Chicken-Raising With Toddlers

Guest contributor Joshua last checked in with a review of the Boon Potty Bench. He has been raising chickens in his home city of Seattle, and has found it to be a great experience for his young son, G, so we asked him to write about it for ZRecs. Today, his impressions of the experience; tomorrow, how to do it yourself. [Update: Read it here.]

Our family lives in the city. It's a great place to raise a child. My wife Emily can't wait to see our toddler G grow up into a teenager who hops on the metro bus to catch a fringe play in the theater district.

I dig that too. But there's a chicken-shaped hole in my heart. And last April I got it plugged.

I'd been counting down the days until the chicks were to arrive at the feed store. My eyes were on a sort of permanent chicken radar when G was around. "Hey G, look, IS THIS BOOK ABOUT A CHICKEN?" He'd crawl up in my lap as I browsed the heirloom chickens on the Murray McMurray website. We talked about the chicken and egg cycle.

So I spent many a rainy evening last winter building a chicken coop. I realized how long it had taken me to get the foundations built when G. revealed that he thought a chicken coop was a big muddy hole in the ground. When we finally got to the framing, we christened a big rubber mallet as "G's hammer." I'd set a nail and let him whack on it for about 20 seconds before "helping" him drive it in the rest of the way.

The day we finally got the chicks was one of those days where I go into a sort of parenting haze. Like I couldn't imagine being anywhere else on earth doing anything else, but sitting in the cab of my pickup truck with G and a box of peeping chicks. He poked his finger in the little holes and grinned.

G was scared to hold them at first. But over time he asked more and more to hold them, and would hold his arms out stiffly as I set them in his arms until their claws made him nervous. He'd ask to go "feed the chickens," which meant throwing a handful of scratch at them, sending them off peeping to hide in the corners of their cardboard box. You know how toddlers throw? Even if it's lightweight, they act like it's a twenty-pound shot put. Inevitably I'd have some cleanup to do after G's feeding routine.

As the chicks grew into hens we developed rituals of hunting and gathering, spending minutes that turned into hours seeking out things for them to eat. We began by digging in the garden for worms and slugs. We started to go on long hikes, returning with bags of wild black currants, rose hips, and Oregon grape. From the garden, G now collects and brings them nasturtiums, fava beans, and culled tomatoes. We stand around leaning on our matching brooms like lazy janitors as the hens scrape mulch into the driveway. Lately he's been comfortable "herding" them, holding his arms out and waving them back towards the coop. This is waaay better than a Wii!

G has collected eggs maybe 30 times and he still expresses delight and surprise each time he discovers the eggs in the nest. When I've let the eggs pile up for a couple days, we bring along an "Easter basket" so he won't drop any.

I'm constantly surprised by the opportunities that arise to talk about complex things when you keep animals. And in this, we're equals, G and me. I'm still figuring out some of this stuff out, and his fresh perspective and lack of assumptions really make me think things through. For example, it's taken us several conversations for us to figure out that it's okay to feed a slug to a chicken but not okay to squish a slug if you don't have a good reason.

As dedicated gardener, I've always been a slug squisher. I've been known to spend hours at night hunting slugs and cutworms with a flashlight, shedding any "tools" along the way that were supposed to do my killing for me and basically going Rambo on them. Yeah, pretty gross. But in trying to develop a way to help G understand that violence in nature is okay but cruelty is not, I'm changing my thinking a little bit. I've been thinking of the Samish Indians up here, and how they used to thank the animal they were about to kill, and to ask its forgiveness. There's something powerful in that image, in that it allows us to be imperfect in this world.

Last month, our Rhode Island Red up and died. Late at night I spotted only two of them on the roost. It took me 20 minutes to find her buried in the litter under the little ramp that goes from their enclosed run into the coop. I think she was egg bound, something that can happen to hens with small frames inclined to lay large eggs. (This is another good reason to get an heirloom chicken.)

I set up my construction lamp and dug a hole under at the base of our seckel pear. I planted some rye and vetch cover crop there because I couldn't bear the thought of G seeing that spot of bare earth there all winter. A couple days later I told G that Henny Penny had died. I thought he'd be ready - we'd just visited Emily's great-grandparents' grave in Toronto. G was excited to point at the ground and talk about how the Teets' bones were right down there, right under us! But when I showed him the spot I'd buried Penny, he cried "that's not very nice, now we'll have to spend all day digging her up again so she can go back in her coop."

"No, no G, I buried her because she died. She didn't die because I buried her..." I'm not certain he ever understood. But these are the kinds of conversations we'll have many times over the years. I don't think I'll ever find the right metaphor for explaining death to G, but I hope that at least he can develop a sort of muscle memory, remembering bodily that joy eventually follows grief.

Tomorrow on ZRecs: Why and how you can keep chickens in most cities, and what it takes to raise and maintain your mini-brood. [Read it!]