“Chickens are farm animals, not pets.”  I should make myself repeat that 3 times a day until I convince myself of it.  But it is hard for me to keep that in mind. I enjoy having the hens follow me around the yard as I garden.  They come up and look to me for treats, just like the dog.  They come when I call them “chook, chook, chook.”  Penguin and Miss Prissy (formerly Greasy Chicken) both hop on my lap for attention when I sit outside with a cup of coffee.  It is really hard not seeing them as pets sometimes.

With most of the chickens I have raised and sold, once they go to new homes, they are gone and I rarely hear anything about them again.  Generally, I have not kept most of them long enough to get too attached, all except the Joey, Amber, and Cruella.  Amber is the hen I am holding in my profile photo on the about page of this blog.  Well, tonight I had an automatic email from an old thread at Backyardchickens.com that I started 2 years ago; it was about Joey and Amber.  It got me wondering how they were doing, and I decided to see if their owner, Michelle, had posted any new photos of them.  I liked that she posted photos of them getting adjusted to their new home last summer via twitter.  I guess I should not have gone looking at her website again…Amber was the victim of an urban raccoon.  I cried when I read it, especially since she included a copy of Amber’s 10 day old baby chick picture I gave her.  Amber was a good PET chicken.