Squeamish readers may want to read no further than this sentence, but it’s no horror story either. Some friends asked about our daughter and husband who lived about a 15-minute drive from us, before we left Austin for a life in the desert. Among the news updates on them, I mentioned that Luke has long wanted backyard chickens and that he and Joy were involved in building a chicken coop, actually a covered shed with enclosed walls and a fenced-in area for chickens to run around along the back side of Luke’s workshop.
Rhode Island Red chickens. We raised a lot of these when I was a boy.
Interestingly, Austin’s City Council passed an ordinance a few years earlier that allows residents to raise chickens. The consequent cackles announcing an egg has just been laid have spread around the city. Anyone can have their own flock now, unless homeowners’ associations prohibit it. Since I had nearly two decades of experience with thousands of chickens on our Tennessee farm, somehow a desire for backyard chickens has not yet risen in my bosom.
But I thought it was great that Luke and Joy were on the verge of chicken raising and egg-gathering experiences. To move things along, a neighbor gave Luke two dozen fertilized eggs and he focused on incubating them in anticipation of baby chicks breaking out of their shells before their eyes. The egg donor estimated that fifteen chicks would emerge from the twenty-four eggs, that half of them would be roosters, and that Luke and Joy might become the proud owners of 7-8 laying hens. Ominously, Joy had said that Luke was having difficulty with keeping the incubator at the proper temperature, so an aura of extra uncertainty had entered their lives. But pretty much on schedule, we were invited over to see the second chick hatch as soon as the first one unsteadily stepped out among the shell fragments into the world.
Our friend recalled that I had told him about the chickens on our farm as I was growing up, then asked, “Did varmints ever get in your chicken house?” I responded that they surely did—sometimes foxes ate the chickens, sometimes possums ate the eggs, but the most troublesome animals were rats that invaded the feed rooms in our chicken houses. They came in droves and ate holes in the large burlap bags of chicken feed, spilling it on the concrete floor. Then the rats gathered for a feast on the piles of spilled feed. Not only was this unsanitary, it was very costly. There was no market for extra-fat rats that were not only raising the cost of raising chickens, they were stealing from our chickens.
Traditional methods of rat control—poisoning and trapping— helped contain the numbers of them, but we sometimes had to resort to firepower to control them. I forgot to mention this in my earlier post, “Firearms on the Farm: DIY Law Enforcement,” where Daddy used guns to drive away would-be thieves, or worse. At times of particular desperation with rats wasting our chicken feed, Daddy formed a swat team with my older brother Nolen Robert and me. Well after dark when the chickens were asleep, Daddy on occasion told us to get our .22 rifles and go with him to shoot some rats.
The feed room was walled off from where the chickens slept in this one particular chicken house. About 2,000 chickens lived in the long, rectangular building. During the day they roamed freely on a floor covered with about six inches of wood shavings, and during the day we let them out into a large, fenced-in grassy area. This was in an era before the term “free range” chickens was coined, because chickens in cages had not become part of the chicken business. When cages were introduced, Daddy scoffed at the idea. He said, “Chickens don’t belong in cages, they belong on the ground.” He never changed his mind about that.
Our rat-killing procedure, without all the gory details, was to enter the dark feed room quietly through a slightly cracked door, raise our guns, and turn on the light. Invariably, rats began to run for cover as we stood side-by-side and started firing. The rear wall of the feed room backed up to a hog pasture with dense woodland beyond that. Hogs didn’t hang out there at night, so it was safe to fire through the wall while shooting rats.
The favorite escape route of the rats was to run to the right-rear corner and run up it until they reached a timber that supported the metal roof. When they reached that junction, they paused to change directions. At the moment they paused, they briefly made a good target. Over time, we shot enough rats at that point that we had shot a hole through the roof that was as large as a baseball.
My brain is a patchwork of free associations, and always has been. Our friends ask about Luke and Joy, the conversation involved chickens, the guy asked about varmints, and varmints around chickens remind me of the rats.
That’s how we got to this.
Watch for stories from growing up on a poor Tennessee farm, moving away, study, travel, parenthood, striving, setbacks, and just crazy stuff! 
earlbrussell 
I’ve seen plenty of foxes in Westlake (Austin, TX), but not any chickens, when I was at my son’s house about six months ago. There was a fox with her brood raised in a backyard nearby, so we saw them a lot until the bunch was moved. Enough critters were in the woods obviously for food.
Jim, I would have enjoyed seeing the mother fox with her pups. Hope you got some good pics of them. On rare occasions we saw red fox clans with their young ones during my growing up years on our farm. They were beautiful animals, until they got into our chickens! 🙂
Okay, so here’s another question to ask my mother-in-law about her childhood! Our neighbors have a few chickens for their fresh eggs and at our recent block party we all wanted to know how the chickens were doing, kinda like how they ask about each others’ dogs. Well, since the family was going to visit relatives in Germany for a month, the chickens had been dispatched into the freezer. There was a collective gasp from all us nonfarmers.
Thanks so much for your comment. The gasp you describe is interesting, probably tinged with curiosity about the process the chickens went through before entering the freezer. However, few people seem to think much about all that when peering into a meat case in the supermarket for chicken breasts, thighs, or legs. The disconnect is perhaps more comfortable.
Always weaving a good tale! I liked this one, do want to know what happened to the ‘offed’ rats????? Creepy! Daddy was right, chickens belong on the ground and you had lots of them! Guess they didn’t have names?
Thanks for your great, inquisitive comment. Since I’ve already pushed the limits on this story for some readers, I’m reluctant to write about what I generally referred to in the story as “gory details.” What I will say is that we disposed of them “properly,” given the practicalities of the day. As for whether we named our chickens, we did not; there were just too many of them.
My father was also raised on a farm. An expression that he used frequently was: “I need to get on with my rat killing.” I wish I had asked him why he used that expression, but I never did. He always used it to mean he needed to quit enjoying himself and get back to more serious matters. I guess he believed killing rats on a farm was a matter of great seriousness.
I think you’re right about the meaning of that expression. I have heard it before, but I don’t recall it being used in my family. In our case, when my dad called my brother and me to arms against the rats, it was deadly serious. (Pardon the pun.) Thanks for your insightful comment.
My oldest daughter, also, has been thinking about having chickens in their back yard. The city of Kirkland, WA, allows five chickens in ones backyard. I have tried to tell her she doesn’t know what she is getting herself into, but I’m not sure I have convinced her. I wish your son-in-law and daughter well with their venture.
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Luke and Joy are likely to do well with chickens. They both relish complex, long-term projects and largely see having chickens as a learning experience they’d like to have. They won’t have foxes where they live, their chicken enclosure will be difficult for possums or other urban critters to get into, and their small quantities of chicken feed can easily be stored in rat-proof containers. They’re also good at dealing with the unexpected, which is bound to be part of their experience. I’m looking forward to watching. 🙂
You tell a good tale. I can see the whole thing. Dreadful.
Well, there was no sense of sport or game in rat shooting. It just seemed necessary under the circumstances, and we were more like a trio of grim reapers. Thanks for your comment.
Thanks much for the linkback on my blog post. I read your informative story on chickens and possums, a good word to the wise. Your other posts are interesting as well, so I’m now following your blog.