Let the Punishment Fit the Crime?

Left with the chicken she killed tied around her neck, Kathleen licks her chops.

Recently our younger dogs have acquired a taste for chicken--fresh chicken. Although many of the hens are now safely enclosed with the coop, several still choose to wander about freely. (I prefer to encounter them around the yard, and would allow them to free range indefinitely if I could count on them to dodge the dogs and to lay their eggs safely out of canine reach.)

The Buff Orpington hen, Kimberly, the farm's most dedicated chick-raiser continues to wander about freely. She is fine, of course--I've seen her reprimanding a dog who got too interested in her new chicks; nobody will mess with Kimberly. Of course, now that her most recent brood is older, their range is tangential to Kimberly's; they no longer orbit her as planets might orbit their sun. The drawback to their continued independence is their increased vulnerability without mama hen watching their every step.

Indeed, Kimberly's brood of seven--was it seven?--is down to three. The three adolescent chickens travel together, loosely, and put themselves in peril every time a young dog is in search of entertainment. The day after Midnight Hank arrived, Kathleen was sprung from doggie jail having done the time for her last poultry crimes. Soon after her release, Jeff and his mother-in-law brought a fresh load of hay. While we were moving bales, I tried to point out Midnight Hank to Jeff--only to see Kathleen with a fresh chicken carcass in her mouth.

Doggie jail is located in the very kennel where the roosters are being fattened for the freezer, in the adjoining run.

Back she went to doggie jail. Let her stew beside the nicely-fattening roosters, said I. Jeff (who has a story for every occasion) related the story of an acquaintance who tied the dead bird to the offender's neck and allowed the dog to tote that burden for some days. I figured it was worth a try. The next evening, the dead chicken, one of Kimberly's adolescents, was slipped into a mesh onion bag and trussed tightly to Kathleen's collar. The lower photograph shows the canine prisoner in her personal poultry hell: housed beside unreachable roosters and with a dead chicken trussed about her neck. Without any real confidence that the plan would work, I left her in for the night.

Unfortunately, the following morning's result did not surprise me, although I was a tad disappointed. Kathleen still had the onion bag still tied tightly to her nylon collar; however, all that remained of the chicken were its tightly-trussed orange feet.