Buttercupchappati Chronicles

How many chickens have you eaten in your lifetime?

I don't really want to do that sum for myself, and I am very glad that the bird we had enjoyed for our dinner was a genuine free range organic chicken. After watching the second episode of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's three part programme on the chicken meat industry, if we had eaten anything else I think it would have been like poison in our stomachs.

Most people would know Hugh from  his River Cottage show, all about self sufficiency, small holdings and eating real food that you have hopefully grown or collected yourself. He comes across as a bit of hippy, bit of a prat sometimes, but entertaining. The thing I have always liked and respected him for is his stance on raising animals for meat. If you are going to eat meat, make sure the creature has the best possible, most natural and humane life it can have before you take its life.

Hence this tilt at the chicken industry. And it is truly frightening what a cold and cruel operation it is to bring an average bird, cheaply, to the table. The statistics are horrifying, the footage of his own intensive farm (started as an example because none of the commercial growers would allow him to film in their sheds - and that says plenty doesn't it?) is awful. Last night, in the daily cull of small, sick or injured birds - a job which is clearly killing him - we saw a bird taken out to have it's neck broken; but the kicker was it was the first time that bird had been out in sunlight since the day it was delivered to the shed in a big cardboard box as a day old chick.

How can we do this to fellow creatures? I agree the whole meat eating issue is charged with emotion and not cut and dried. But surely we can give a little more kindness and respect to these animals that sustain us.  What is this sort of food doing to us anyway?

I urge everyone to visit the site and register as a supporter or at least have a look at what he has to say.

I am a bit of a hypocrite I know, we keep chickens for eggs and there is no way I could kill a bird for the pot, but I will buy a free range organic bird to cook for the family. It is important to me to know that animal has had the best possible life and most humane death.

Chicken out

It's raining!

What a blessing!
Heavy, steady, drenching rain, the kind we used to get when they talked about this town as a place where it "rained for nine months of the year and dripped of the trees for the other three."
Those were the days when we complained about rain - hard to believe now.
The Weather Man used to apologise for wet days!

On our tin roof it is a steady mantra of blessing, and waking during the night to hear it was a joy.
Today every pore of our earth is open and receiving this gift.

Leo has, I guess, the only legitimate reason to be less than happy. No walk on wet days! He is a Chow Chow with the thick double coat, and among Chows he is doubly blessed with more coat than two or three dogs. This means that a walk in the rain equals a whole day of being wet, he takes forever to dry!

Buffy update - that is Buffy the traumatised chook, sole survivor of The Great Chook Massacre - she seems to the be recovering from her post-traumatic stress syndrome and actually emerging from the chook house again. I hope to get some friends for her this weekend. Can't have her sad and lonely as well as traumatised.
Plus, we are out of eggs! And I can't bear those dreadful excuses for eggs that you buy at the supermarket. You can taste the misery of a caged chook.

If an angel descends with each drop of rain, falling to its appointed place, we are in a place of angels today.