Dead Chicken

Lost the arucana layer today. Found the bird with a prolapsed intestine and I had to put her down. Reduced my odd intercity flock to two so now they look really lonely on that big empty grass lot in the middle of the city. I'll start finding some little chickies to raise up again, though Im trying not to get bummed out about it least aggravate my first-time-chicken-rearing housemates. Some lessons ought to be learned from this, namely neighboorhood kids can stress the chickens out enough to death and chickens are infact so delicate. Also, I might have seen a chicken butchered before but I've never had to do it myself so that was something quite new to me.

As for making amends all around, this might be a great opportunity to get the neighboor's kids raising some chickies of their own. I'd offered my neighboor's family relatively free run of the chicken lot and apparently they took it to the extreme. Course the kids aren't irresponsible - they are like 12-14 afterall! Its a fault of negligence and mainly my ignorance. To make things right I think Im going to have them raise up two chickens for me and when they are old enough to add to the flock then they can recontinue visitation. This way the chickens will become more mundane, and therefore capable of harm and death. I had intended that my housemates and neighboors would want to keep up the flock when I left the area next year, now I think things might just work out fine in the end.