Honey Farm Dreaming: A memoir about sustainability, small farming and the not-so simple life by Anna Featherstone

Author:Anna Featherstone [Featherstone, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Capeable Publishing

If you still have an appetite for sauerkraut, it’s very good for you by the way, there’s a recipe on page 231.

Chicken

Today I need to kill a chicken. It’s just a chicken, but I’m chicken.

If Andrew were here, he’d take care of it, enabling me to be at arms’ length, but lately he’s been somewhere else whenever someone is about to die, needs help dying or dies inappropriately. Like today.

Her days of modelling on the cover of egg cartons might be over, but even in old age, she’s bright-eyed and her chuckling cluck still buoyant with banter. But sometime in the last week her coppery feathered right leg stopped working, and now her body twists and strains with the effort to drag it along. She can only move an egg-length at a time before she tumbles down. I don’t even need to call in the kids to catch her, I just scoop her up.

Up until a few days ago she was still living the high life at our Hens on Holidays Caravan Park, now a cluster of old caravans rebirthed as mobile hen houses. Painted bright orange, lime green and electric blue, the caravans provide fox-free night time accommodation and a funky place to call home after a day free-ranging.

Her Boho gypsy days have suited her. I love how she feels tucked up in my arms, she’s like a hot water bottle full of trust, a calm ripple against my body. I gently stretch the bad leg and finger the spindly bones from her toes up to her thigh, checking for bumps or ridges or cracks, she doesn’t even flinch.

“That’s not good,” I say to her. “If there was a break we could splint it with a paddlepop stick like we did for your old friend peacock.”

I carry her with me, not wanting to put her down to be attacked by ants she can’t turn fast enough to peck.

We head into the house. It’s the first time she’s been back inside since emerging six years ago from the incubator nursery set up in our bedroom cupboard. Back then she was a fluffy marshmallow of sunshine, tottering about like the star of a tissue commercial and mesmerising us with her visual and vocal avian adorability. Cheep-cheep, cheep-cheep.

I get an old blue towel, fold it four times and lay it in a cardboard box that once held oranges. I pop her in and we go sit down in Dr Google’s waiting room.

I type in, ‘chicken leg paralysis’.

Broken bones, no. Temporary paralysis from predator attack, no. Malnutrition, not with all the treats she gets. Botulism, unlikely. Tumour, possible, humane euthanasia recommended. Marek’s disease, possible, isolate from flock and humanely euthanise.

I swallow. It’s one of those back of the throat, uncomfortable situation swallows. The swallow you do when your brain realises things are about to get hairy. The swallow you do when you realise you need to face something you don’t want to, the swallow you do when you don’t know if you can.

Euthanasia: the painless killing of a patient suffering an incurable, painful disease.

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