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http://ift.tt/2xSv3UR:buttons-beads-lace replied to your photo “I GOT MAH BEBBEH CHICKENZ IN THE MAIL TODAY ok my sister did here is…”
‘the post office called and I could hear the peeping’ is one of the best sentences I’ve read in a while. Loud Boxes. what a wonderful thing.
It is!
Well, it’s a wonderful and terrible thing. You see, part of the chicken industry in the US depends on this sort of loophole about chickens (and indeed, most birds): when they hatch, they’re designed to get out of their eggs, and then just sit for a day or two while the rest of their broodmates hatch, and only when all the hatching is done, do they come out and get any water or food. So the last bit of yolk they absorb before hatching can see them through into the world for a couple of days. Which means you can throw them into a mailing box and Priority Mail Express them just about anywhere in the continental US. And it’s amazing because it works so extremely well: because I wanted Fancy Chickens, I literally had them mailed from Iowa to New York.
There’s a downside, though, which is that if it goes awry, it’s basically the worst. My sister’s farm tends to try to order from as close to home as possible; they have a hatchery so close that in the worst heat of summer or during a cold snap, they’ll drive to it and pick up the box themselves (it’s like an hour and a half each way, which is a lot but for a potential $10,000 worth of turkeys, surely worth doing). And they almost never will mail turkeys this way, even though the same exploit exists and it *can* work out just fine.
Because sometimes you get a box and it’s… not Loud. And that’s. That’s a bad, sad thing. So there’s always a bit of nervousness. Because honestly I don’t think most postal employees have any real training in this sort of thing, and it depends on them exhibiting common sense and being able to do something like, say, put the package on the seat next to them instead of in the back of the truck and if there’s not room to do that, what can they do?
So, a Loud Box is a joyful thing, and most often is really what happens– but the times when it doesn’t are so sad that you really don’t forget them and worry a lot.
Because sure, they’re only chickens, and chickens are mostly for eating, but they’re still cute fuzzy babies, and honestly my family has a long history of keeping pet chickens. Chickens do make great pets, but everything kills them, including sometimes themselves.
As a palate-cleanser, I leave you with a link to my sister’s Instagram, featuring a video of a baby chick asleep on her chest.
We don’t usually play with the chickens on the farm, but I want these guys to be sort of tame so I can steal feathers from them more easily, and I also think it would be really fun to have chickens that will eat from your hand like we did when we were kids, so. My sisters are obliging me and helping hand-tame them for now, because #Farmbaby is into it.
I don’t know how this will go once there are 350 more hatchlings today (the plainer, more productive chickens ordered from the local hatchery)– I might just have to hand-tame all of them, and we’ll see how that goes. Well, whatever, I wasn’t doing anything in the evenings anyway.
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