The Army
So I'm putting my chicken knowledge to use! When I was a teenager, my family lived on 6.6 acres in Michigan. We had ducks, geese, pigs, and chickens. These were not pets - we learned that quickly when we butchered our first two roosters. To this day I remember how I felt when I was served a drumstick (my favorite part of chicken). Imagine eating your dog or cat.
Yeah, that's how I felt poking at my dinner while Dad scolded me for not eating and lecturing on how he told us these weren't pets. "They're food."
Well excuse me I I like furry and feathery creatures! And those roosters were cuddly too! Feathers AND cuddly, what did Dad expect?!? Thankfully my younger brother complained about the bird being too tough to eat (my brother was an eating machine - I believe if he had to, he'd eat his own foot); and when the rest of my siblings agreed the bird wasn't very good, my father took a bite. Being a man with poor teeth, he quickly ignored the fact that I hadn’t touched my chicken to know it was like eating the sole off of a workbook and declared none of us had to eat the chicken if we didn’t want to.
YAY! We get to have pet chickens!
No. No we couldn’t and to make sure we didn't, Dad tasked us kids with the new batches’ care. Which wouldn’t have been a big deal if my father wasn’t a cheapskate…I mean, frugal.
He had the idea of raising our meat to be as natural as possible long before the “organic” movement started. That means no hormones, no antibiotics, no pesticide, herbicides or fungicides were used on the grains in the feed. Finding that in America was damn near impossible, but Canada hadn’t allowed that in their agriculture industry for years so Dad wanted Canadian feed - which was great because we lived in Michigan and Canada was a hop, skip and jump away. Problem was, the elevator didn't carry the feed and it would be a week or two before they could get it.
So Dad got dried corn. That was still on the cob. It was feed intended for other livestock, but it would work. Yeah, I knew how it worked - the man had 5 frigging kids and we spent TWO WEEKS shucking and popping and grinding the corn into pieces suitable for chicks to eat. When I say shucked, I mean pulling whatever husk was dried off of the ear, slicing your fingers in the process. Fresh corn husk cuts burn like a son of a bitch, worse than paper cuts or sheet metal cuts, but when they’re dry…oh my God, just kill me now.
No, death would be too easy. Now we had to use our sliced fingers to pop the dry kernels off of the cob. To save ourselves some pain, we used the meat of our hands and thumb to pop the hardened rocks off of their bed. After the second cob, some of my siblings were calling uncle. Those of us who were double jointed in the thumb (namely me) was able to go longer, but the result was the same.
Agony. Imagine, if you will, using your fingers to test the edge of a chainsaw blade after sticking them in a vat of glass shards 100 times. Do this until your hands are absolutely raw. That’s how our hands felt. But we figured once the hard part was over, we were done.
We were stupid.
Just when we thought life couldn’t get worse, we had to grind the kernels. With raw, tender hands sunburnt red (there was no sun, we were in the basement). On an old grinder from Wyatt Earp's era - you know, the one that clamps to a table and has a turn handle; the kind that gets jammed up and you’re lifting the table just to get the fucker to turn. That kind of grinder.
I asked Dad why he didn’t just get an electric one - that HAD to have been available; it was the 1990s after all. Dad’s response?
“Why do you think I had 5 kids?”
…that explained SOOO much…
Anyhoo! I quickly learned not to view them as pets, but as food. However, I noticed how well clipped the chickens kept the back yard grass (they were free range) and how we didn't really have a problem with mosquitoes and flies. Hell, chickens will even go after a mouse - it’s weird seeing a chicken peck a mouse. It’s freaky seeing a group of them play “I got it” with said mouse; like the “SAVE THE MELON!” scene from Ice Age. But what really impressed me in my young age was how the chickens would walk up to a spider web, peck it, and when the spider dropped down, they pounced on it with zero fucks given. To add insult to injury, the chickens would then absolutely DESTROY the web, or dig into the burrow to eat anything they found.
They are ferocious.
They are tenacious.
They are vicious.
They are EXACTLY the kind of soldier I need to end this war.
