Thirty Thousand Pets for One City House

Posted on April 13, 2008 at 8:41 p.m. by Jill.

That's "pets" not "pests," in case you read the title wrong.

At our house, up until yesterday we had 30,002 pets. A dog, a leopard gecko, and 30,000 honey bees. (By the end of the summer the bee population will double to 60,000.) Out of these multitudes of so-called pets, only one individual can we actually physically pet. Predictably, that honor goes only to the sole mammal in the group.

Until today. In my never-ending quests to eat as locally as possible and to make prodigious amounts of smelly household work for myself, I acquired four chicks. I've been interested in the possibility of raising hens for some time, because I know they:

a) Eat household scraps.
b) Eat bugs out of the lawn and garden.
c) Provide an extremely high quality waste product that makes for potent compost.
d) Offer up six to eight eggs a week, the freshest and tastiest imaginable.

Now I've made the leap. Four little yellow puffballs with scrawny, toothpick-length legs are in a brood box under a heat lamp in a bathtub on the second floor of our house. Petting their fluff is irresistable. I'm not certain they enjoy it any more than the gecko does, but at least they don't sting me the way the bees would.

I never really noticed how truly bird-like chickens are. I always lumped them in with cows and sheep and all the other animals on Old MacDonald's Farm, but already at six days old, our chicks have noticeable feathers on their wings. They are vigorous little things, flapping those wings, eating constantly, determined to grow. The will to stay alive and to thrive and move forward in life is nakedly apparent in each of them.