Poultry Daycare
Back when I was ten in the stone age, otherwise known as the seventies, we lived for a year on an acreage. My parents decided that it was a good idea to get some chickens, mainly for the eggs but I would bet it also to provide a teaching experience to their city kids.
So we got some chicks, loving took care of them and watched them grow up into chickens. Neither of my parents had the stomach for killing them for dinner so they were all egg layers except for Rusty the Rooster. My father had seen too much as a child in the middle of war in Europe and my mother had to kill chickens as a farm kid and hated it. My youngest sister thought of them as pets and carried them around in her arms and on her shoulder. The chickens thought of us as family. They would knock on the kitchen door and when my mother opened it, they walked in as if they were our buddies.
So great, we had chicken pets (all with names) and eggs. Until we stopped having eggs. All those free range chickens stopped laying eggs at the same time. And this lasted for quite awhile. I'm sure my parents were wondering why they were paying for chicken feed when there were no eggs.
And then one day, all of a sudden, out of a bush, fourteen baby chicks emerged. They all appeared at once. Like in a cartoon.
We were delighted of course and over the following days we saw something interesting emerge. Every day a different hen would take on the mother role and would take care of all the chicks while the other chickens gossiped, had spa days, took naps, asked each other if they looked fat in their feathers, and flirted with the new rooster that was given to us. Imagine that Rusty was the nerdy nice boy with glasses and this other rooster comes along looking and acting like Gaston. He was a nasty rooster, not gentle and loving like Rusty, but those hens were all taken with his size and handsome looks.
I'm sure none of the hens knew which chick belonged to who since they all laid their eggs in the same nest, so they simply took turns being the mom while the others got days off. I think they had something there because mothering every day is exhausting. Imagine mothering only one day out of the week. It would be a tremendously difficult day because you have to take care of everyone, but you get a bunch of days off to recover.
So when I saw this picture of this Mama duck with fifty something ducklings swimming after her it reminded me of that experience with the chickens. Obviously she's not the mother of all of them. Ducks don't have that much off spring at once. But she's got some kind of deal going on with other mothers. They take turns being Mom and the others get to go out for girls night every night.
Maybe we can learn something from the animals. They clearly have more compassion for others little ones than some people do these days who take children from their parents and throw them in cages and refuse to give them basic necessities or to take care of them in any way. As people we're supposed to be better. We have brains and hands and we claim to have hearts. And yet, we come up short when it comes to human suffering. We may get horrified at the abuse of a dog or cat, yet shrug off or support the abuse of a child.
It's not a new thing. It's happened many times before in history. Over and over again. And still we do not learn.
So if you see a child in need, play mom for awhile until Mom can do it. It would be the animal thing to do.
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The Canadian Woman for today is...
Margaret Atwood (1939 - )
Born in Ottawa Ontario, Atwood has written poetry, children's books, various genres of adult novels, and non-fiction. She's recently acquired new fans through the popular television series of her 1985 novel "The Handmaid's Tale", a dystopian book she wrote based on actual occurrences through history and cultures.
I was lucky enough to be able to hear her speak at Red Deer College a few years ago. She's a funny lady. Her list of awards is extensive and it includes the prestigious Order of Canada. Margaret Atwood Website http://margaretatwood.ca/
Margaret Atwood Wikepedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Atwood
