talk a lot, pick a little more
Toasties, earlier this week I was very excited to bring home a couple of weeks-old baby chicks for chick-sitting, and today I will be very excited to return them both to my daughter’s school, where the children can care for and enjoy them until such time as their true owner, a local farmer, sees fit to retrieve them. Here is what I have learned after just a few days as a chick caregiver:
1. Pecking order is REAL. Especially the pecking.
2. Baby chicks are kind of assholes.
2(a). Like these ones (Exhibits A and B) actually had to be separated from the younger, newly hatched baby chicks, who they were supposed to nurture and help train up in the way baby chicks should go, because all they did was peck at the littler ones and try to block them from the food tray. Seeing how they behave with each other, frankly, it comes as no surprise to me that these two were terrible mentors.
2(b). I might have decided they are unworthy of the temporary names I had so carefully picked out for them (Galadriel and Celeborn), WHICH they do not answer to anyway.
3. Crema is probably my favorite Insta filter for baby chick photography, with Slumber a close second.
4. No matter how carefully you* clean and refill the food container, baby chicks will just heap wood chips in it 2.7 seconds after you return the water container to them, so why BOTHER, seriously, it is as futile as cooking a fancy dinner for your toddler.
[* your spouse]
5. During the daylight hours, baby chicks never shut up — really, they don’t, even after you remind them they are sharing a house with a cat, and might want to dial back the cheeps a little — but at night they can sleep right through your three-weeks-overdue “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” marathon as well as the subsequent loud [and incredulous] conversation you have with your partner (“oh my GOD what were they THINKING with Dong’s ‘theme music’? And also the name ‘Dong’?”) (I know you all watched/read thinkpieces/worked through your feelings about this show at least two weeks ago but I still need to talk about it with many more people).
6. To recap, baby chicks: sort of jerks, but more than a little adorable. And their visit, while brief, made one’s children happy.
*
So what did I like this week? And what do I want you to read (or reread, as the case may be)?
“You are poor now. So very poor. You have left London and can now only afford a large house in the countryside, a rambling garden, and three (yes, only three) servants. Understandably, the degradation of this crushing poverty is very difficult for your dear Mother, but she bears it nobly.” –How To Tell If You Are In An E. Nesbit Novel
WOULD WATCH: The Revenge-Based Sequel to Cast Away That Tom Hanks So Richly Deserves
If John Cho were your boyfriend. If Hayley Atwell or Michelle Obama were your girlfriends. (We are now flooded with submissions for this series, which is fantastic, but selfishly I am pleased and more than a little relieved that no one scooped me on John Cho. HE IS MINE.)
Every Argument About Buffy on the Internet, from 1998 Until Now: A thing of beauty is a joy forever. One day heaven and earth shall pass away, and somehow people will still be leaving impassioned comments on this post.
Substance abuse in the trans community and the need for more (and better) resources
Gal Science: an archaeologist wrote about bone health for us! I read it and immediately had regrets about how little thought I gave to my bone density during the crucial adolescent years.
I Hope You Sing About Me, a new short story by Vanessa Willoughby
THE TOWN: get out, you orphans
THE BAKER: I’ll sell you to just about anyone
BENNY: this old train is asleep
VIOLET: lets live in it, instead of society
HENRY: we won’t like the grandpa man
BENNY: i found this pink trash to eat off of
On anxiety and messed-up families and sisterhood, and never being alone.
“Wanting to change, to thaw, to pursue is brave and admirable. Pick up your shovel, dear reader, and go carefully in.” How I appreciate some on-point poetic advice.
*
I could go on and on, but I won’t, because I have chicks to return. There was so much great stuff on The Toast this week, your best bet is just to go back and read everything all over again. You won’t be sorry. Hope y’all have a beautiful weekend! See you next week.
Tags: meta, toast points
To be fair, adult chickens are also kind of assholes.
Yes indeed.
😀
Not as bad as goats, though. Goats are essentially the epitome of asshole.
There’s a small orchard/farm just down the road from our house, and we go there every fall to pick apples, buy pumpkins, etc. We eat apples as we pick them and feed the cores to the cows and chickens.
The cows are nice but the chickens peck the crap out of each other most of the time for no reason (they all have bare butts from the pecking). Thus giving them an apple core is kind of terrifying, like an avian version of Thunderdome.
When I was a girl scout were used volunteer at a local farm. Every year we signed up to “help take care of animals!” because every year we forgot that that mostly meant cleaning up poo. We had to clean the chickens “coop” (more a stall, really) WHILE THEY WERE IN THERE and it was THE WORST. Easily the most terrifying experience of my young life.
This is probably in one of those thinkpieces, but…
(Sorry, thinkpieces, actually reading you is a low priority.)
I think his name is Dong because of the throwaway joke that Kimmy means penis in his language and Dong means penis in her language. Haha? Is it worth giving him such a horrible name to make such a lame little joke? Only time will tell!
1. …but…it doesn’t, does it? mean penis in Vietnamese?
2. there is NO EXCUSE for the music and I really cringed every time they played it.
also, I’m catching up on all the thinkpieces now (I tried to avoid them until I’d finished most of the series). I appreciated this one by Kat Chow about Dong’s character.
I was coming here to link that one for you but you’re (as always) way ahead of me.
No matter the initial joke, if they’re not going to be subversive/funny with the character tropes PAST that joke, they need to just…not.
I “won” a chicken that my class incubated. It lived with my rabbit in its hutch and I would let it out so it could follow me to the garage to be fed. Then a hawk ate it when it was a few months old. The end.
I have a similar tale of chicken husbandry:
My neighbor got a baby chick for Easter as a gift from her boyfriend (it was the 80s, it was a weird time) which she regifted to me and three weeks later my neighbor’s dog ate it after it got out of the coop. The end.
These are sad stories, you guys. 🙁
You know who really didn’t care all that much about the baby chicks? Our cat. I thought they would awaken her KILLER INSTICTS, but…eh, not really. I never left her alone with them, though.
Your cat is more thoroughly domesticated than any hawk or my neighbor’s dog! (In my neighbor’s dog’s defense, she was a nursing mother so she probably would have eaten rocks if they had any nutritional value.)
I feel a little guilty tbh. WHAT HAVE WE DONE TO OUR CAT.
She could never survive in the wild, she would miss the adoration of my children and scratching her chin on the corner of my laptop.
You have given your cat warmth, food, shelter, a statistically longer lifespan, and presumably a lot of happiness. I think this is a choice she would make if she were presented it (and also given the magic of rational thought – which cats are not big on – and I speak as a cat-love and cat-haver).
I grew up in the country – nature red in tooth, beak, claw, etc….
It’s also pretty hard to get attached to a chicken, in my opinion. Even one that follows you, flapping like mad, across the back yard to get to the garage (food).
Totally, chickens are jerkfaces. We had a hobby farm growing up and each year we’d have a cow, or three pigs, or a bunch of chickens. I stopped being able to eat pig. Pigs are lovely. Chickens are nasty.
You had defective chickens! When I was a kid, we had a couple of hens as pets and they were a ton of fun. Very affectionate – They’d sit on our shoulder and groom our hair. Now my folks have about a dozen and although these chickens aren’t as friendly as those two hens, they’re still pretty sweet. They follow my mom around in a ridiculous line.
I remember being surprised at how intelligent they are. Birds get a bad rap for being, well, bird-brained.
I think they also get a bad rap for shouting as loud as they can all the time.
Oh, our chickens are well trained – they sit on shoulders, come running when we call, etc. But they are still usually assholes to each other. The only way to sometimes avoid the pecking order is to a)choose calm breeds b) all the same age c) always been with the same peers (no new chickens introducted) d) all have similar appearance.
There are ways to introduce new chickens but you never want to do it just a couple at a time or those new birds could be doomed. Or you end up with Zombie Debbie (a friend’s chicken that got attacked so badly after being introduced that they removed part of her skull and brains were oozing out. She survived and the wound scabbed over but feathers didn’t grow back so you can still sorta see her brain)
oh god we just introduced four new chickens to our three slightly older chickens and they seem to be SLOWLY adjusting to the change? Like, the new ones are getting better at standing up for themselves, rather than the older ones becoming more accommodating.
I love my chickens! They aren’t quite that level of friendly, but they’re cute and clever, like velociraptors.
Clever like raptors, anyway. YMMV on the cuteness of raptors.
Also, baby chicks are fairly hilarious when they first encounter a laser pointer.
Telecommunications? Industry? Bah, the proper use of laser technology is to keep our domestic animals off balance.
What a coincidence! My hypothetical, never-going-to-happen chicken shall to be named Galadriel.
“And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!”
I do a semi weekly work/trade at a local no spray farm. I mostly care for the flock of pasture raised happy chickens, who are the resident egg layers and compost eaters (NOT dinner). There is a pair of fluffy yellow hens who, delightfully, sat on 3 eggs togetber and are now raising the surviving 2 chicks as a pair. It’s as delightful as it sounds.
So let’s talk about Dong. I do enjoy the point the NPR article made about how Fey was in a doomed if you do, doomed if you don’t situation insofar as including mostly racial minorities in a show whose modus operandi is all about making its characters act silly. That said, fuck Dong’s theme music. Do we want to talk about the idea that Unbreakable is getting so much criticism about its treatment of people of color (when normally, two shits aren’t given) as a sort of panicked response to how unabashedly feminist the show is? And…now I can’t find the article. Well, it exists. Really love to read what people think.
When you say “normally, two shits aren’t given,” though, I disagree. I mean, a lot of the criticism is coming from people who think critically about race and the media all the time — this isn’t some new thing they’re doing because they don’t like Tina Fey or feminism.
I do see that, but what I had in mind was more the radio silence about shows like Two and a Half Men or House of Cards or 24 or Breaking Bad. Maybe this has more to do with the fact that intelligent, well spoken people more so write interesting articles about shows that are better produced (and hence, often more diverse, and often more feminist) that the more common denominator popular programs.
Or maybe it’s because, from people who are sophisticated and nuanced enough to write well about gender and feminism, we expect more. Hence, it’s a big gigantic disappointment when you are watching your smart, feminist comedy all soft and not on your guard and then you’re hit in the face by surprise racism.
Like these ones (Exhibits A and B) actually had to be separated from the younger, newly hatched baby chicks, who they were supposed to nurture and help train up in the way baby chicks should go, because all they did was peck at the littler ones and try to block them from the food tray.
Birds can be such arseholes. There is a duckpond opposite my parents’ house, and the mallards are bad enough, especially in spring (the males chase the females and half-drown them while mating); one year someone dumped a few Indian Running Ducks there, and they were awful. When mating season rolled around, they repeatedly chased one of the mallard drakes away from the pond and towards the road to keep him away from the female; he was hit by a car and killed. I was really upset.
There's a small orchard/farm just down the road from our house, and we go there every fall to pick apples, buy pumpkins, etc. We eat apples as we pick them and feed the cores to the cows and chickens.
The cows are nice but the chickens peck the crap out of each other most of the time for no reason (they all have bare butts from the pecking). Thus giving them an apple core is kind of terrifying, like an avian version of Thunderdome.
When our baby chicks were about four inches tall, they sometimes got out the cage in the basement where we were keeping them as they grew (last winter was hella cold for the babies), and our cat would come down in the basement to see what we were doing. He kills mice and goes after rodents, no problem, but those chickens confounded him. He was like wtf mom and dad.
In other news, keeping chicks in your house because it’s hella cold out will gradually cause your house to smell like chicken shit, and I was grateful to force my husband to move them to the garage since the coop wasn’t ready yet.
Also, all the chicks were inadvertently named Pikachu, thanks to my habit of picking them up and saying “Pikachu, I choose you!” Except Stumpy, the smallest, who turned out to be a boy, and Lumpy, who turned out also to be a boy. We ate them. RIP Stumpy and Lumpy. You live on in our muscles.