“I don’t like animals.”
This is a statement that I am sometimes forced to make. It makes people recoil in horror and think
terrible thoughts about poor, soulless me.
However, a fairly recent occurrence has given me a story to tell that
makes people much more sympathetic towards me.
They might even think I still have a heart.
Enter story of a chicken.
It began last February, when my siblings, got an incubator and 12 eggs to hatch from the 4H club. We knew that it was not likely for all the
eggs to hatch.
At the beginning of March, 8 adorable little chicks
hatched. We were soooo excited (yes,
even me, the animal-hater!) That night,
the 9th chick peeped (I believe that is the proper term for making a tiny hole
in the egg) a hole in her egg. Yes, I
made it a girl. However, she didn’t come
out. For days. I would sit by the incubator and watch her
rock the egg and make pathetic peeping sounds.
It was so sad. I wanted to break
the shell off her but we read that if we did, she could die because her blood
supply was attached to the shell and if we broke it she would bleed to
death. We read that if it takes more
than a couple hours for a chicken to get out of their shell, they can become
stuck to the egg. We assumed that that
had happened so we began patting her shell with a warm washcloth, hoping to
loosen the membrane. I went to bed on
Friday night crying because I thought that poor little chicken was going to
die.
Yes, crying. In fact,
sobbing.
Imagine my joy when I woke up the next morning and found
that little chicken out of her shell. I
was so elated and named her Daphne.
However, I soon discovered that Daphne’s fight was not over. She was so tiny, much smaller than the other
chickens. She also had a scissorbeak,
which means that her top beak did not fit over her bottom beak, but was crossed
over. A scissorbeak can make eating
difficult or impossible.
Daphne wouldn’t eat anything and I didn’t know what to do. Once again, I was crying. I would hold her and force her to eat and drink
water. Finally, she got where I thought
she was going to survive.
Then I noticed that Daphne was scared of all the other
chickens. She would lie down to sleep
but if one of the others made a single noise, she would jump back up. As you might imagine with 8 chickens, there
was a lot of noise, which meant Daphne was not sleeping at all.
I would sit by the chicken crate to do my homework, watching
to make sure the chicks weren’t picking on Daphne. All of a sudden, she started twitching and
flailing around the cage. I was
horrified. My family thought Daphne was
also having neurological problems. I was
crying again. But I thought that maybe
the reason Daphne was having these problems was because she wasn’t getting any
sleep. After all, doesn’t not having
sleep make people crazy? So that night,
I held her for hours and hours. I wrapped
her in a washcloth and she fell asleep.
She was so cute. I began doing
that every night when I got home from school.
While I was gone, my brothers and sister would hold her occasionally so
she could get some sleep. She stopped
having her seizures. And guess
what?? Boatloads of tears later, Daphne
is now a healthy and strong chicken… or rather, a rooster! :-)
There. I’m not so soulless after all.
