It's a dirty job, but...

When I was 17 and Channel 4 was just months old, I watched The Animals Film. It showed, in graphic detail, factory farming and what went on in a vivisectionist’s laboratory. I decided there and then that no animal needed to live in such conditions and I gave up eating meat (and six months later, fish) as a personal protest. I said at the time that when factory farming stopped, or when I killed and ate my own meat, then I would eat it again. That hasn’t changed over the years, neither has my support of animal welfare (although not animal rights). Over the weekend, though, I think the day got that little bit closer.

We had three hens. The biggest used to bully the other two to the stage where they have almost no feathers on their backsides. One of them was also laying shell-less eggs. So, with my dad’s help, we built a ‘sin bin’ and I started to isolate them to find out who was laying soft eggs. It turned out to be the bully, so she was put in the sin bin for two days to try and cure the feather pecking. However, when she was put back in the run she viciously attacked the other two and plucked feathers from anywhere within reach. So we took the decision to cull her.

Not an easy decision but the hens aren’t there to look pretty, they’re there to lay eggs. As Agnieszka said, we’re not a charity. In addition, if I want to farm a smallholding, then there will be times I need to cull birds or animals and if I can’t do it, then I might as well forget that kind of life. It isn’t something I would do for the hell of it, just when it’s necessary. So I took advice about the correct procedure and late on Friday night when it was dark and everything was still and quiet, I lifted her out of the sin bin and wrung her neck. She was plucked, dressed and in the fridge an hour later.

To say I haven’t wrestled with my conscience over the weekend would be an untruth. It bothers me that I did something I thought I never would. I lost sleep over it, felt guilty, tried to justify what I did and at the end of it all came to the conclusion that it was the best thing. We don’t have room for a ‘free-loader’. She had a good year with us, was well looked after, but in the end she stopped producing what she was bought for.

The red mite mist...

Before we left for our long-awaited holiday I was having some small problems with red mite in the chicken shed. Namely, the little bleeders (in more ways than one) suddenly seemed to be everywhere, including in my clothes. This led to a nit-picking session in the bar on the ferry, which was viewed with horror by other passengers but gave us a table to ourselves. On our return, while the hens themselves were fine and ably looked after by next door neighbours, the mites were everywehre. Of all the things I though I'd be doing when I got back from holiday, standing in the yard in a t-shirt spraying Jeyes fluid on the hen hut wasn't one of them. But it had to be done: a thorough clean out, Jeyes fluid, blowtorch and Dyna-Mite. After reading some of the forums, I am also going to get some Poultry Shield and will make extra efforts to eradicate this bloody menace. If there are no mites in the hut then there'll be no mites on me and, as Agnieszka said the other night, she doesn't want to spend the winter picking biddies off my neck.

Thankfully this isn't life size...

Kury domowe

As I write this, great goose feather flakes of snow are falling on to the car park outside the window. The view to Scout Moor is hidden by driving snow backed by grey cloud and the general feeling in the office is one of great excitement as well as a hope that tomorrow may be a ‘work from home’ day.

Luckily it wasn’t like this on Saturday when we barrelled over to Reaseheath College for a beginner’s course on keeping poultry. Living in the Greater Manchester urban sprawl certainly doesn’t have its advantages when you want to do outdoorsy things, which is why we travelled for an hour to sit in a classroom at Cheshire’s agricultural college to learn how to keep poultry, with a general focus on chickens.

There were twelve of us there, eager to learn. Two women already kept chickens and, as they reminded us throughout the day, knew pretty much all there was to know about the birds. Except where the nose and ears were, as I heard her asking while we were outside. We got to learn a lot over the course of five hours: housing, feeding, breeds. The instructor was an ex-farmer who had been drafted in to take the course and, unfortunately, it showed. His idea of how much food they needed (‘Oh, a kilo a day per bird should be ok’ – it should be 130g) was off, as was his vague notions about housing. Disease weren’t mentioned, except for a brief nod to Newcastle disease. His excuse was he liked classes to be informal, but I think his experience of hens was on a large scale where feeding is done by the bag, not the handful, and hens are left to get on with it, ill or not.

The best bit of the day was when we got to go outside and get down with the birds. While they don’t have a big poultry unit at the college they do have meerkats, a valuable addition to the average agriculture student’s knowledge base. Agnieszka was torn, therefore, between looking at the meerkats, and watching me chase scraggy arsed hens round a muddy plot.

Having never held a chicken before, let alone caught one, it was good experience as now I know I can do both. Whether I can wring its neck, should the time ever come, remains to be seen. What the day did teach us, was that we are capable of keeping them and I am really looking forward to getting our own for the yard, while I know Agnieszka is looking forward to me moving the hen house out of the front room to somewhere more suitable.