The Funny Farm: Chicken Dramarama 2

If you think that chickens are no maintenance pets and you can toss some scratch on the ground and collect eggs once a day, then you’re in for a big surprise. Chickens are magnets for predators, parasites, injuries and illnesses. Sometimes it feels like if it’s not one thing then it’s another. The life of a chicken keeper is marked by lurching from one accident, tragedy or close call to another. That’s why The Funny Farm exists: to bring some levity into our lives and remind us all that at the end of the day our birds are worth all the sweat, tears and heartache.

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Alyx Shaw

Do you see this precious face? This adorable sweet baby? She FAKED being sick to avoid her allergy treatment. She lounged on the sofa all day, looking weak and sad, and worried the life out of me. Then I gave her sister some lettuce, and GLORY GLORY, IT’S A MIRACLE! She leapt to her feet and came running to get fresh cold lettuce. What a brat.

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Elizabeth Pence

Friends it been a freaking day here and it’s only 10am.

I went outside to put on my coop shoes and take care of the girls only to find out some critter stole one of my shoes. Only one. I got my chicken rain boots out. I started to clean coops because that’s what you do when you have chickens. I felt something in my hair. Shook my hair and the biggest mother trucking spider I’ve ever seen fell on my shirt. I hate spiders. Terror. Absolute chaos ensued.

I screamed and flapped my arms in the best karate type moves I could come up with blind fright. The girls screamed and flapped their wings. But wait there’s more.

In the screaming and flapping I stepped on Big Red and fell down. In a chicken coop. Where I was raking poop. It got on ME. Then the freaking chickens saw the spider, looked at me like I was an idiot and fought over who was going to eat it.  The last pic is Big Red. I stepped on her. She won the spider-eating contest.

I don’t know if I’m cut out for the chicken tender life.

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Jaime Williams-Messaros

Me bringing fresh water to my flock: “Hello there, I am from the fresh drinking water initiative. We provide fresh drinking water to spoiled rotten birds who would rather drink from mud puddles and will kick poop and dirt into this water in less time than it takes me to make it back to the barn. Would that be something you are interested in?”

They were extremely interested.

Said No Chickens Ever

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Samantha Allison

So I messed up my chickens with this. I’ve been letting them out of the brooder pretty much all day because our coop and run aren’t finished. Close, but not good enough. They have been good house chickens but they beg for the blanket set up when it starts to get dark and have slept on it every night for the last week. They literally won’t shut up till I give them this exact set up. They have roost bars that they play on all day but this is how they want to sleep. How am I gonna fix this?

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Rachel Ashley

I got stuck in my chicken coop today while letting my chicks outside. They all run to the far side of the coop, so I have to get in to grab them. The wind shut the door behind me, and it automatically locked me in. We just finished it up to the point of it being safe for our chicks to sleep in at night, so we hadn’t gotten anything put together yet, in case this happened. I was locked inside for 45 minutes without my phone, while my two young kiddos were inside alone watching TV.

Thankfully a neighbour heard me yelling for help while she was letting her dog out. She was injured, so she couldn’t walk across the alley to open the door for me, so she called the fire department. Am I traumatized? Yes. If you’re a parent, you can understand my fear. Is it also kind of funny? Yes. Please get some kind of emergency escape figured out for your coop so this doesn’t happen to you. If my neighbour hadn’t heard me, I’d still be stuck inside. I can laugh about it now, but it really does make me realize the seriousness of the situation if no one had heard me. Be careful everyone.

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Susan Messick

It is raining cats and dogs tonight. I went to the coop to make sure all made it in before the door closed. I counted nine chickens. I have ten. So, I counted again. Nope, still nine. I check the run and find number ten. I go in and she is so glad to see me. I scoop her up and bring her in the coop. By now my husband comes in and asks what I am doing. I told him I was missing this one. He asked if the door closed before she went in? “Yup!” I said, “Don’t worry. I got her.” He said, “I am so glad you are rugged!” These are my chickens and he knows I will do anything for them. He likes them too and would have helped me had I needed it. So now I am the hugged chicken farmer. 

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Marra Rae Ludeman

Monday while doing the night feeding and egg collection I heard my husband say, “Hey honey!” I noticed the tone right away. It was something injured or dead. We have 56 souls on the property so I have heard it once or twice. I started walking over; he was huddled to the ground holding a chicken. I asked, “How bad?” All he could say was, “She is alive, not sure how, but she is”.

He found her upside down trapped under and between the fence posts. It looked as though she tried to get out of the garden and slipped down the fence and wedged herself. She was covered in dirt and poop. My husband said her limbs and neck were discombobulated.

I took her inside immediately and crated her. I gave her a warm bath to get the dirt and debris off. She slurped down some Nutridrench, got a cat scan and I warmed her up. She seemed to be walking fine but she was acting weird with her back end so I kept her inside for the night. The next morning she greeted me with an egg and tried to flee the cage; she was just fine.

A few minutes ago, I went out to water the seedlings and she followed me around. I told the dog it was time to go in the house and she decided she was going to be a house chicken and that’s that. Needless to say she is not a house chicken with eleven cats, a bunny and a dog that wants to eat her.

Pictures of the cat scan.

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Thanks to everyone who shared their stories and photos. Feature photo: Marsha Barlow Gibbons

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