Mom, why is your b**b chirping?
Little Meep Meep
Because I have a dying chickie in my bra.
File this under conversations I never expected to have. I have a little 3-day-old chick suffering from failure-to-thrive. She is thin and shivering and I have done all the usual chick saving measures. She’s not going to make it. Left alone with her teddy bear and brooder plate, she peeps plaintively. When I hold her, she chirps softly and goes to sleep. I expect she will just pass in her nap, but until then, she is warm and can feel a beating heart and this is the best I can do for her. Sometimes farming breaks my heart.
My casual records indicate that 2% of the chicks we hatch won’t make it to Day 10. This is why a hen lays an egg nearly every day.
A sad story. One of my customers picked up a box of cute fluffy chicks, took them home and set them up in the brooder next to her kitchen. She then started dinner, cooking in a non-stick pan over gas.
We don’t like to talk about it. We don’t like to think about it. And we certainly don’t want to discover it in our brooder in the morning. But chicks die. Some perfectly cute floofy little chicks just don’t make it, which is why hens reproduce themselves almost every day.
Mom, why is your b**b chirping?