Monday, November 24, 2008
How are chickens like small children?
Give a cow a pile of hay for the day, and it is content to sit and munch in the sun and let the time ebb away. However, give a chicken it's daily ration of grain or other feed in a single pile, and it gets distressed. Chickens are descended from jungle fowl, and they're going to scratch and peck at the dirt whether they're looking for food or not. Chickens need not only food, but also entertainment. Like small children.
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3 comments:
So what keeps them entertained?
Have you ever seen the Wallace and Gromit-esque film Chicken Run?
Do they like checkers? Maybe backgammon?
You could see if they wanted to sit around a table for a D&D session... :)
No, my understanding is that they like things to peck. I suppose they could peck checkers, but they might try to eat them. They would probably be poor D&D players - they're really not very smart. They wouldn't even be very good models for gigantic (enormous? I forget the size classes) monsters, because they would refuse to sit still where you wanted them.
But seriously, folks - the great thing about chickens is that their dietary needs are pretty close to us humans'; they eat the excess food that the people on a farm can't. They're very sustainable that way. I've seen them eat (/drink?) sour, molding milk; buggy rice; rotting tomatoes; old and smelly pasta.
They currently have access to a couple apple trees, and at first when they were let out in the morning they would run to the fallen apples under each tree - not only to enjoy the apples, but to also feast on the tiny slugs that were slowly investigating the apple drops. TMI? You decide.
Ah, Chicken Run - I saw that movie in theaters with a boy I ultimately developed a *huge* crush on. The telephone conversation to schedule the outing involved so much indecision about which movie to go see that we ultimately assigned the choices random numbers and let the "random" number generator on our calculators decide for us. Let's just say that was a long, long time ago.
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