Chicken Stories

Why we have chickens

Hi!
        Surely I've told you about my rooster?!?   
        Well, when I was a kid I had my heart set on having a pet chicken.   I
lived on a ranch near San Antonio, TX and had a fair number of long term
pets (cats, dogs, horses, sheep, goats) and short term pets that I only
kept for a while before letting them go (deer, horned toads & lizards,
snakes, frogs, etc.) but I wanted a chicken.  I *think* it was because
I'd read the book _That Quail Robert_ all about a family that had a pet
quail.  Anyhow, there was a perfectly good though empty ramshackle hen
house down at the barns, but I wasn't interested in having a flock, just
one chicken.  A chicken to live in the house, not at the barns in the
hen house.
        We'd always had one kind of orphan animal or another in the house and
I'd raised various lambs, kids, fawns that were abandoned.  The sanchos
(Spanish slang for orphan) were usually raised in the kitchen when it
was cold and on the screened in porch when it was warm, and usually
spent their adult lives scheming to figure out how to get back in the
house.
        But my mom wasn't too keen on the idea of a chicken in the house.  I
however talked of nothing else to anyone who would listen.  And our
neighbor listened and arrived on our doorstep with the last of his flock
of banties.  They had been sleeping in trees and gradually the raccoons
had gotten them all.  All that was left was a full grown tough-as-nails
bantam rooster with seriously long, sharp spurs.  It wasn't the least
bit tame.  I'm sure if my mom could have figured out how to head the
neighbor and his rooster off, she would have - but as they say "a bird
in the hand is worth two in the bush" and my bird was in hand, more or
less since it was too wild to pick up, and once I set eyes on it, it was
mine.
        The rooster was officially named Mars, and was sent to live in the
barbecue pit - a little rock floored room with screen walls behind the
house.  I set up jigsaw puzzles on the table inside the porch and talked
to the rooster non-stop for days.  It eventually got used to me and got
tame.  And I could pick it up and set it down and it would stay where it
was set.  (Much like the Dorkings seem to be learning to do now.)  As
the weather got colder, the rooster couldn't stay out in the barbecue
pit, so of course he had to come inside.  But this wasn't a problem any
more.  During the evening I'd set him on the back of the couch with a
newspaper under him and he would stay put.  At night he slept on the end
of my bed, with newspaper under of course, and again stayed put.  After
a while he learned he could follow me and wander around the house, but
by that time had a reasonable idea of going over to the newspaper to
poop.  Though mostly he stayed where put once it was dark.
        The rooster would wake up at about 4:30, crow, I'd wake up sometime
thereafter, feed the rooster and let him out.  He would walk down to the
hen house (which now had a flock of banty hens) and play rooster all
day.  In the afternoon when I got home from school, around dusk, I'd go
down to the barns and the rooster would meet me half-way up the hill and
we would walk back to the house together.  If for some reason I didn't
get down the hill in time, the rooster would walk himself all the way
home and wait outside the front door for someone to let him in.  This
went on for years and the rooster lived to be a ripe old age.
        His name however didn't stay Mars.  I called him Roo-babe, but everyone else called him CPP, which stood for Chicken Pot Pie.  And that is why I wanted to have chickens again!