Does she look happy to you?
A discussion of “mad as a wet hen” appears in the previous thread, so I had to dig out a picture. This is Mapp chicken in 2012, wet. I don’t know about mad, but she ain’t happy.
My lot *will* go out in the rain (especially the Polands) and get thoroughly soaked. Anything is better than being cooped up. But chickens famously will drown if they fall into water and scoot if water is sprayed at them (handy for hostile cockerels).
In fact, I’ve heard more than once that a chicken that falls into water will die even if it’s rescued in time. I don’t know if that’s an old chicken-keeper’s tale.
You can, however, wash a chicken in warm soapy water and give it a blow dry. People do it before shows. Then they put Vaseline on their combs and wattles to make ’em specially red and on their legs to make them…shiny, I guess.
Chicken keepers, eh?
Mapp here is not preparing for a show. Mapp was the tragic victim of a novice chicken keeper: me. Her first Summer as an adult, she abruptly stopped laying and sat on the nest all day looking miserable.
Turns out, she was just broody. Broody hens stop laying eggs. She went broody every Summer for the rest of her damn life (and she lived to be eight, which is good going for a bantam). I didn’t get many omelettes out of this old girl.
But I decided, in my ignorance, that she must be egg bound. Getting an egg stuck in your egg chute can be fatal, so I did panicky things like soak her in a bucket of warm soapy water for an hour, to no avail.
I don’t even want to talk about what I did with the olive oil.
December 8, 2021 — 8:00 pm
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