The Saga of Big Girl: The Chicken Who Almost Wasnt Part 1

Being in a fairly rural location we don't have to succumb to many zoning ordinances, and we can take advantage of opportunities to pick up animals that people want to re-home without thinking about it too hard. We were still getting started on our first flock and still fairly new to keeping chickens when an opportunity to pick up some commercial chicken farm rejects to add to our growing feathered family. Gwen found an ad on our local Craigslist and made arrangements to pick up 10 Cornish mixes that were deemed to small for commercial processing. And so she returned with a cage full of fat white birds. Now when I say fat I mean fat, birds so large they could barely support their own weight. How these gargantuan birds were decided to be too small for anything is beyond me, but then again I don't provide chickens to a commercial processor. These were large plodding masses of chicken flesh, feathered beach balls that didn't have the slightest clue as to what it meant to be a chicken. I cant speak to the conditions from which they came but I can assume that these creatures had never seen grass, they sulked through it uneasily eyeballing each blade with suspicion. The new chickens didn't know how to scratch, peck, roost or forage. Introductions to the flock caused no alarm or disruption it was as if the other chickens instinctively knew that these birds were not capable of besting them in a competition for anything, they were basically ignored. There is something that we came to learn about the Cornish mix breed that is used for commercial many applications, they grow big they are bred to grow big quick and are not capable of longevity left to their own devices these chickens will grow so large that their organs will fail from the stress of servicing their ever expanding bodies. With the arrival of sundown came the time to close up the chicken tractor and bed the birds down for the night. None of the new birds were capable of waddling up the chicken ladders or ramps to get in to the tractor and had to be lifted and placed inside. In the morning the Cornish mixes would have to taken out of the chicken tractor and placed on the ground. Its sad to see a chicken that doesn't know what it is. Two days later we lost two, the remaining ones didn't seem to notice. The Cornish that remained started to move and didn't see the grass as such a threat any more they were still far from acting like chickens but at least the demonstrated some mobility. The routine continued for a few weeks and gradually the birds grew to be chickens, some scratched and pecked with the others rooting for juicy bugs and other tasty things lurking in the back yard. There was one particular hen that caught our eye and we came to call her "Big Girl" she seemed to have a little more personality than the other birds who still seemed a bit shell shocked. Big Girl was all of 20lbs so she still needed some human intervention to get in and out of the tractor, the other birds seemed to be getting the hang of using the chicken ladders.