KILLER CHICKENS!

You guys know I’m a city guy. I grew up in the city. Went to college near the Windy City. When we moved to beautiful suburban Caledonia I had the chance to buy out in the country but I chose a subdivision that reminded me of the city. City guy through and through.

But some of my ShilohFriends are not city guys. Tom the Elder is not a city guy. He grew up on a farm. He lives outside of Lowell, in the country. Their garden is bigger than our entire lot. They have more lawn than I could mow in a month. They have a barn. They have a tractor. They have a bunch of chickens that run all over the place.

Well Tom the Elder and his wife invited us all out for dinner last Saturday night. May I say that Mrs. Tom the Elder made a fish dinner that rates right up there with the best fish I have ever tasted? We sat around the living room and visited for the rest of the evening. Around 8:30 Tom suggested we go out back and shoot some clay pigeons. (It doesn’t get dark here until almost 10:00 these days.) So he got the ol’ shotgun and we went out to blast stuff.

You might ask, “How could you, a Democrat, anti-gun guy, go out shooting?" Well, I’m a hypocrite. I love to shoot guns. I don’t know if I could really kill anything but I love to shoot guns. This was a beautiful, foreign-made, automatic shotgun. I’m a dead eye with a rifle but I’ve never shot at anything moving before. I’d yell, “Pull,” and the clay pigeon would fly and I would fire away and they would land safely. Every time. Never hit one clay pigeon. Tom never missed one. So he hung some on the fence and let me blow them to smithereens just to make me feel better. (By the way, it did a lot for the stress of the moving blues!)

After shooting we walked around the yard. The chickens were all over the place and one big huge studly looking rooster. So I asked Tom the Elder a question I have been wondering about all my life. Just how often does a rooster have to, well, you know, um, uh, service, an egg-laying hen? (You need to be sensitive with these questions when you’re talking to an elder!) I figured a couple times a week ought to keep them laying. I was shocked at what he told me. That rooster does his job…are you ready for this?... about every FIVE TO TEN MINUTES!

Now to the really distressing part, the thing that made me sit down to write tonight. As we walked around the yard, surrounded by hens, I actually SAW an egg come popping right out of one of the chickens! I couldn’t believe my eyes! And all this time I thought they were supposed to lay eggs in the barn! But that still isn’t the upsetting thing. It’s this: As soon as that egg hit the ground, about five hens attacked it and pecked it to pieces and ate the egg, yoke and all! It was cold-blooded, cannibalistic murder! I was stunned. It was like a scene from “Lord of the Flies!” I looked at Tom to see what he would say. In true, farm guy fashion, Elder Tom looked at me in return and said, “I think we have a problem.” Understatement of the year! I’m feeling rather emotionally abused. We city guys are completely opposed to cannibalism. We might bend the rules and shoot guns and all, but we draw the line at eating infants. I just don’t know if I can go back to the scene of the crime. I don’t care how good the fish was!