chicken shit and fly paper
and pointless interventions
Let me begin by stating the obvious:
Any media representation of any experience fails to capture the full complexity and nuance of what’s being represented.
Take owning chickens for example.
If you only experienced chickens on Instagrasim, you might think that owning them would turn you into an earthy, naturally pretty young woman with flaxen hair and some irascible children covered in mud with suspicions of the government, vaccines and some anarchistic political perspectives highly doubtful of globalism.
They don’t show you the rats.
And another thing they don’t show?
The horseflies.
Sorry,
The uncontrollably large swarms of horseflies that grow more baby flies in the ever present piles of chicken shit within your chicken enclosure.
Sure, you may get eggs.
But you will pay.
You’ll pay with flies.
When we first realized the extent of the flies, we reacted urgently. We were experiencing maggotageddon and something had to be done.
This year?
Laura had some time to reflect on our summer fly conundrum and implemented a few plans in order to mitigate the flyzaster.
At the feed store, she found rolls of incredibly sticky fly paper.
Think of 8.5 x 11 fax machine paper only sticky and covered with the twitching legs of dying flies.
Now?
Imagine this in a chicken coop attracting many flies.
It never took very long before a sheet of fly paper went from fresh and green to black and covered with mature flying maggots.
We, as a family that does not like flies celebrated our wisdom.
The chickens?
Well, as lay-dees who love flies they celebrated as well.
How could they not?
They were presented with a captive, slowly dying protein source.
And our little dinosaurs just love slowly dying bugs.
They loved to peck the little bastards off the fly paper.
I figured fair is fair. The flies grew up in the chickens shit, now they get to become part of it again. An odder take on ashes to ashes I’ve not seen in some time.
But dear reader, I digress.
There was however an issue with this buggy buffet.
The lay-dees are not so smart, nor physically aware.
Today one of the girls forgot that the fly paper was there. She stretched her wings and flapped a little too close to the fly paper.
In a weird version of Icarus, she didn’t fly too close to the sun. Instead? She became a bigger version of the mature maggots that she was feeding on.
What do you think a chicken caught in fly paper would do?
Dear reader, how do you imagine she reacted?
Badly.
She reacted badly, very badly. She squanked and she flailed. She flapped and she struggled until finally she was well wrapped in three sheets of fly paper. I’ve been ‘three sheets’ in my youth, but never like this.
When this happened?
Her sisters bolted.
They ran into the coop and hid crooning on their roost.
And this poor scared chicken?
They left her to die quivering in a corner of the enclosure.
Luckily Laura heard the noise and quickly identifying the issue, called me to help.
Laura cuddled the chicken who lay still in her arms.
It had a look on its face that seemed to say Oh shit. I really fucked this one up. Grateful for the help, but what the fuck was up with that sticky paper?
(authors note to self - rewrite this story from the perspective of the chickens - perhaps include the voices of not only the stuck chicken but also her sisters)
It wasn’t long before I had cut away the sticky paper and peeled what was stuck to the hen.
I’m proud to say that I managed all of this without her losing too many feathers.
Now?
The fly paper has been moved. It’s no longer inside the enclosure. It’s not as effective as it once was.
It’s also less problematic. It’s more of a bit of a show for the neighbours. We’re pretending to make things better but really?
We just care about our chickens.
The same can be said for a lot of things we do to mitigate the unwanted consequences in our world.
Whether it’s our own shitty life choices or some historical injustices, we feel urgent to rid the world of the maggoty bits.
Our flypaper like interventions frequently cause more harm than the problems we initially meant to solve.
And then?
Invariably we hang up the fly paper outside of the coop so we can pretend that we tried.
But in the end?
If you’re going to have chickens, the flies are inevitable.
And if you can’t stand the flies?
Maybe don’t get the chickens in the first place.
And most of all?
Don’t think that getting chickens is going to turn you into a flaxen haired waif in overalls with a big, round straw hat.
Stay stinky you cluckers.
