Lucky

     I lost one of my chickens today, and I'm very sad about that.  Lucky wasn't just any chicken; she was--well, Lucky.  And she was lucky.  She'd lived through some pretty feather-raising experiences.
     Lucky was an Old English bantam, and a perfectly beautiful specimen of the breed, with her golden speckled feathers.  She was a tiny little thing, and she laid the smallest white eggs I've ever seen come from a chicken.  I acquired Lucky from a friend about 5 years ago, when I first moved to Redding.  Lorene had mail-ordered and hatched some eggs in an incubator, so her kids could see baby chicks come into the world.  Then she needed to find them a home, and I was happy to have them.  My husband, Dan, built them a nice pen out of some old dog kennel fencing, and he bought them a lovely wooden hen house.
     The pen stood just outside our fenced back yard, where our 3 large dogs spent a lot of their time.  There were six or eight chickens, and I went out and got some guinea hens to add to the flock.  They were all chicks together and got along well.  Occasionally we'd let them out to spread their wings, and I taught them to come when called by offering dove and quail seed and calling out, "Guinea, guinea, guinea!"  (I'd heard of teaching guinea hens to come when called and didn't realize the chickens would learn, too.)  Once or twice a chicken got into the back yard and the dogs killed them.  One day Lucky got in and lost all her tail feathers in the mouth of our Lab, but managed to escape.  That's when we named her Lucky.
     We'd had the chickens for almost two years when we had a terrible storm one winter night; I heard later that winds had been clocked at the airport near our home at upwards of 80 miles an hour.  In the middle of the night, the wind sounded like a freight train going by outside my bedroom window, and through the din I heard a loud crash.  I ran outside to see what made the noise, fearing the worse for my horses, chickens and goats, but as I rounded the house the wind lifted me bodily and threw me against the chain link fence, knocking my own wind right out of me.  I went back inside and decided I'd just have to wait for daylight.
     The next morning I found my chicken pen and henhouse had been lifted and thrown right over the 5-foot back yard fence, and broken into pieces.  Although there were no dead chickens in the yard, there were several missing when we finally found the survivors pecking around in the front yard bushes a little later, acting as if nothing had ever happened.  Lucky, once again, was one of the survivors.  Days went by before we could erect a new pen, and in that time we lost every single chicken and guinea hen except for--you guessed it--Lucky.  She spent every day right next to the house, outside the kitchen window, and roosted there at night, ten feet up in the branches of a pine tree.
     That was three years ago.  In the meantime, we've increased our flock to twenty-one hens.  Since everyone but Lucky is a full-sized chicken, not a bantam, she unfortunately was at the tail-end of the infamous pecking order, and was constantly and viciously chased away from food a good deal of the time.  She alone, however, would eat out of my hand, so at least once a day I would go down to where the new chicken pen stands near the horse barn and hand-feed her.  Sometimes the other hens, although they were too chicken to actually eat from my hand, would crowd in close and intimidate her into running off.  I got into the habit of quietly trying to draw her away when they weren't looking.  I could literally peek around the side of the barn and whisper, "Guinea, guinea, guinea," and she alone would hear me and come waddling around the corner to eat from my hand.
     Dan had just sat down to a dinner of warmed-over ham and noodle casserole tonight, and I was in the laundry room folding a load of clean clothes, when I heard a chicken squawk, not even sounding hurt so much as surprised.
     "The dogs have a chicken!"  I screeched, running for the back door.
     Dan beat me there, and I watched through the sliding glass doors as he called off the dogs and scooped the little mass of feathers into his hands.
     "It's Lucky," I moaned.
     He took one quick look, and when he lifted his eyes I saw what he didn't want to have to tell me.
     I decided to bury her out at the back of the property, where we had to bury two of our little goats, Jar-Jar and Binks, last year.  Digging graves is no easy feat in Redding soil, but "Lucky"-ly it was only a chicken grave and we've had record rainfall for the last month, so the ground is relatively soft, as in a great big pick can make a decent dent if you're very persistent.  (I've never buried a chicken before, and I doubt I ever will again, but Lucky wasn't just any chicken.)  My granddaughter, Kaela, came down to help me out (she really is grand).  The funeral was well-attended by several friendly cows, who stood just outside the fence and mooed forlornly to excellent effect, as the sun sank sadly into the west.  We piled lucky thirteen very large stones on top of the grave, and placed white stones all around the edges.
     Lucky had a very good life, and a pretty long one, for a chicken.  I tell myself she went quickly and didn't suffer, because the last sound I heard her make was more surprised than anything.  If my mom is in Heaven watching, as I'm sure she is, she's probably already taken Lucky under her wing and is up there feeding her from her hand while Jar-Jar and Binks frolic nearby.

Cultural Acclimation

            My granddaughter, Kaela, wants to be a marine biologist.  She’s been hounding me for months to obtain from Netflix and watch a film called The Cove.  It’s about how the Japanese harvest dolphins.  I won’t pretend to have a lot of knowledge about the practice of killing and eating dolphins world-wide, since this film is the only information I’ve absorbed on the subject thus far.  Viewing it did raise some interesting questions in my mind, however, and I’m eager to do further research.  But that’s a whole ‘nother blog.

             The Japanese manner of herding and corralling the dolphins reminds me very much of how we deal with cattle.  They line up fishing boats near a pod of dolphins and create a “wall of noise” by banging on metal pipes that hang down into the water.  At the end of the pipe, under the water line, is a foot that sends the vibration out into the water.  The dolphins dislike the noise, in fact are frightened by it, and move away.  The fishermen thus herd the dolphins into a cove, then quickly spread a wall of net across the mouth of the cove, barring the dolphins’ way back out to sea.  Once the dolphins are corralled, some are marketed to research centers and amusement/education centers, such as Marine World or Sea World.  The rest are harvested, killed and processed for human consumption.

            Dolphin meat used to be featured in school lunches throughout Japan, but due to political pressure this practice has reportedly been discontinued, although the film alleges that dolphin meat still finds its way into the marketplace at large, disguised as one type of fish or another.  Dolphin fishermen, again yielding to outside pressure, also claim to have made their killing methods quicker and more humane.   These two facts, again, remind me of the beef industry in America.  In recent decades, we’ve been urged to avoid too much red meat, and animal activists have protested and tried to bring about change in the way we treat and harvest cattle.  Ironically, it’s the Japanese who have some of the most humane cattle practices, producing the famous Kobe beef, which is supposedly dramatically more tender and of better quality because the cows are treated kindly before they are swiftly and humanely dispatched, thus keeping harmful enzymes and chemicals released during stress from adversely affecting their muscle tissue.

            Raising cattle for food is a long-standing part of our culture here in America, as in many parts of the world.  Many of us think nothing of raising these animals expressly for consumption; they have no other function in our world.  Japan is a small country, surrounded by ocean, and relies on fish for the mainstay of its diet.  Raising red meat is too costly for a country with so little land to use; raising cattle takes a lot of acres.  Dolphin herding and harvesting is probably a part of their culture from antiquity.  In India, Hindus are appalled at our practice of eating cows; to them, cattle are sacred.  In Korea and the Philippines, past, and in some cases present, practices include eating dogs.  In parts of the Middle East, Africa, Mexico and South America, meat goats are common.

             I tried to eat goat meat last year.  I’ve grown up eating beef and chicken, but I’ve never raised a beef for slaughter and I’ve never killed my own chickens.  I do own dairy goats, and friends who own meat goats urged me to try eating goat meat, so I did.  It was difficult, and I have to say I just don’t want to do it—to me, the cooked meat tasted and smelled just like my little goats smell, and I couldn’t get past that.  Maybe if I’d grown up with it as part of my culture I would be less bothered by it.  I already know I never want to try to eat dog (even typing this is horrifying to me)—my dogs feel like my adopted children. 

            I think that’s a lot of Western civilization’s problem with dolphin harvesting—what dolphins are, to us.  We see dolphins as these cute, amazing, mysterious ocean-dwelling mammals, not food.  The film makes a point of stressing that they are MAMMALS, not fish, but so are cows, goats and dogs.  Of course, there are those who shun eating any living animal, and perhaps eating any mammal is as repugnant an idea to them as eating goat or dog is to me.  It’s culture, and individual choice and conviction.  There are lots of good arguments for not eating meat, environmentally and for humane reasons, but that, too, is a whole ‘nother blog.  I ate vegetarian, for the most part, for several years,but finally started eating meat again when I was diagnosed with anemia.  I still eat very little meat, and prefer eating vegetarian a lot of the time.  Food, like religion and politics, is something that people can get very emotional about.

            I do know for sure that I never want to eat a dolphin.  Like eating dog, it seems horrifying to even think of it.  To me, dolphins are highly intelligent, almost mythical and mystical creatures.  I’ve been telling my family for a long time that, when I die, I want to be cremated and have my ashes poured out over the Pacific Ocean; I have this idea that what’s left of my cells will merge with the ocean and, ultimately, even become a part of a dolphin somewhere.  So I get how some people are upset about what the dolphin fishermen are doing, and how some people won’t eat meat of any kind.  Most of all, I appreciate the people who made The Cove for inspiring Kaela to want to learn more about marine biology.