The world has gone wild for animals, just check out Facebook. Goats scamper about in pajamas. Gerbils wear hats. Ducks waddle about while wearing bandanas. And cats . . . don’t get me started on cats. Every human emotion known to man can be demonstrated on the faces of the legions of cats that populate social media. I know. I’ve seen them. Happy cats. Sad cats. Mad cats. Grumpy cats. Well, you’ve seen it.
My husband and I live with animals, the kind that lives in coops and barns and pastures and not on Facebook.
Wild animals haunt the wetlands and bogs that border . . . well . . . basically the entire state. The wild animals don’t wear clothes. I include this for informational purposes. Wild animals eat farm animals. It’s a natural fact. And everything eats our chickens, so, into the coop our chickens go, every night, for their own protection, and so we don’t have to bury the bloody, gory remains in the morning. Free range means free to be eaten by eagles, hawks, feral cats, coyotes, bobcats, possums, raccoons, and the neighbor’s dog.
Most of our chickens coop themselves. At night, they wander back into the safety of a roomy, re-enforced, hardware cloth draped impregnable chicken fortress.
Yesterday, one of the hens forgot where she lived. My husband went after her, determined to save her clucking life. She began to squawk, loudly. A rowdy rooster hearing the hen’s distress ran out to take advantage, and when I say, “take advantage” I mean he thought he was going to get lucky.
For the Facebook crowd, roosters are equal opportunity sex fiends. One rooster holds a hen down and his buddies, hearing her shriek, come running to take their turn. I am not kidding, and it’s not a video you’re going to see on social media. It’s the wild kingdom . . .
The hen starts squawking. The rooster comes running, jumps on the goofy hen and proceeds to fulfill the measure of his creation. (IM me if you don’t know what this means.) My husband, taking advantage of the distraction, picked up both chickens, now wildly mating their brains out, and carries them to the coop. That rooster never took a breath as he floated through the air in the arms of my poor husband. Lust made that rooster blind, deaf, and dumb.
I fell down, laughing.
And this is how “animals” behave. They eat. They drink. They look for opportunities to be merry. And tomorrow they will do it all over again until the neighbor’s dog gets them.
Linda (Hoot) Zern
