DAYS 115-119: Chicken Farming is not all its cracked up to be....

Week two at the chicken farm really started to wear us down, and Lizzy and I got into our first fight.

That's right. Our first legitimate fight since we left home in August. Can you take a gander as to what it was about?

We fought about the most efficient method in which to reallocate chicken feces as fertilizer among the green house gardens we had weeded. Yup. We fought over how to spread chicken $hit. We had lost our minds.

The days sort of blended together at that point. It was pretty disgusting as we were shoveling chicken poop every day but we were only allowed to shower every other day and do laundry once a week. Not exactly ideal cleanliness if you ask me.

One day, Hans took us with him and the dogs up to his cow and donkey pasture about a mile up the road. He would bring his big giant tractor with a large hay bale on the back. Lizzy and I hopped on with him and enjoyed the ride up to meet the cows.

Now, Lizzy was bitten by a horse once when she was at summer camp as a kid. And I don't mean like she put her hand too close to its mouth or anything. Her instructor tightened the saddle belt too tight and the horse whipped its head around and bit Lizzy in the stomach. So Liz now has a healthy fear of large animals.

I, however, do not.

So I had a grand old time petting the donkeys and leading them around the pasture and admiring the cute little calfs and big momma cows. Lizzy stood a nice 10 yards away from them

just to be sure.

The week was rather unexciting as we continued to work with the chickens. That is, until one of the last days we were there.

WARNING: The next bit is a bit gross.

The week before, Lizzy and I had notice a chicken with blood coming out of its butt. I mentioned it to Ute and she immediately got up from the lunch table to go get the chicken. She brought it back to the main barn and put it in a small cage to deal with later. When I asked her about it, she explained what had happened.

FUN FACT #73: Apparently sometimes chicken's eggs do not fully develop and can crack on their way out of the chicken. This can cause the chicken to receive a cut and therefore start to bleed. But this isn't the nasty part. What is truly disgusting is that when chickens smell blood, they peck at it. So this chicken who is bleeding from it's a$$ is now being attacked by other chickens because it is bleeding. That's right- chickens are cannibals. If you do not remove the hurt chicken, the other chickens will peck it to death. YUCK!

As I said, this incident had happened the week before. On our last Thursday, Lizzy and I were refilling the chicken feeders and water jugs when we noticed a bloody chicken. Ute was out running errands and we had no idea where Hans was. This meant that we needed to remove the chicken ourselves. I looked at Lizzy and could see in her eyes that she would rather cut off her own hand than touch this bird. So I chased it around the yard and carried the disgusting pecking bloody chicken over the fence, through the gate and into the bard where Lizzy got out a cage and I put her inside.

But wait! It gets better. When we returned to our task, we noticed another chicken. So I chased it around the yard, caught it, and carried it over the fence, through the gate to the barn into a cage.

THIS HAPPENED 4 MORE TIMES. I carried around bloody chickens all afternoon while Lizzy laughed at me holding the gate open and continuously getting cages. I was not pleased.

When Friday came, we thanked Hans and Ute for having us and caught a bus to Galway, happy to never hear the obnoxious clucking of chickens ever again.