Foxes and the Moral Quandaries of Farming

July 28, 2025July 28, 2025 ~ sanebishop ~ 5 Comments

We’re currently being out-foxed by a Urocyon cinereoargenteus–a gray fox. In the last few weeks, the fox in question has carried off two chickens, presumably not to befriend them. Over the years, we’ve never had any luck trapping foxes. We can trap just about everything else–possums, raccoons, neighbor’s cats–but the fox has always been able to sniff out and elude our entrapments. We even caught this hawk a few days ago (and safely released it).

When dealing with a fox, you’d best call in a professional trapper. We know this because we once brought in a non-professional trapper. He was one of my wife’s coworkers, a fellow librarian–and a self-described “outdoorsman.” Be advised: a self-described outdoorsman should not be allowed to handle any spring-loaded contraptions that look medieval–the risk of self harm is just too much. Nor should you ever sniff anything a self-described outdoorsman hands you in a little brown jar–unless, that is, you’d like to become an aficionado in the various wafts and whiffs of urine.

“Wow, that’s fox pee?” I said, trying not to gag.

“No, it’s synthetic, but most people can’t tell the difference,” he said.

Apparently, only pee snobs can tell the difference–these elite outdoorsmen spend much time at highfalutin urine sniffing events, where they slosh pee around, then sniff it and make erudite comments like, “This pee has undertones of roadkill–I believe this fox that produced this urine had just eaten an armadillo in Burgundy.”

Also, foxes can tell the difference. They prefer all-natural organic fox pee. If you haven’t done much comparison shopping in the urine aisle recently, organic fox pee has really suffered from inflation–in fact, most stores now keep it locked in those plastic anti-theft boxes, to prevent shoplifters from swiping it and selling it on the black market. With egg prices back down, sometimes I think I’d be better off just sacrificing the chickens to curry favor with the fox, then asking it to pee in a cup.

Anyway, after the synthetic fox pee failed, the outdoorsman counseled me on various shades and patterns of camouflage, so we could stake out the fox and shoot it. I chose a Realtree Xtra Oak Camo Print, but the goats quickly blew over cover. They walked right up to us and tried to eat the oak leaves on my shirt. Then the self-described outdoorsman misidentified the goats as sheep (free farming lesson: sheep tails point down, goat tails point up), and I began to question his credentials as an outdoorsman.

Alas, our current fox is probably a descendant of the previous fox I failed to shoot. For now, our chickens remain cooped up. Ah, the moral quandaries of farming: let the chickens live free and die or live cooped up (and live).

Chicken Fluff Balls for the Soul

June 30, 2025June 30, 2025 ~ sanebishop ~ 2 Comments

Over the years, my respect for chickens has really grown. I used to think they were dimwitted creatures that poop everywhere. Then I realized I shovel their poop, so who’s the dimwitted one? Also in their favor, chickens have leaned heavily into feathers, which seems like a smart collective decision as a species–just think how much time they save doing laundry, plus all the money they save on clothes.

Meanwhile, we humans are at each other’s throats, trying to figure out how much we want to tax each other for manufacturing a pair of blue jeans. I’m pretty sure chickens haven’t read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (let’s be honest, how many humans have either–it’s 700 pages with no pictures), but chickens, it seems to me, have a better economic theory of the case; indeed, “bock, bockity, bock, bock, ba” makes more sense to me than anything I have ever heard on CNBC. Life tip: if you are ever in need of a moment of mirth, the next time you see some expert on CNBC bloviating incomprehensibly, picture them in a chicken suit saying “bock, bockity, bock, bock, ba.” You still won’t comprehend them, but it will make you smile.

Smiling is what I primarily use chickens for these days. Eggs–meh, who needs them–you can buy those at the grocery store. But what you can’t buy at the grocery store is smiles. Fluffy baby chicks equal smiles. It’s been scientifically proven that if you try not to smile at a fluffy baby chick your soul will implode.

Maybe that’s why I have so many chickens now because I need something to smile about, and at this point, I think we’d all be better off gazing at fluff balls than the TV.

All I know is that baby chicks make me smile.

(P.S. Call me crazy, but I believe that our recent egg shortage was contrived. My theory is that table eggs were being diverted and exported as hatching eggs to Finland, so the Fins could sit around and gaze at baby chicks, which is the only logical reason that such a cold and arctic country could be the happiest country in the world. Maybe that, or gazing at baby penguins (wait, are penguins Arctic or Antarctic?). The point here is there is no logical reason (like good healthcare, work-life balance, or functioning multi-party political system) why Finland should be the happiest place on earth when America invented Disney World.)

Death of a Humble Chicken

August 26, 2022August 26, 2022 ~ sanebishop ~ 16 Comments

My thoughts about dead chickens mostly revolve around whether I want their deep-fried corpses from Bojangles or Chick-fil-a. Ages ago, we learned that butchering your own chickens is for the birds, so to speak. It would take us hours to skin and pluck a single rooster, and the carcass was usually so stringy that it tasted more like my grandmother’s cross-stitch than her fried chicken.

After a few feeble attempts at self-reliance in the early years, we soon gave up and ceded control of our dietary poultry intake back to the fast food professionals. That was terrible news for my cholesterol, but really good news for the chickens on our farm, many of whom would live long and prosper in our pastures until a fox, hawk, or owl brought their prosperity to a quick and often violent end.

But this past week we actually had a chicken die of old age. It was about as graceful and peaceful of a death as I can possibly imagine for a chicken. The chicken just became less and less mobile over a course of a couple months, but it never seemed to be in much pain. Mostly, it would just sit around and watch the other chickens coming and going, and strangely the other chickens didn’t bother it either (chickens can usually be quite cruel to other chickens that are showing weakness). Everyday, it would grow a little weaker until it finally stopped eating and drinking early this week. The eight-year-old hen just sat and watched, surrounded by her flock, until she finally closed her eyes and breathed her last. It reminded me a lot of the Dowager Countess’s death in Downton Abbey, a Hollywood ending for a humble chicken. In the end it got me thinking there are a lot worse ways to die than being at home surrounded by family, especially for a chicken.

MERE CHICKENS

July 22, 2022July 22, 2022 ~ sanebishop ~ 3 Comments

Who knew

she’d take to chickens

like she did—

mere chickens?

(Oh, to hear her unabashed calls

“Chickens! chick,

chick, chick—ons!”

to see her care for them

and them, apparently, for her,

and to know even the old rooster

respects her).

A Good Old Age

January 21, 2022January 27, 2022 ~ sanebishop ~ 18 Comments

I was thinking about it the other day, and I’ve been writing this blog about farming for nearly two years now and have yet to mention the most humble of barnyard creatures. But the time is nigh, specifically the next paragraph.

I’m talking about chickens. Chickens are paradoxical creatures, being astonishingly helpless and yet nearly indestructible in their own way. For instance, we have a chicken, Quigley, who is ten years old, which in chicken years means she’s as old as Methuselah (who in biblical years lived to 969, which means Methuselah likely pulled a Betty White and somewhere in the desert sands there is an undiscovered stone tablet edition of People Magazine that says “Methuselah turns 1000!”).

Chickens best defense mechanism has been palling up with humans who are willing to build elaborate and highly priced fortifications in exchange for calcified embryos. On the one hand, it may seem like a poor business decision on the chickens’ part, given jumbo size eggs are ejected frequently out of a small orifice and often the human fortifications are hardly predator proof, especially if an English major built it. On the other hand, if you’re going to die, you might as well die in style, living in a grand gated community with a penthouse hen house, i.e a chicken run with elevated roosts.

Quigley endears herself to us in other ways than egg laying (she quit laying eggs after two years). Namely, she’s the tamest chicken I’ve ever seen. She’ll come right up to your legs and softly nuzzle you with her beak until you pick her up and hold her. She is the last remaining member of our original flock that got babied and pampered as chicks and lived in a Rubbermaid tote on our back porch. With subsequent flocks, we’ve grown less attentive, which is why most of our current flock are about as tame as feathered dinosaurs. Quigley has outlived all her friends and family. Her best friend Charlie died about five years ago to natural causes, then Perla dropped dead, then Penfold and Andy got killed by a neighbor’s dog. And since Thomas was born, her chicken keepers don’t get around to giving her as much attention or chicken treats as they used to. But still she survives. I don’t think she likes her new flock mates, but to be honest, neither do I. They’re different, just wild nameless chickens if I’m being honest. But Quigley is a chicken worthy of a name. May her feathers fluff for many years to come!