Such sweet and charming girls my chickens are. Each with their own personality; the escape artist, the hawk, little red, broody, and we mustn’t forget our little bantam rooster amongst a flock of big girls, Napoleon. They kindly share their varied and often humorous eggs with me, eat the nasty bugs, weed our gardens an fertilize the lawn. I was nearly appalled to witness the savagery they were instinctually capable of. I keep many logs and boards in their chicken yard for a couple of reasons. They like to perch on them and bugs love to gather in them and especially under them. So I periodically flip them around to expose the bugs and it’s a riotous clucking feeding frenzy. Well, I did just that recently and exposed a little field mouse with four or five little sucklings attached to her belly. Before I had the chance to register what I saw the mayhem broke loose. Mamma mouse frantically runs for cover, being pulled this way and that as the savage beasts I call my sweet girls were ripping the sucklings from her teats. A cacophony of clucking and squawking mingled with tiny little squeals of terror overwhelmed the chicken yard. The girls were running chaotically about attacking one another to get at the tasty little morsels. As I said, I was nearly appalled. It was a a grotesque moment of natures beauty and sickened as I was for the mice, I was equally mesmerized by the raw brutality of survival instincts in action. I stealthily slipped out of the yard and let my sweet girls sort this one out without the interference of stupid human emotions.
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