Tuesday, May 31, 2011

A lesson in eco-nomics

Vegetarians be on notice.....this blog may upset your sensibilities.......



We made some tough decisions over the last month. The economic impact of having 52 beaks to feed is....well....too much. We buy organic feed at $25 per bag. When 2 bags last 9 days and less than half of the hens are laying and there are 4 roosters and blah blah blah. Tough decisions HAVE to be made. We hold up the economic ruler and face it.

Gotta cull the flock.

Now

With our best abattoir, Sam, on the other side we have delayed the inevitable in order to talk ourselves into harvesting the flock. We realized that it would take all day to harvest the flock and process the flock. There is the room in the freezer....there is none right now. (I gotta get busy cooking the frozen veggies and fruit from last year before this year's crops start coming on).
It's taken too many bags of feed for us to decide.

It is so final and we have been feeling rather stuck.

Thank heavens for our intrepid friend Arron. He can add "abattoir" to his resume. Actually he is a quantum physicist heading to UC Irvine for his post grad work. He'll find much more satisfaction in that work, however, this is just his kindness to us that allowed him to play the circle of life game today.

I certainly feel a lot lighter. It's less of a burden for me now that I am no longer thinking of how.

Which brings me to the meta-thought for the day. When do I allow myself to get stuck in the how and not proceed into the bliss of my life? Less often than in years past. Happy for that.

So off they go to the next step on the ladder of life. They had a grand life here with us, those chickens. Big yard for plenty of room to run. Yummy kitchen scraps. Bugs galore. The roosters got plenty of action, I'll tell you that! What is next on the ladder? Whale? Horse? Cat?

What do you think?

2 comments:

  1. When my hens stopped laying, they became queens of the coop. I couldn't kill them. Since I don't eat meat, keeping them as companions was the whole idea in the first place. All is good.

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  2. How many went to chicken heaven?

    ReplyDelete