i am chicken.

In my humble opinion chickens are proof that vegetarianism is pure silliness. They have brains the size a peas, can function without their head, are ugly, smell disgusting, and sound ridiculous. The only good reason that I can come up with for their pathetic existance is that they make a nice soup, taste good on the BBQ, and supply us with eggs.

I think it is safe to say that my strong dislike of chickens stems from the fact that they are my weakness when it comes to being a 'farm girl.' I love to think that I am a classic 'home grown on the farm' child. I know how to drive a tractor, plant a field, milk cows, unload hay, scrape the feed, the whole nine yards... but when it comes to chickens I fall apart at the seams. Me and chickens, we've had quite the relationship in the last 20 years...

It all started out when I was about 9 years old and my dad gave me the job of raising 100 little chicks. Well, if I could have been able to tell them apart I would have named them all, but since I couldn't, I gave them all the name Fred (I didn't know they were all girls). These fluffy little yellow puffs won over my heart instantly. That summer I fed them twice a day, sung them little songs at night, and picked fresh grass for a special treat. My parents started to worry about how attached I was getting and they didn't know how to break it to me that the destiny of these chickens was our freezer, so they didn't. Instead they sent me off to my friend Leanne's house on the fatal day. Murphy's Law prevailed and I came home a little before schedule and was welcomed with the site of my Freds without heads, hanging upside down and featherless. I screamed and I ran to the coop just in time to see Fred getting his head chopped off by Dad. It was a bad day.

The next year the weasels got them and the year after that they committed cannibalism and ate eachother. I soon learnt to not get attached to chickens and I went to the next extreme, I would help in the butchering of the chickens. My job was to cut the neck bone off of the already plucked and gutted chicken, simple enough task. The first three went well, but the forth had it in for me. A freshly killed chicken is pretty slippery... slippery chicken + sharp knife + Katrina = disaster for Katrina's wrist. Instead of chopping the chicken I chopped my wrist. It was a bad day.

I decided that I didn't like chickens and refused to have anything to do with them. They had hurt me far too many times. Little did I know that I was soon to be repulsed my them. If you have never seen I chicken lay an egg, kudos to you, eat your egg in peace. I have, and I still have a hard time choking down eggs. I have been blessed with an overactive imagination that sometimes gets the best of me...

Then there was chicken catching. One night, 16,000 chickens, 16 teenagers, and one truck. Chicken catching is probably one of the most sereal, horrible jobs I have ever done. By the end of the night you are carrying eight chickens, four in each hand, purposely giving them brain freeze and siezures, and playing the occasional game of catch - it makes you turn into a monster. For the next week you are coughing up feathers and chicken crap. Also you can't eat chicken for at least a year, well at least I couldn't... once again I'll blame it on the overactive imagination.

Today was chicken killing day. I opted to pick the beans from the garden, snap and bag them. Sadly I couldn't escape the smell and the sounds of the Fred exclaiming his last words. It was a bad day.

Chickens are my weakness, I can't handle them. True farm girl? Perhaps not.