You Know You're Addicted to Chickens When
by Tomat Hornworm
A Friend Forwarded This to Me - All I Know is The Blogger's Handle
14 January 2005
I think about my birds a lot.
I am often on-line looking up things about them and for them and pictures of them.
Hearing other people's stories about chickens is a fun thing as it make you feel less the odd ball.
So on a Farm Forum that I often visit I posted this question.
Lots of posters had fun and I only take credit for the first two I threw out as starters.
- At night you have dreams of building elaborate coops.
- You talk your wife into baking treats for your girls.
- You carry their pictures in your wallet.
- You have a roll of film developed and find 18 pictures of the chickens & coop and only 6 of the kids.
- You call, yoooooooo hooooooooooo...mommm mmmy's here!
- You tell them to sit down and wait their turn for treats.
- You think about what types of bugs you should attract for chicken treats.
- You let the chickens ravage through your herb garden and eat everything down to the bones because they like it (so what if you don't harvest herbs for the season).
- You remind your over frolicky dog to be nice to the babies (even when the hens are full grown).
- You give massage therapy to chickens when you should be giving it to your spouse.
- Scratch feed has to smell and look good because all were not created equal (and are therefore not good enough for your girls).
- Your idea of a good trip is anyplace where chickens are kept.
- You buy poultry borders for walls when you have no walls left to paste them.
- You prefer a subscription to the poultry fanciers newsletter over national magazines.
- It's a major communication breakdown when a family members throw out food destined for the chickens (oh, the treats they have missed!).
- Your house falls to the ground while your chicken coop gets featured in "Architectural Digest".
- You buy your first chickens because you WANT to hear them crow.
- You subscribe to Poultry Press for 31 years.
- You bring your chickens into the bathroom and give them nice baths with baby shampoo, blow dry them, and keep them in the house overnight till all their feathers are in place.
- You leave on Thursday or Friday for a weekend chicken show and spend all weekend looking at chickens and talking about chickens, and at night you and your chicken friends cram into a motel room to talk some more about chickens--far into the night.
- You go through the hassle and expense to take your chickens on the airplane with you to shows in far away states.
- Your 250-egg incubator is in the living room because that seems to be the best place for it.
- Your walls are covered with chicken art, chicken calendars, and awards won at chicken shows.
- When almost all the gifts you get from friends and family are chicken themed.
- When you've had chickens for 60 years.
- You can spend hours pouring over a poultry catalog, trying to find ways to afford "just 5 of this breed, 5 of that."
- You step into the coop and blissfully inhale the smells of warm feathers, hay, straw.
- You excitedly count each egg laid each day.
- You plunk yourself down on an overturned bucket in the yard and gleefully watch them for hours, scratching in the dirt, clucking and squabbling amongst them.
- You raise mealworms in the house for treat
- You refer to them as chicken people, as in, "I'm going out to feed the chicken people
- You spent too much time looking for funky chicken art.
- You don't mind chicken poo on your clean shoes/clothes because that means they graced you with their presence, sat in your lap---besides, poo washes off!
- You go out to feed them and realize an hour has passed and you've just been watching them pick and fuss
- Your girlfriend mentions "Silky Lingerie" and you think she's talking of a new chicken breed.
- You sit amongst them for hours just watching them frolic about, sneaking in the occasional hug when they aren't expecting it (freaking them out of course). Meanwhile dishes are piling up in the sink and much more.
- You call them your children.
- When folks ask how many you have, your fingers immediately are extended, as you say something like "Well...there's Buttercup, Amy, Anna," etc.
- When someone asks you if you eat your chickens, things get ugly!
- When your home is filled with chicken items.
- When you look up websites for chicken diapers, just so you can bring them into your home to visit.
- Not a day goes by where sometime during the day, the word chicken comes out of your mouth.
- You freak out at having to take a trip and leave their care to your husband or friends.
- The two dogs have real competition for the number one spot in your affections
- You MISS THEM when you go on vacation...and they miss you!
- You greet them with the call of "Hi kids!"
- You figure that there is always room for one more...or six...ten...after all, it's just as cheap to have 40, isn't it?
- You think that having them in to watch TV and share popcorn is perfectly normal.
- In inclement weather you gleefully bring them into the house.
- If you find a cricket in the house at night, you wish the chickens were awake to eat it and seriously consider waking them for a midnight snack.
- You grieve deeply when you lose one, as much as over a cat or dog!
- You buy yourself an X-ray machine so that you can see the eggs before they come out.
- You go swimming buck-naked in leach-infested swamps just to provide your birds with juicy treats to snack on.
- You find out you might be moving and then think about how you are possibly going to take them with you...and about how crazy people will think you are moving 5 chickens across the country
- You hear the words "Miss Rhode Island" in the middle of a "Girls-gone-wild video" and picture a sexy red pullet wearing edible thongs.
- You know you're addicted when you worry about when your chickens eat more than your spouse and kids
- The whole flock runs to meet you, since you MUST ALWAYS give them treats! Isn't that what an aunt is supposed to do? LOL!
- You email pictures of the chickens back and forth to each other.
- The screen saver is of the chickens.
- The idea of moving in order to have chickens seems perfectly reasonable.
- Poultry catalogs are a source of great joy!
- You had to go and buy a new snow blower cause the plow truck won't fit into their run.
- You buy 8 loaves of bread and have to explain to the cashier how your chickens love it.
- You debate the pros and cons of Christmas lights on the coop.
- You need to buy a remote thermometer so you can tell how cold your crew is getting at all hours.
- You have over 50 chickens and can tell which ones are behind you just by the crabbing or clucking they are making.
- When you make up excuses for why your favorite rooster viscously attacks everyone in the area. "He's just a little naughty!"
- You have to explain the two extra dimples on your face are from a rooster attack!
- Someone calls you "chicken" and you take it as a complement.
- You get 26 new chicks and spend hours thinking up names so that each begins with a different letter of the alphabet, from Arabella to Zoe.
- You set up a Web cam for the new babies and watch them on TV when you aren't out in the coop with them.
- You suggest to your dinner guests that they join you for a couple of hours of Chicken TV after dinner. You are perplexed when they suddenly remember a previous engagement and leave early.
- Your temporary home for the chicks in the corner of DH's new $2000 shed becomes permanent when he gives in and installs a little chicken door.
- You give up your parking spot in the garage so the things that had been in the shed can be stored there.
- You 'interview' prospective adoptive parents when you need to decrease the size of your flock, insisting they convince you of their worthiness.
- You set up a Web page with pictures of your chickens instead of your grandchildren.
- You live inside an unheated cargo van and your chicken coop has triple-insulated Andersen windows.
- Your spouse joins the local Chicken AA support group.
- You don't own any of your own but you buy chicken feed for the neighbors chickens and have named them all....
- You spend hours outside on a miserable cold day, turning over logs and crushing rotten wood just so you can find a few measly grubs to give your girls
- You have a box of chicks peeping in the bathroom because the hen escaped from the neighbor's free-ranged chicken operation and nested in your goat barn but you didn't say anything and even though you found the hen a hideout in a Federal Chicken Relocation Program at your brother's, it's too cold to just put the chicks in the hen house with the adults. Then spend an hour explaining to your children why it's okay to lie to the neighbor in JUST THIS ONE CASE.
- You buy beef cattle so your chickens can turn over the manure piles looking for tasty maggots to eat!
- You get the McMurray catalog in the mail in January, race to the house to pour over the pics, even though you've stared at them for years, dreaming of the coming warmer months when you can add to your over burgeoning flock.
- Sitting down there all day reading a book, while waiting and watching for the little darlings to lay so I can write their names on each of their eggs and learn who lays which perfect little presents.
- When you would rather look at pictures of peoples' chickens than their family (Old family photos with chickens in them are especially nice!)
- You don't understand why people would get tired of reading, thinking, talking, posting about chickens online.
- There is an "I brake for chickens" bumper sticker on your truck.
- When something happens to one of the chickens you get an instant message reporting "a tragedy".
- Time you were spending online looking up other things gets suddenly derailed in a look for chicken stuff for your sister.
- You dream of a large piece of land, a nice little house, and chickens running freely all over the place.
- You are TOTALLY JEALOUS of the chicken mailbox you have seen while driving around and are seriously considering stopping to ask where they got it.
- You think the movie Chicken Run is a training film.
- You have pre-bought your tickets for the Chicken Little movie that doesn't come out until this summer.
- You get your new Murray McMurry catalog and your DW phones a divorce lawyer.
- You are telling your students about the time your father was attacked by a rooster and had to kill it with the hoe he was carrying, and one of your male students looks at you with a confused look on his face and points at a female student. You then have to give a quick lesson on the names and functions of garden implements.
- You spend an hour after cleaning the chicken coop trying to figure out a way to tell your two (seemingly) identical Buff Orpingtons apart.
- You don't eat at KFC anymore because yours taste better!
- You and the family gather around the coop at night, watching the little peeps jump at the bugs flying around the light...then enlist your children to find crickets with a flashlight so you can laugh at the hilarity of 25 baby chickens cowering in the corner away from 4 crickets! (They did figure out real quick that they were for eating, though. They took no prisoners!)
- Your husband asks how you can tell one from the other, and you can list different features on each bird like you can your kids or yourself. Not all chickens look alike!
- You pay attention to exactly which grasses and plants they like to eat in the yard, so when you have to keep them penned up, you know exactly what to pick for them.
- Your only pick-up line is: "Hey, show you my chickens if you show me yours!"
- You spend most of an evening and the following morning wondering how to keep the chickens entertained in the coop since the weather isn't nice enough to be let out.
- After a long rambling talk about making corn muffins to enjoy your sweetheart says "I don't like corn muffins" and you laugh and say "OH! I never said I was making them for you! They're for me and the chickens!"
- You have spent time looking for neat pins that you can wear that look like your favorite chickens.
- You talk about them by name and all your coworkers know what chicken you are talking about. They also ask how their favorite chickens are.
- Your daughter sees that leftover biscuit from last night's dinner and knows to ask if she can have it or if it's for the chickens AND she can answer her own question before you have to.
- You spend several hours digging in the backyard...not to PLANT anything, mind you--just so the chickens can jump in and get some earthworms. You do this carefully because you've got three hens at once standing on the shovelful of dirt, and your five year old daughter joins in finding worms, shouting, "Here's a good worm, chickens!" None of you think that this behavior is unusual and it's great fun. The part that is just a teensy bit weird is when you grab the worms yourself and wipe the dirt off of them because certain chickens; most notably a large, spoiled roo, don't like the dirt.
- You stop at a pile of "free" stuff because there is a kitchen step ladder that would be just PERFECT for the kids to play on in the coop.
- You put a heat lamp in your coop and still go out on nights where it will get below 40d to make sure that everyone in on their roost and has their feathers safely covering their toes so they don't get frostbite.
- When you write poetry about your chickens.
- When you manicure your nails and immediately go out and dig for worms under the stepping-stones.
- When you say to them as you enter the coop "It's Mommy!"
- When you take one of the spoons of your best set of silverware and use it to scoop up beetles from under the burn barrel that weighs 80 pounds.
- When you buy many of their treats at PetSmart in the bird section.
- When you make them a salad with dressing.
- When you buy a case of corn and feed it to the chickens.
- When you give them filtered water.
- When you name the chickens after people you know, and then give them pictures of their chicken namesakes.
- While at the store you declare 'The chickens will love this!' and it isn't clear to anyone who doesn't love their chickens why they would.
- If asked if you eat your chickens, you laugh evilly and say 'Of course, so they will always be with me.' If asked if you eat your chickens the next day you act totally offended and demand if the person thinks you're a cannibal.
- You have been considering making pretty scarves for your Turkens. You have been asking someone with a sewing machine if they will make scarves for your Turkens.
- The idea of digging under a couple feet of snow for some grass for the chickens to play with isn't nutty to you.
Seems obvious that a few of us go too far. Are you going far enough?