To Farm or Not to Farm Part 2

My mom named the chicken Big Hen because she was so big and to this day we still remember her as Big Hen. The name just stuck.
she gave us eggs quite regularly as long as she was in the mood to lay and we kept her fed fat. Eventually she became very tame.
what did we get out of this? I got the job of feeding and watering her and my sister got a few cracked ribs from her fall. The few eggs weren't quite compensation for the trouble she had but we decided to wipe the slate clean when Big Hen gave us Cheep.

Cheep was the only chick that hatched out of a batch of ten eggs. At first the gg didn't want to break open properly and so we had to help the little chick out of her prison. After which Big Hen decided that it wasn't her baby and why should she look after it? So we had to raise Cheep ourselves. No easy task!

During the day she would snuggle up with whoever got to her first in the mornings. Sometimes she would snuggle deep down inside my rollneck sweater, next to my neck. At nights she would sleep on a hot water bottle inside a box. We had to change the bottle at least once throughout the night. Through the next few months Cheep became a favourite with everyone, including all our other pets and any visitors who popped by. She had a way of behaving more like a cat or a dog than a chicken and most of the time we could forget that she was a chicken.

One day she laid her first egg. What a surprise it was for poor Cheep!
AAAAH! Where did that come from??
Its an egg, silly, you laid it!
Are you sure?
Yes, I'm sure.
Oh, well I guess that's okay then.

After that she just called us to tell us she had laid an egg and it was waiting to be picked up and then she was off on her foraging again.
Two months later she died mysteriously and we really missed her a lot. She was also the last chick that we ever raised....in fact, she was the last chick point.

The reason for this was that we had to get rid of our rooster. His name was Speckles and he turned out to be a complete beast! He took to attacking our animals and even our dogs were cowed by him. He pecked two holes in my lamb's muzzle and it took weeks for that to heal. She lost quite a lot of blood and I was wondering if I was going to have to write an obituary for her soon.
We held a meeting and decided that he just had to go, so my dad pulled out the axe and we gave him the chop. He was certainly a tough old bird...it took Mother over four hours to cook him!!

So we were back to just having old Big Hen around and she got used to being quite spoilt.
And then she did something totally unforgivable. She became so tame that she took to roosting on the kitchen windowsill. You might think that there is nothing wrong with that but you didn't have to clean the wall and veranda every two or three days, nor did you you have to live with the smell of fresh chicken manure. I took to quoting Gerald Durrel's brother Larry every time I had to clean up the mess.
"Look at this! Now we're expected to wade knee deep in guano!!"
I am convinced that, had that been the only unforgivable act she committed, we would have forgiven her soon enough. Instead, she had to take it one step further and every morning after my dad left for work, she would wander into the kitchen and potter around looking for spiders and moths.
It took a while for us to realize what was going on but one morning the truth was knocked into my sister. I don't think she had much luck in those days and I used to feel quite sorry for her.

One morning she dashed into the kitchen to grab a cup of coffee before she had to milk (she was running late) and the next thing she was sliding across the tiled floor waving her arms and wobbling all over trying to keep her balance. I'm afraid it didn't help much and two seconds later she landed with a big thud on the floor...and into some more evidence.

From that moment on, Big Hen was banished to the chicken run. The whole family was warned that if they felt sorry for her and let her out, they would have to clean up the mess by themselves!
We had no more trouble from her after that. And she must have felt really bad about the episode because she gave us one egg every day, sometimes we even got two, till the day she died.