YOUNG DUD turned up late to school on Monday. It wasn’t unusual for Young Dud to be late and it wasn’t unusual for him to have a good excuse.
Monday was no exception. “OK Young Dud, what’s your excuse today?” asked the teacher.
“Well!” he said seriously, “last night dad went to bed with no pyjamas. At about midnight there was a hell of a ruckus in the chook house, so dad grabbed the shotgun and we all went out to see what was happening.
“Dad went first, without his pyjamas, then his old black dog. Me and mum followed. When we got to the chook house there was a noise.
“Dad propped, cocked the shotgun, but the old black dog just kept walking. His cold nose bumped into dad’s bum and I’ve been cleaning up bloody dead chooks all morning.”
THEY say there has never been a chook that hasn’t died in debt.
Maybe that’s right if you are one of those people who weigh up everything in life by how much profit something makes.
But I reckon the benefits of keeping a few chooks can’t be simply measured by the dollar value of eggs produced.
Chooks are good for the soul. Anyone who has chooks will tell you it is an absolute pleasure watching them scratch and cluck around after you toss in the kitchen scraps. The eggs and nutrient rich chook poo for the garden are just a bonus.
WE are all encouraged to live more sustainably and keeping poultry can be an important part of running a sustainable household.
All you need is a bit of space, a chook house and a well fenced enclosure. The hens will do the rest. Naturally you have to provide food and water, but chooks aren’t too fussy.
THE CHOOK HOUSE need not be elaborate. If it isn’t too big and complies with some commonsense regulations, the local council doesn’t want to know about it. If in doubt about the rules the council has a fact sheet on its website.
ROOSTERS however are a different kettle of fish. In a nutshell roosters and neighbours don’t mix.
The council rangers don’t get many complaints about hens, but they certainly have to deal with a lot of neighbour disputes about noisy roosters crowing away early in the morning. So if you live in a town or village don’t have a rooster. It’s not worth the grief.
FOXES and dogs are a bit of a threat to your average poultry pen.
We have lost a few hens over the years, with the most memorable massacre happening before our very eyes when an evil looking Rottweiler leapt over the fence, systematically killing every chook then leaping to safety with just one hen in its feathery mouth, before disappearing without me being able to land even one decent blow with the hockey stick. Not unusual I hear some of my former hockey playing team mates muttering.
AND another thing about chooks – some live happily laying eggs for years, but others seem to fall off the perch for no apparent reason.
Chirpy one day and dead the next. As one old farmer philosophically told me after I sympathised with him about losing his best bull – “if you’ve got animals sonny, you’re gunna have some live ones and you’re gunna have some dead ones.”
THE trick is not to get too attached to them.
My good wife is a Newcastle lass, so when one of the chooks had a prolapsed uterus she immediately took it off to the local vet.
Being a caring sort of bloke like all vets are, he did his best to repair the chook.
He confessed to never having tried to save a chook with a prolapsed uterus before, but Barbara insisted.
So he did what he could then shoved a tampon into the tail end to keep the reproductive bits inside the poor girl, but alas she died.
Being an old farm boy from Bullio I would have painlessly ended this saga long before the poor chook got to visit the vet. But hey, that’s life.
As we said at the start of this story, there has never been a chook that hasn’t died in debt. In this case her debt was greater than most.
*Geoff Goodfellow has lived his life in the Southern Highlands, works for Wingecarribee Council and is well known in local sporting and social circles.
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