Chicken soup and quackers update.

Yeah, I would never consider chickens or ducks as pets. When they're babies they're amazingly cute and sweet, but unless you can let them free-range, they are a nightmare.

I will never forget our family's experience in HOUSTON with a chicken when I was a tween. Now, we did live in the suburbs with country-ish surroundings. Big emphasis on t the ish, though! A fully-grown chicken somehow made its way onto our back patio. Our mom inexplicably took a fancy to this chicken. When the chicken started pecking at the sliding doors on either end of the patio, Mom decided it was hungry and that she needed to feed her. By this time (a couple of hours), the chicken had already gotten a pretty good start on shatting up the patio. My siblings and I argued with her that feeding it was not a good idea, but she was having none of our "sass." She went and poured a bunch of dry, uncooked grits into/onto something or other for "Henny Penny" as mom had now dubbed her. The damned chicken would peck at us if we tried to enter or exit through either sliding door. Luckily, there was a true back door a short distance away (from the outside), but HP would chase us when we used that one as well.

Dad got home from work that night and found an aggressive chicken, and a patio covered in chicken poop, with a fairly decent layer of grits all over the top of it all.  HP was a really messy eater.  Anyone who's ever had to scrubbed dried on grits off anything will understand what a nightmare this is.  I'm not sure Dad had prior experience with scrubbing grits off dishes or anything, but he learned pretty fast when it came time to try to get them off the poo covered patio. He went dad-ballistic and an epic fight ensued between our parents with much yelling, lots of profanity on dad's end, and lots of giggling from us kids about all the chicken shit references. Mom for some reason, doubled down, and kept feeding the chicken. This went on for about a week, and that patio was something else. Dad spent many a long evening that week with water hoses, the most powerful nozzles he could find, and lots of scraping, sweating, and carrying on. My memory escapes me on the details of how detente was finally reached, but Mom finally enlisted the help of a neighbor on our street who bought eggs from someone in the general vicinity and that chicken lady found HP a home somewhere in the country. At least, that's what we were told! We were griping constantly about not being able to play outside and swim in the pool, the patio, and all the poop near the pool*, so maybe that's why Mom finally broke. Who knows? Dad grumblingly hired someone to thoroughly clean and powerwash the patio and sidewalk and patio area around the pool the day HP left, and life soon return to its normal level of dysfunction as opposed to the DEFCON 5 level we had been at.

That experience put me off chickens forever. We hatched some every year in K (a set arrangement with a farmer who gave us the eggs and then took the chicks back a couple of weeks after they hatched, and I did ok with those. We even had a duckling or two a few times, and they were just as sweet as they could be, but I've never had a desire or the space to have ducks running around. Same with chickens. I guess some of my childhood traumas have served me well



*our theory was that HP patrolled and pooped around the pool at night while we were all asleep.

I've got a half dozen chickens and poop just isn't an issue. we have them in a fenced area where they get plenty of greens and the poop just kind of composts itself I suppose. They don't even smell.

greenlegume,    good times!