“Mommy!” My daughter cried out as she hobbled towards me. Tears slipped down her cheeks, and she bent down with one hand on her calf. “Mack got my leg.”
I watched our youngest child approach. It was early April in our first spring on our hobby farm, and it had finally happened—our rooster attacked one of our kids.
Being attacked by the rooster is a right of passage on a farm. My job when I was four or five years old was to collect the eggs. My parents say I wielded the egg basket as my shield when I ventured into the chicken run. One day the rooster got me when I wasn’t looking. I probably beelined to my parents, crying woefully much like my seven-year-old. As the story goes, we ate roast rooster the following evening. I knew this day would come for my own children, and here it was.
“It hurts,” she whined. She rolled up her tights to look at the wound.
There was a small puncture hole with a faint patchy bruise, but roast rooster wasn’t an option. In a few months, I would process many of our flock of aging second-hand hens to fill our deep freeze, but I’d chosen him specifically for his size, breed and colouration. I was going to incubate eggs to sell chicks, and we needed him around for fertilization.
“Yeah, I can see he got you,” I started. “It doesn’t look that bad. I bet it was surprising though.”
My daughter knew the rooster story. She knew I’d been attacked, and she knew Watermelon Grandpa had avenged me with his axe.
“Mack doesn’t like me. He hates me.”
Her eyes filled with fresh tears and her face pinched in that way it does when I can see she feels crushed inside.
“Sweetheart, Mack has the brain the size of a pea,” I said.
The brain of a chicken is actually about the size of a peanut, but pea-brain had a better jingle.
“He doesn’t hate you. Chickens don’t hate, they only think about eating, breeding and being with the flock. He didn’t get you because he doesn’t like you. His brain made a split-second decision, fight or flight, and he chose to fight.”
She sniffled and kept my gaze, wanting to believe me.
“All he cares about is protecting his ladies and he made a pea-brained decision to attack you because he decided you were a threat to his ladies, that’s all.”
My sweet daughter the empath, trying to make sense of why this bird she had been nothing but friendly to had drawn her blood. One of the main things raising our kids on a farm has taught them is you can’t anthropomorphise animals. Sharing space with animals, which behave based on instinct, has proven a bottomless well of educational experience.
I coached the kids on how to “be the boss” with their body language, but after that attack, the kids chose various farm tools to bring with them to the barnyard. They’d march out to collect the eggs with the hoe, broom or rake held stiffly before them. Friends would come by for play dates and recoil in fear. I brimmed with pride to watch our kids grab the rake and lead their peers through the barnyard.
A prized parenting moment for me was being there when it happened again. Nearly a year passed since Mack’s attack, and instead of chickens, we were the proud keepers of 10 ducks and two Pilgrim geese. It was February, and Poppa Goose was getting hormonal, so the geese needed their own temporary breeding enclosure. He would ruffle his feathers and cast his head high in the sky, his long white neck stretched up like a flagpole, then turn his head and stare through your soul with one pale unblinking blue eye.
We picked dandelion greens and squatted down with our treats to poke through the fence. Both geese tore gently at the greens, but Poppa squeezed his head through in an instant and nipped her inner thigh. I was just as shocked as she was. She rolled up her tights. A welt rose on her skin and a patchy bruise was taking shape.
“I’m sorry that happened. I wasn’t expecting that,” I said, feeling terrible.
She bent to roll down the leg of her tights and as she did, she said, “It’s okay, he was only protecting Momma.”
