Cold War solutions are the only answer to protect Nancy from the mean girls
The joy of owning poultry is only slightly tempered by the insane situations that you find yourself in. My most recent embarrassment came after giving Aphrodite the chicken a good telling off for being mean to the other chooks, overheard by our next- door neighbour.
Aphrodite is the ringleader of a naughty trio of mean girls who have been feather pecking poor Nancy.
Feather pulling can be habitual behaviour or it can happen when hens are kept in crowded conditions or if food is scarce. That is not the situation in our case, the chooks have free range of the entire garden to scratch and scrape and look for bugs and worms galore, and they have plenty of grub.
As feathers are made up of around 90 per cent keratin, the chooks need protein to replace them when they are shedding their feathers. Hens are omnivores and eat a range of grains, greens and insects. It’s fair to say that they are simple souls which are essentially a stomach on legs.
As the main provider of food, I am central to their very existence. If I pop my head out the back door I am met by a feathered mob, half running, half flying, like off- kilter Lancaster bombers they crash into each other in frenzy to reach me first to find out what tiny tasty morsel I may have.
As a species they are evolutionarily related to dinosaurs, so I know if I tripped and fell these miniature velociraptors wouldn't pause before stripping the flesh off my carcass. So any sign of damage to Nancy's skin to could lead to a vicious attack.
In an attempt to halt the feather pulling, I tried anti- pecking spray, which is a version of human stop n grow for nails. And it’s a bit tricky to apply. Holding a hen with one arm, I managed to miss and ended up with a good squirt of it in my eye.
Sadly it didn't crack the errant behaviour, so the next step was to banish the worst offender into a Great Escape, Steve Mcqueen- style cooler. She wasn't best pleased at being kept apart from her besties, but after her release, they were all still at it. Now even Clem, the next to bottom in the pecking order has joined in the fun. So most of the time I'm on high hen alert to intervene in chicken politics before Nancy's butt becomes the focus for the others’ pesky beaks.
I look to the internet for a solution: get a cockerel comes in at number 1, they won't accept any of that nonsense from hens. However, as I'm pushing it a bit with the neighbours as it is, I have resorted to dividing up the free- ranging rights in the garden, like the partition between East and West Germany during the Cold War.
Who said owning chickens would be easy?