How I Became a Chicken Tender

I’d wanted chickens for years, basically as soon as I got my own place I daydreamed of a chicken coop with a couple hens wandering around, and farm fresh eggs every morning. Well, last year I moved to a farm with chicken coops already in place. It was destiny! In fact, there was a chicken living there already! Finally, I could have chickens.

I moved in and met Amazon Chicken. Amazon Chicken is as close to immortal as a chicken can be. There was an Amazon Distribution Center nearby, and there were sightings of a chicken wandering around the parking lot. Well, my friend went and caught her and brought her home, and she got dubbed “Amazon Chicken”. A dog came in and massacred all of his chickens and he was sure Amazon Chicken was a goner. A few days later, Amazon Chicken wandered out of the woods, wholly intact, albeit with a “seen some stuff” vibe now.

No, not that kind of Amazon Chicken

I wanted to get her some friends, so I messaged my friend with an egg business to see if I could buy some laying hens. She said “Sure! Come pick some up this weekend!”. Now, I’ve never bought a chicken before. I’ve bought horses before, and they are usually caught, prettied up, and patiently waiting for me to pick them up. I naively went into this transaction envisioning something similar.

I was wrong.

Oh.

So.

Wrong.

You put a horse in a horse trailer, a dog in a dog crate, so you put a chicken in a … chicken coop? That didn’t seem right. I asked my friend and she said to bring file boxes. Okay, that doesn’t seem bad, I’ll just swing by Target and get some on the way to get the chickens.

My wonderful mother was in town visiting for this ordeal, so off to Target we went. A helpful sales associate comes up and asks if he can help us find something. “File boxes, please!” I confidently reply. He leads me to a wall of beautiful file cabinets, and fancy file boxes. This doesn’t seem right. I was only paying $10 for the chicken, putting them in a $30 file box didn’t compute. He noticed my baffled expression and asked what was wrong.

“I need these for…something different. I need holes in them”

“Oh, for file transportation?”

“Sort of. I need air holes”

At this point his helpful demeanor changed to cautious horror as he backed away from me.

“I’m picking up chickens,” I quickly replied. He instantly looked relieved and led me to the cardboard file boxes, and then scooted away as fast as he could.

Alright, I’m armed with chicken boxes, time to fill them up! Off we went to my friends house to get the chickens. I just had a day of shopping with my mom, and I was dressed as such. We show up, ready to load up some chickens. My friend tells me to grab the boxes and off we went to the chicken coop. Keep in mind, the chicken coop is through a cattle pasture.

We get to the chicken coop, a welded steel 20′ x 30′ x 10′ behemoth, FULL of chickens. “Grab what you want,” my friend says. My mom and I exchanged looks. “How?” we replied in unison. “Just go in and grab what you want!”

In we went. “It’s just a chicken, how hard can it be?” I muttered to myself as I set sights on a chicken I like. I walked up to her, in which she promptly took off like a bat out of hell. Okay. Maybe this wasn’t going to be at all what I envisioned. The next 30 minutes were spent with my friend showing us how to chase down and corner a chicken. I quickly learned that I have the reflexes of a sloth on Xanax. In hindsight I wish this ordeal had been filmed. We eventually got two Buff Orpingtons stuffed in one box, and two Rhode Island Reds stuffed in another.

As I carried my box full of chickens back to my car, those buggers pecked my hands and anything they could reach. I quickly named those two, my Rhode Island Reds, Mo and Fo. I’ll let you figure out why.