characteristics. Good thing humans like to eat chickens and eggs, I think. They’d have been long extinct otherwise. 🙂
I had no idea a chicken’s social life could be so complicated.
ML: I suspect their survival characteristics are few and feeble because present-day chickens exist due to us modifying the ancestral cluckers into something that wouldn’t try to eat us.
What # is her band?