Chicken Dance

About three weeks ago I went shopping with my parents, and bought a dozen chicks. I know this may sound odd to any city folk, but while I didn't actually leave my house intending to come home with anything living, (other than my parents, of course) going to a feed store to browse is actually a form of entertainment when you live as far out in the country as we do. In any case, they had these absolutely adorable little yellow fluffballs, and on a lark I decided to buy a dozen, thinking that we eat eggs, and why buy them when I can just buy the animals they come from? This is the kind of rationalization coming from my brain that the Man has to put up with on a constant basis.

I bought them food and a special little container for it, as well as a special container for their water, shavings, and a handy little light to keep them warm, and the pimply faced kid manning the register scooped them into a box and took my money and as an afterthought handed me a simple flier telling me to give them water at all times, and off we went. I didn't realize then what I was in for.

My little fluff balls are growing very rapidly and eating nonstop, and were running very low on food. So the man and I went to the chain feed store where I purchased the chicks, and they didn't have the same kind of feed I originally bought. I decided that instead of simply buying another kind of food there, we should go to the locally owned feed store instead, and so that's what we did. The people there apparently care more about their customers (big surprise, right) and told me that I had not purchased what I thought I had. That's when I learned of my fatal mistake.

Apparently, not all chicks are created equally, and the ones I bought are a man-made hybridized version created specifically for eating. Their hearts are eventually not strong enough to support their bodies, which grow at an alarmingly fast rate, and they die of a heart attack if you don't slaughter them first. The problem of course is that I didn't want my chicks to become dinner; I wanted them to create breakfast.

So now we have a dilemma- the Man didn't grow up in a redneck family that always had some form of livestock in the process of becoming dinner, and simply can not handle the thought of sending our chickens out to slaughter and renaming them nugget and wing and thigh. If I had purchased these chickens with that in mind, I wouldn't have any trouble at all sharpening an axe myself. However, since I wanted eggs, I have been calling them poached and scrambled and over easy, and just can't bring myself to do it.

I have had an epiphany, though. My chicks were originally these adorable tiny little fluffy things, which no one could walk by and not want to bring home. That is purposeful. The designers of this bastardized breed of chickens created these babies to look so sweet and cute so that people will buy them. Right now, my chicks have white feathers on their wings and tails and are nearly bald everywhere else, which I, in my ignorance, thought was a part of the growing process, and that they'd eventually become fully grown chickens with white feathers everywhere. Not so. The thought has occurred to me that they stay this ugly for all of their short lives so that you don't mind eating them so much. Just like in the human race, the cute chickens get to live easier, more comfortable lives just laying around (literally) and flirting with roosters. Life sucks for the ugly, but I suppose at least for chickens, it doesn't suck for very long.

I also guess I know for sure now which came first. If there simply are no eggs, clearly the chicken did.