This is written for @gallusrostromegalus who is sick and apparently really enjoys chickens, so. Fair warning that you are going to read about my family and chickens. I don’t normally write stories on tumblr, so here’s hoping you enjoy the narrative despite the shoddy storytelling.
To begin, I should start with my mother the Undercover Hippie. I spent a good portion of my childhood thinking my mother was normal because she didn’t dress in tie-dye, but as an adult, I’ve realised there are several things that marked my mother as one of those Boulder Hippies. The types that aren’t really Hippie in the seventies sense, but more in the ‘making questionable health and lifestyle choices because it is the newest Organic Idea going around.’ Notable occasions on this list are the time that she filled the brownies with wheat germ and made them crunchy, the time she brought my east-coast-city-child cousins on a camping trip, and the time she got chickens.
Chickens, in and of themselves, are reasonable things to own. Usually. However, my mother wanted them for eggs and began by taking the childhood fort (which most of us had grown out of) and turning it into a chicken coop. By chicken coop, I mean she stuck some boxes in it and put a fence around it, and patched up the hole in the side from A’s Enthusiastic Ninja Punch, and the hole in the other side from C’s Peephole Experiment, and the last hole from my own childhood Cannonball, and both windows, and then got chickens.
My mother is the sort of learner who just starts a project and then learns as she goes. While she knew they needed food and basic heating, she was otherwise a bit naiive.
For example, it turns out L, my sister, is terrified of chickens. My mother apparently didn’t know this (Mom, I don’t like the idea of chickens) until the chickens (Mom, really, do you think we have to have chickens, because they have beaks, and I got pecked once) actually got to the house (OH MY GOD GET IT AWAY. GET. IT. AWAY. GET IT AWAY GET IT OFF GET IT OFF GET IT OFF!!!!).
Additionally, Mom forgot that chickens can fly short distances and the fort has a loft and thus made the interesting mistake of not wiring off the top areas of the roof. On Day One she had to knock on the neighbour’s door and ask if she could retrieve her chickens from their yard.
Eventually, after many phone calls, Mom got a handle on chicken care – by which I mean she passed the project onto my chicken-enthusiastic younger brother, who adored them. Not only did Mom have chickens, she had Happy Chickens who were more than pleased to make Many Eggs, and the family chowed down happily.
W, my chicken-enthusiastic younger brother, explained chickens to me this way:
Chickens have a hierarchy, so you have to have a rooster. They’ll start pecking each other and it’s a mess, but roosters kinda keep them calm, though roosters can get aggressive if the hierarchy gets disturbed, so you have to keep the roosters calm. This isn’t really hard, except that if you have to have a rooster, you’ve got a chance of eggs getting fertilised, and we want to eat them, so you have to go out and get the eggs every day, unless you want more chickens, and there’s a limit of how many chickens you can have inside city limits.
All of which seems perfectly reasonable, and was perfectly reasonable, until Mom decided to go on a fortnight’s holiday with my younger brothers, including W.
This left L in charge of the chickens.
Now, my mother is not a reasonable person, so if you’re just now wondering why Mom left the chicken-terrified child in charge of the chickens, it’s because mom is either an idiot or an arse. I’ve still not decided to this day which one she is, so we’ll leave it at that. But regardless of Mom’s motivations, my younger sister is now in charge of the chickens. She can’t get within a few yards before wanting to burst into tears, but also has a Big Heart and doesn’t want the chickens to die.
The chickens need to be fed and watered.
According to W, several things had happened when he got home and took charge of ‘his’ chickens again.
On day one, L had attempted to feed the chickens, and upon entering the coop had been met by the Rooster, who, not recognising her, had immediately gone into Protective Mode. L had fled the coop, dropping the food but leaving the door open. This led to L calling the neighbours in a panic asking for a Group Hunt for the Chickens because she was too terrified to round them up out of the yard. A friendly neighbour put the end of the hose into the water trough so L could just turn it on instead of going in.
L had fed the chickens every day by taking a bucket about the right size full of feed and tossing it into the coop. Not just the feed – the whole bucket. W had to pick up 12 different containers because after L ran out of buckets she just started using old yoghurt containers and whatever else she could find. The chickens apparently didn’t mind being bombed with buckets full of food, just ran out of the way and then attacked the containers until they got their due.
L didn’t fetch the eggs, not even once, which meant that now W was a full eight chicks over the city limit, and had to give six more to some friends in the foothills who weren’t in city limits and could have as many chicks as they wanted. He ended up keeping the eight chicks and bargaining with the neighbours that they could have free eggs, provided that if the city Chicken Inspectors came by, the neighbours would tell the Chicken Inspectors that W was just caring for their chickens while they built a new coop or something.
By the time W, L, A, and my mother left to live in Swaziland (another story altogether), my brother had ten chickens over the limit, all extremely pleased and contented with life, until L went Anywhere Near The Coop, at which point they would all start shrieking like the dickens and running out of the way of any impending Food Bombs, except for the Rooster, who would puff up and start attacking the fence in preparation.
Anyway, the point of this story is Don’t Leave L In Charge Of The Chickens, with side morals of Don’t Buy Pets You’re Not Prepared For and Don’t Fuck With Roosters, and also I hope you feel better.
This is DELIGHTFUL and a fairly solid example of why I don’t intend to own my own (Beyond already owning a dog with an impressive prey drive and No Damn Sense). Was you mom ever part of the Fiber Visions Guild, becuase she sounds an awful lot like one of my mother’s friends who moved to somewhere in Africa a few years ago, but I can’t remember right now.
I want you to know that your storytelling is not shoddy at all!
In fact I was glued from beginning to end and I would have gone looking for your equivalent of a Family Lore tag if the premise did not suggest there was none to be found.
its weird to think horses were ever ‘prey animals’ because what fucking predator looks at a 8 foot tall ENORMOUS beast with pitch black devils eyes, terrifying teeth and extremely powerful legs and think ‘yeah lets go attack that one’
well moose are still prey animals so
thats fucked up, a moose is like a horse with extra weapons
one of my favorite things is how badgers and coyotes will hunt cooperatively. as in not just like happening to go after the same thing at the same time but actually combining efforts to bring down prey; coyotes are faster and can chase down prey species, while badgers are adept at digging them out of their burrows
Mother cat with kittens came to meet an old friend.
I can’t believe we’ve already found the best animal video of 2016.
That is too adorable. You can tell the mother cat actually does trust the dog just by her body language. Typically a mother will watch her kittens closely and be very protective of them, here she completely trusts the dog to play gentle with them. This is just too damn cute.
When he bops the kitten and looks up at Mom to make sure he didn’t overstep!
The dog is trying to make himself as non-threatening as possible!!
I love videos like this because they completely refute those assholes who say “Animals are just fancy machines with no emotional or mental depth.”
the ending tho when the adults are together!
My day is complete even though it literally just started hahaha
I can’t stop thinking about crocodiles for some reason so here’s some cool pictures I found of probably the second largest one in captivity, his name is Utan:
isn’t he beautiful
listen to the SOUND when he bites
and that’s not even a real power bite, that’s mostly just heavy bone falling on heavy bone from his jaws and the air rushing out from between them
2000 pounds of Good Boy
you get me
I honestly expected like 5 notes, what HAPPENED here
More tags on this ridiculous post:
Wait, thats the 2nd biggest crocodile? Then what does the biggest one look like?
That would be Cassius, a very old Saltwater crocodile who is estimated to be around 114 years old and lives at Marineland Melanesia in Green Island, Australia. His official measurement is 5.48 meters, which makes him the largest in captivity currently. Because Utan is only slightly smaller and much younger, (only in his 50s), he will likely break Cassius’ record eventually. But for now, Cassius holds the title:
He is NOT, however, either the largest crocodile ever captured in Australia OR the largest ever in captivity.
A slightly larger crocodile has been reported (though not yet comfirmed) to have been captured at 5.58 meters.
And while the famous Brutus of the Adelaide River was estimated to be just slightly larger than Cassius at 5.5m, he was driven out of his territory by a younger and even larger crocodile, who as a result has been given the name, The Dominator. He is estimated to be just over 6m.
This is Brutus, with an appropriate caption:
It is believed that he lost that arm in a fight with a Bull Shark.
The Bull Shark lost.
THIS is the crocodile who kicked him out. The Dominator:
And that’s STILL not the biggest.
The largest living crocodile ever reliably measured was Lolong, who for the 1.5 years between his capture and his death was the largest crocodile ever held in captivity, at a whopping 6.17 meters (20 feet 3 inches) and 1075 kg (2,370 lbs). He had been feeding on both humans and very large livestock in the Bunawan creek in Agusan del Sur in the Philippines. It took 100 people all night to drag him to shore during his capture.
And here’s why:
Also, to prevent credit from getting buried on a separate reblog, I have been informed that the above image of the crocodile with the cartoon eyes and halo was made by @rashkah! (And it is wonderful and I would like to thank him for its existence, because it perfectly captures my feelings about terrifying giant primordial reptiles.)
The answer is it depends. Crocodilians are very hardy animals. Their stomach acid is the strongest of any animal. Their immune systems are INSANE. Literally if you drop crocodile blood onto a petri dish full of MRSA – one of the most aggressive and antibiotic-resistant forms of Staph bacteria – by the time you check on it the next day the crocodile blood will have eaten a hole through the MRSA colony. I’d post a link but I’ve watched … a lot of crocodile documentaries and I don’t know which one it was from off the top of my head and would take a while to find out.
That’s the reason Brutus survived his encounter with a Bull shark, by the way. Crocodiles lose limbs in fights all the time and honestly, they’re fine. It probably hurts, but in the long run it’s not a life threatening problem for them. They have an amazing circulatory system that adapts to trauma and reroutes blood away from an open wound like that until it has time to close, so they can suffer SEVERE injuries that would be life-ruining for most apex predators and live to kill for decades afterward. And their blood is so potently antibiotic that they don’t have to worry about infection.
They also, due to their exothermic nature, are extremely efficient with their energy needs. They can go a YEAR without food if they have one meal that’s big enough, which is a perfect adaptation for an opportunistic ambush predator.
Plus their thick skin is covered in osteoderms (literally bony skin) and hard scutes that act as a natural armor – a couple reblogs have mentioned an internationally famous Nile crocodile named Gustave, who I will NOT spend a lot of time on because I do not need to get started down that rabbit hole again, I’ve posted about him enough before. But long story short Gustave, being a MASSIVE crocodile, was a long standing problem along the Rusizi River in Burundi with a history of killing dozens of humans and plenty of livestock, and over the years there had been many unsuccessful attempts to kill him. His body was marked with many scars, including multiple bullet wounds from some kind of automatic weapon. Which, obviously, did not kill him. Crocodiles are TOUGH.
All of this adds up to an animal with very few weaknesses. Honestly there are only three major things that present any real threat to a large crocodile:
A larger crocodile
Humans, prior to conservation laws that criminalized poaching
STRESS
Stress is the biggest danger for a crocodile. They are very sensitive to environmental stress, which is part of why Steve Irwin, and the golden age of Animal Planet that he brought with him, was so focused on conservation. Stress in the environment can come from things like shifting ecosystems, rising temperatures (which affects the sex of crocodile eggs), and especially ACCESS TO FOOD.
A crocodile does not need to eat often, but they do need food to be AVAILABLE when they need to eat. If their ecosystem is not providing a stable SUPPLY of food, even if the crocodile isn’t necessarily in immediate need of it, they can end up feeling environmental stress, and this alone can be enough to kill them, if it’s severe enough and they don’t know how to get to another food source. This is one danger of practices like the Adelaide River tours – not only do crocodiles associate humans with a food source (not the biggest concern in the Northern Territory where that’s kind of the default with Saltwater Crocodiles anyway), but it could potentially cause them to RELY on humans for food, in which case, if the practice was ever shut down, the change in their environment (no more unlimited free food 9 months of the year) might stress them out and cause them to either find another source of food elsewhere (increasing conflicts and competition with crocodiles in nearby territory), or die.
This is why zoos – good ones – are actually not a terrible thing for large crocodiles. There have been many concerns in the tags about Utan’s enclosure, but most of it is not visible from this post, which mostly shows off the area where they do his feeding shows. He has water to swim in comfortably, and honestly, his enclosure is like twice the size of my house. Utan is living better than me. The fact that they feed him very regularly, as many skinned rabbits as he feels like eating every couple of days is EXTREMELY positive for his overall health, because CROCODILES DO VERY WELL IN PREDICTABLE ENVIRONMENTS. Routine is good for them. That doesn’t mean they don’t like a bit of excitement from time to time, but that excitement should come in the form of stimulating their brains rather than upsetting their environment. Good zoo programs call this “enrichment” (like giving lions and tigers pumpkins full of raw meat to play with on Halloween) and it helps keep the animals happy, which further helps to keep them healthy.
Which is why a crocodile like Cassius can celebrate his 114th birthday.
Crocodiles in the wild can, under the right circumstances, live 60-80 years or so, more if their environment is very favorable, no larger crocodiles challenge their dominance, and no humans can bother them (except as a food source, which includes literally preying on humans, which happens especially with Nile and Saltwater crocodiles). Cassius has been in captivity for decades, getting regular access to food with very little stress. Under such circumstances, honestly who knows how long he might live. Reptiles are crazy. Tortoises can live to 200. Without the risk of starvation, competition, or poaching, crocodiles might well far outlive our expectations. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cassius broke 120. Utan, who has all that AND a better enclosure, maybe longer. I’d be more surprised if Utan didn’t at least get past 80 or 90.
Lolong died quickly in captivity because his time in captivity was stressful. He was the largest captive crocodile in the world – BY TWO FEET – so they liked to drain his pool to show him off for tourists. This was an unpredictable source of environmental stress for him, plus, given how massive he was, it put a lot of strain on his organs, which benefit greatly from the buoyancy of being in the water or on soft ground rather than the hard concrete of his shallow pool. He may also have suffered from pneumonia. There was a point during his capture where they had to float him to the other side of the river because they dragged him to the wrong side of the shore and couldn’t carry his weight over a crude wooden bride. To do this they basically tied him to some things that floated and threw him back in the water face first. Since he was restrained and blindfolded at the time, it’s possible that this caught him by surprise and forced some water into his lungs before he could close his nostrils. He survived about a year and a half after this, but crocodile metabolisms are so slow in general that it may have just taken that long for the pneumonia to kill him, or he could have acquired it from any one of the times they drained and refilled his pool.
TL;DR crocodiles can live a LONG time under the right circumstances. Stress in their environment is extremely harmful to their well-being, but in a healthy environment with steady access to food and lack of competition from larger males and no threat of poachers – all of which a good enclosure in captivity provides – a crocodile has a lifespan potential on par with humans.
I have more crocodile posts on my blog somewhere, including ones particularly on the differences between alligators (and caimans) and crocodiles, which might help some of the people in the notes who keep falsely claiming or suspecting that Utan is an alligator. One of those posts was actually the reason I had crocodiles on my mind when I first made this post.
I assure you, despite the unusually heavy and bony skull he has, Utan is 100% crocodile. No alligator comes close to him in size or shape. I won’t explain it again in detail here, but there’s specific things that people mean when they say alligators have wider, rounder faces than crocodiles. Utan is not an alligator.
Steel Phoenix Studios 