Category: Dogs

Requiescat in Pace, Pulli*

*Latin for “Rest in Peace, Chickens.” Yep, I took a little Latin in college.

I’m gonna keep this brief, because if you know me well or keep up with me on Facebook, it’s old news. But I figure it’s a narrative thread that I need to tie up, so here goes:

We no longer have any chickens.

You may recall that, a couple of weeks ago, Brinkley killed one of our chickens, bringing the total down to three. Earlier this week, two neighborhood dogs finished the job.

It was a grey Monday morning, and it’d been raining for three days. As usual, I’d fed the chickens and let them out of their coop at around 6:30 AM, but what with the rain and the recent Brinkley attack, they were inclined to stay up in their roosting area.

At around 9 AM, as I came downstairs from wrestling the girls into a relative state of cleanliness and dressed-ness, I looked out the kitchen window and froze: there were two chocolate labs, dogs that I’d seen running through our yard from time to time, INSIDE the chicken fence with mouths full of feathers. Chicken corpses littered the ground at their feet. I knew right then that they were all dead.

I pulled on my boots and raced out the door to yell at the dogs and get them out of the coop. The girls followed me outside. “HEY! Get outta there!” I shouted. The dogs looked at me calmly and ambled away. I suggested that the girls stay inside, because the scene looked pretty gory, but they insisted on coming with me.

It was a mess. The dogs had bashed their way through the wire fence, and then ripped a wall out of the chicken coop in order to pull the chickens down from their roost. Body parts and pieces of wood were everywhere. I checked around to see if there were any survivors, because it was hard to count the total kill based on the partial bodies strewn around. No survivors.

“Gross,” Fiona said. “That’s even grosser than the dead chipmunk.” (A small specimen of roadkill that represented her grossest dead animal — until now).

I don’t know what made me think it, but I decided to call our next-door neighbor, Brinkley’s owner. I figured she’d know who owned the dogs, and she might also appreciate knowing that she wouldn’t have to worry about Brinkley killing our chickens anymore. This was one of the best calls I’ve ever made. Not only did she know the dogs’ owner (turns out these dogs have a reputation for breaking out of their electric fence and roaming the neighborhood, and were even on the Forest Service’s “warning” list for chasing deer), but she offered to call the owner for me.

Then she asked, “Have you cleaned it up yet?” I told her I hadn’t.

“I’m coming over right now to take care of it for you. You shouldn’t have to clean that up with little ones in the house,” she said. And no matter how much I protested, she insisted.

A few hours later, the dogs’ owner called and was as sweet and apologetic as could be. But, what can you do?

Aside from the four dead chickens, the worst thing about this is the sense of waste. It took a LOT of time, effort, and expense to raise these chickens over the past five months. They would’ve started laying eggs next month, and we never even saw that pay-off.

But the way I see it, the good things outweigh the bad. Here they are:

1. I learned that I have the absolute best neighbor in the world. I would give our next-door neighbors my kidney, my right arm, even one of our girls (hmmm….) for the asking. At the very least, I hope I have a chance to clean up some dead animals for them in the future.

2. I got to have some good conversations with our girls about death and nature throughout the day — about dogs being dogs, chickens being chickens, and death being part of life.

3. I have one less thing to take care of. It’s funny that I’d just written about adding things to my life, and my mom’s concern that I was taking on too much. Apparently the universe agreed with my mom. (Don’t you hate it when that happens?) The way I see it, these chickens were taken out of our lives at the perfect time, making way for the new puppy that’s set to arrive later next week. And I can’t say that I’m sorry not to have to feed the chickens on those cold, dark winter mornings when I’ll already be taking the dog out to relieve herself.

We learned a lot. We had fun with those chickens. We’re not the only people we know who’ve lost an entire flock to predators. And if we get more chickens next spring, we’re also getting an electric chicken fence.

Adding It Up

And then there were three: two smart ones and a lucky one. (The doughnuts were a little post-trauma treat, not a regular occurrence!)

Brinkley killed one of our chickens last week.

Here’s how it happened: For those of you who don’t know, Brinkley is our neighbor’s Golden Retriever, but we’ve “adopted” him to the point that our neighbors looped their electric dog fence around our yard. So Brinkley has the run of our yard, and we love him. Since July, when we first put the chickens outside, Brinkley has shown admirable restraint — he’s been interested in them, but until lately he never made any aggressive moves.

We keep the chicken coop inside a fenced yard. Here’s the weakness: because our yard is so rocky, we can’t sink the fence deeply into the earth to keep predators from digging under it. The fence is chicken wire strung between metal posts, but the chicken wire sits level with the ground. So last week, when Brinkley started digging under the fence and pushing up the wire with his 80 pounds of doggy energy, he won. I’d caught him inside the chicken yard several times, but luckily no harm was done.

Then, last Friday, as I pulled into the driveway with Georgia (the other two girls were in preschool), expecting a quiet, uneventful afternoon, our neighbor from across the street came up the driveway. She was watching Brinkley while his owners were away, and had caught him with one of our white Leghorns in his mouth. She saved the chicken — who was a little slobbery and wobbly and traumatized, but otherwise unhurt — and returned her to the chicken coop. I went to check on the chickens — and found only the lucky Leghorn and one of our Rhode Island Reds inside. That left TWO chickens unaccounted for.

My quiet afternoon turned into a frantic chicken hunt. It’s unclear exactly what happened, but it appears that three of the chickens may have escaped their yard by squeezing under part of the fence that Brinkley had warped with his digging. Once they became totally free-range chickens, they were also fair game for Brinkley. Amazingly, the OTHER Rhode Island Red eventually fluttered down from a tree branch above the chicken yard, where she’d taken shelter during the chicken massacre. As for the other Leghorn, all I found of her was a pile of feathers and a dismembered leg.

I wasn’t totally devastated; it’s pretty rare for a chicken to die of old age. Although I’d have liked to have gotten a few eggs out of this hen before she became Brinkley’s chew toy, chickens don’t usually inspire deep affection. They’re not cuddly creatures; even as chicks, our chickens hated to be held, and now it’s almost impossible to catch them. They’re nervous, flighty creatures whose main interest is food.

But I felt worse than I expected. Those chickens were my responsibility. I was prepared for them to die at some point, but it was still my job to keep them alive as long as possible. If you were looking for someone to pin the blame on in this situation, all evidence pointed straight to: ME. It was hard to be mad at Brinkley; he was just a dog being a dog. And the chickens were just being chickens. But I was the one who’d wanted the chickens to begin with, and I was the one who’d invited our neighbors to include our yard in Brinkley’s fenced run. I’d brought a hunting dog and chickens together, and when the inevitable happened, I had only myself to blame.

“You just keep adding and adding and adding,” my mother said to me during her latest visit. She was concerned after we told her that we were thinking of getting a dog of our own. And she’s right: three children in four years, four chickens, our neighbor’s dog, and now possibly our own dog. I DO have a little problem with adding things to my life. But here’s why: I think it’s almost never bad to add something else to love. Don’t most of us add and add? We form new relationships, get married, have children, acquire pets. Isn’t love the motivation behind all of those things?

I have a hard time saying that I love our chickens. I got them because we go through at least a dozen eggs a week, and because I thought it would be nice for the girls to have some animals around to watch and care for. But I raised them from chicks, I feed them and clean their coop, and I guess that’s a form of love.

Here’s the scaly underbelly of love, though, the thing we try to fool ourselves into forgetting: nothing lives forever. My husband, my children, my chickens, Brinkley, myself — we’re all going to die. When we add things to our lives, we’re adding present-tense love, with the promise of future-tense pain and loss.

So why keep adding at all?

I thought about that while I checked on my lonely Leghorn all that afternoon — a chicken who’d just suffered shock and loss herself, and appeared about as depressed as it’s possible for a chicken to be. I thought about that when Brinkley came running up to me proudly, carrying a mouthful of white feathers. I thought about that when I told my two oldest girls that Brinkley had killed one of their chickens.

Guess what the girls wanted to do after I picked them up from preschool? I am absolutely not making this up: they wanted to go play hide & seek in the cemetery. So we did.

And then I thought: we can live with loss. We can feel the pain and learn from it and work through it and heal. But I cannot, I cannot, live without love. So I will keep adding.

Also, I will reinforce that chicken fence.

Backyard-igans

We have a pretty magical backyard. But “magical” can always be made “magical-er,” right? So, when Nana and Boom came up for a recent visit, we started in on some backyard improvement projects.

I can’t believe I just typed the phrase “backyard improvement projects.”

BUT, making our backyard a little more magical made sense, for a couple of reasons. Both of those reasons, of course, center around our kids.

REASON #1: Now that it’s summer again, much of my time is spent outside trying to keep the woods a respectful distance from our house. Note that I didn’t say “spare time,” or “free time,” because that kind of time doesn’t exist for me right now. Having a few added entertainment options in the yard to amuse our girls buys me some time. Two minutes of additional distraction for them = two minutes of additional productivity for me.

REASON #2: I could care less about keeping up with the Joneses, but the truth is that our yard is fairly boring as yards go around here. The other night, we went to dinner at a house that featured — just in the yard itself — chickens, baby goats, a tire swing, a trampoline, and a canoe rigged up as a pirate ship. I’d say that’s about typical in these parts. Our yard, as of springtime, had rocks and a little empty shed as its only attractions. Clearly, if I wanted my children to stay at home, I needed to up the ante just a little.

And it didn’t take much.

BACKYARD IMPROVEMENT, PHASE 1: The Quarry

Our girls call it “The Quarry,” which I take as a sign that they’re becoming true New Englanders. (Central Vermont, like much of northern New England, is dotted with quarries both active and defunct). But really, it’s a gravel pit. Thanks to Boom, we have a more upscale version: a gravel BOX. These are pretty popular around here; gravel is more durable than sand when it comes to withstanding the rain and snow that we get in large amounts, it’s cheaper, and it also doesn’t so easily get lodged in the kids’ clothes and tracked all over the house. Here’s what it took to create our gravel box:

4 – 2″ x 8″ x 6′ spruce boards (for the sides)

1 – 2″x 6″x 8′ spruce board (for the bench/seats — this is just if you’re being fancy)

9 – 60 lb. bags of small marble chips

Assorted shovels, rakes, buckets, and dump trucks

Nana and Boom clearing and leveling the ground for the gravel box.
Fiona and Georgia helped out.

That’s it! Years’ worth of entertainment for under $100.

Georgia enjoys the finished product.

BACKYARD IMPROVEMENT, PHASE 2: The Hammock

My parents gave me a hammock for Mother’s Day, and it’s a HUGE hit with all three Gong girls. My dad strung it up between two trees in the same corner of the yard as the shed and The Quarry, so when the girls need a break from frenzied digging or games of fairy princess, they lounge in the hammock. They have snacks in the hammock, read in the hammock, snuggle in the hammock. It’s been a great addition. (The hardest part of the installation was digging out the rocks from the ground underneath the hammock, so that a tumble doesn’t immediately result in paralysis).

BACKYARD IMPROVEMENT, PHASE 3: Aesthetics for Adults

A couple of new things in our yard have nothing to do with the girls. The first is a beautiful birdhouse that my dad built and hung on a tree facing our sunroom windows.

The second is a new flowerbed along the side of the house. When we moved here a year ago, the previous owners left us a decaying woodpile that stretched half the length of the side yard, and a major project last summer was moving any use-able wood to a better spot. This left a big, bare spot. And, while I tend to have more of a “let it go native” and “who gets to decide what’s a weed, anyway?” approach to gardening, this seemed like a spot that was just crying out for beautification.

Enter our friends Matt and Nicolle, whose son goes to preschool with Fiona. When Nicolle put out a notice on Facebook that she was looking to give away some extra plants from her garden, I jumped. And thankfully, it worked out so that Nicolle and Matt could drop off the plants while my parents were visiting, since my parents know waaaaay more about gardening than I ever will. Here’s the scene when Matt and Nicolle arrived with the plants:

-me, in dirty gardening clothes

-my parents, also in dirty gardening clothes

-6 kids running around like maniacs (our 3 girls, their two friends, and Matt and Nicolle’s son)

-1 dog (Brinkley)

-and, at one point, 2 neighbors (Brinkley’s owners)

Here’s who was NOT there: Erick, who was out in San Francisco for a wedding, sleeping in and grabbing brunch with high school friends. (Did I mention this was Mother’s Day weekend? I should get some mileage out of that for a while….)

ANYWAY, given that scenario, you’ll understand why I was not 100% fully in the moment when Matt and Nicolle arrived (I was more like 300% in the moment), which is why it was surprising and incredibly helpful and just all around amazing when they not only dropped off the plants, but started putting the plants in the ground for us! Over the course of about two hours, Matt, Nicolle, and my parents created this lovely little garden. I think I contributed about half a hole to the project.

The new garden (picture by Fiona).

People are really lovely, especially Matt and Nicolle. THANK YOU, MATT AND NICOLLE!

And THANK YOU, NANA AND BOOM!

AND, THANK YOU, GRANDMOMMY AND GRANDDADDY, who just wrapped up a two-week visit during which they helped us with our most recent backyard improvement projects: stacking 4 cords of wood in our new woodshed and getting our backyard chicken coop into place. (Uncle Wesley helped stack wood, too, during the week he was here: THANK YOU, UNCLE WESLEY!)

Four cords of neatly stacked wood in our new woodshed (beautifully constructed by our friend Cris).
Erick securing the fence around our chicken coop.

We’re enjoying our beautiful and FUN backyard. And it’s even more beautiful because, when we look at it, we are really seeing the beautiful people who helped create it.

Picture by Fiona.

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there, but especially to my Dad (Boom), my Father-in-Law (Granddaddy), and my husband (Erick): Three men who have the difficult lot of often being surrounded by talkative, emotional females, and handle it with aplomb. We love you! 

Brinkley and Us

Brinkley (and my rain boot — oops!).

I’m amazed that it took this long, but our two oldest girls have finally made the connection between parents and stuff. Expressed as an equation, it would look a little something like this:

Erick + me = can buy them stuff

Thankfully, we don’t go shopping with the girls very often. That’s not because we’re virtuous anti-materialists, it’s because we live in small town Vermont: there just aren’t that many stores to shop in. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you already know that we have to drive at least an hour to reach the nearest big box stores. (And even dollar stores are causing a brouhaha lately; check out this article, flagged by astute reader Melissa, which includes excellent use of the word “Vermontiness.”) From a kid’s perspective, the offerings in our town are pretty sparse: there’s a great local bookstore, and a fantastic children’s resale clothing store, but that’s about it. The remaining stores are geared more towards the visiting parents of the college students: lots of women’s clothes and charming home furnishings. There isn’t even a toy store; a few stores sell children’s toys along with their other offerings, but diffusing the wares also diffuses our girls’ interest.

Nevertheless, we are being lobbied heavily for stuff. And perhaps because our girls’ imaginations aren’t limited by what they see in the stores, we’re mostly being lobbied for Big Ticket Stuff. Like a hot tub. A trampoline. Bunk beds. An aquarium of fish. A cat. Chickens. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until horses enter the conversation.

For a while, there were repeated requests for a dog, but that’s stopped almost completely. And for that, we can thank Brinkley.

We have wonderful neighbors, and among the best are our next-door neighbors. (He’s the doctor who walked through the woods to our house after dark when my dad fell in our yard and broke multiple bones, and who correctly diagnosed my dad’s condition without the aid of any medical technology). This past December, they got a golden retriever puppy named Brinkley. Mrs. Doctor brought Brinkley over when he was a few weeks old to introduce him to the girls. He was absolutely adorable, still tiny enough to be carried like a baby. The girls cooed and petted him, and that was that. It was winter; everyone takes to their homes. We didn’t see our neighbors, or Brinkley, for several months after that.

Flash forward to April. One sunny spring Saturday, we were all out in the yard when suddenly an enormous golden dog came tearing through the woods into our yard. He bounded right up to the girls, ready to play. They got it right away; Fiona picked up a stick and threw it, and because he’s a retriever, he retrieved. “Is that Brinkley?” I asked. I’d almost completely forgotten about the tiny puppy next door. This 100-pound bundle of energy bore little resemblance to the Brinkley we’d first met, but it was him all right. And, for our girls, it was love at second sight.

All afternoon, Fiona and Campbell romped around the yard with Brinkley. They kept each other completely amused playing chase, catch, and boss-the-dog-around. Even Georgia, who is about five times smaller than Brinkley, was charmed. Brinkley would run up to her and lick her all over, and she’d scream with delight and wobble after him.

And so it came to pass that we adopted our neighbor’s dog. Mrs. Doctor even brought us over our own Mason jar full of dog treats, so that the girls can reward Brinkley for following commands. This week, they’re installing an electric fence to keep Brinkley contained, but they’re extending it to include our yard. (This is partly just nice, and partly practical, since Mrs. Doctor has told me that whenever Brinkley hears our girls shrieking in the yard, he barks his “protective bark” and rushes over).

It’s an ideal situation, really. An early taste of grandparent-hood: all of the fun, none of the responsibility. These days, whenever we go outside to play, the first thing the girls do is to climb up the rocks that border our neighbor’s yard and holler, “BRINKLEY! BRIIIIIINKLEEEEEY!” Chances are that Brinkley will come bounding over, and everyone will have a good frolic. In fact, the only problems occur when playing isn’t possible: sometimes Brinkley will come up to the screen door in our kitchen during meals, and sit there staring forlornly at the girls, wanting only to play. And the biggest temper-tantrum Georgia’s ever had happened because Brinkley was running around our yard looking for a playmate, and I wouldn’t let her run outside alone to join him. “BINK-EEEE!” she screamed, pounding the window, “BINK-EEEEE!!!!!” (This child still doesn’t say “Mama” or “Daddy,” but she says “Brinkley”).

So, just a suggestion to anyone else whose children are petitioning for a canine companion: try convincing your neighbor to get a dog. It’s working for us; whenever the girls start mentioning pets, I just say, “But what about Brinkley?” and the whining ceases. So far.