The Chickens of Chiang Rai

The chickens are having sex out side my front door. Chicken sex involves little, if any, foreplay; it is rape pure and simple and the victim is very vocal about it. The act rarely lasts long, if anything it is quicker than my first sexual experience, surely a record in the human field, but the hen continues to announce her outrage to the world for several minutes after and her sisters join in sympathetically.

My dog wakes immediately and heads for the staircase; “wuf wuf wuf”, he’s at the top of the landing, “Erf woof, Erf woof”, he’s on the outside balcony. OWOWOWOWOW!!!! He hates the chickens and the sound of them fucking is an anathema to him.
Coming down stairs he heads for his food bowl and scoffs his fried rice that has sat there all day. No chicken will get any of that.

I was watching a program on bird flu the other day; it was on one of the twenty four hour news channels. Not Fox-
(“I may not agree with eating sick chickens
but will defend to the death your right to sell them”),
but one of those that try to pass themselves off as independent. A panel of experts were discussing bird flu, one said it was only passed on by handling infected chickens, one said it wasn’t and the other three didn’t know. I make sure mine is well cooked.

While I was building my house I lived in a small single roomed bungalow a few metres from the site and I came to know chickens quite well. I even considered doing a thesis for a doctorate on their culture and lifestyle. In the morning I would sit outside with my ginseng laced tea, when your girlfriend is a number of years younger than you she does things like that, and watch them at the serious business of survival of the species. They belonged to my father in law, as far as free range chickens can belong to anyone, and the main flock stayed up near his house and we got the refugees. Usually hen’s with too many chicks for them to watch in a crowd and the young roosters driven from the flock by their seniors. The roosters had daily crowing practice outside our window at daylight; they had play fights and kept well clear of the mother hens. Some days one of the serious roosters would wander down to make sure that none of the young hens had sneaked there and to give the lads a few boxing lessons. They hid in the rice field till he left.

Eventually their number was whittled down to two. The old man took a couple to sell or eat, the neighbours’s dogs got a couple more and a few just disappeared. The remaining pair were very likely from the same nest although one developed colourful gold and black plumage and the other the standard Thai red. Chickens are rarely monogamous and I doubt that if bargirls regularly gave birth to triplets that one black, one white and one brown baby would he considered unusual.
They were certainly as close as brothers and foraged together, slowly putting on the weight that would be vital to their survival later. The black and gold bird was the dominant of the two and inevitably his eye turned to the fair sex. His choice was little short of amazing, one of the resident hens was a large bad tempered creature who had beaten the crap out of him for getting too close to her chicks on a number of occasions. She rebuffed him frequently but he persevered and eventually, possibly because of his handsome colouring, she allowed him to hang around as long as he never attempted to eat any thing she scratched up for the now large chicks. His mate, however, took his life in his hands every time he attempted to enlarge the family group. Then one day she deserted the horrified chicks, the handsome chicken attacked and thrashed his brother and they retired to the rice field for their honeymoon.

You can only hold a reader’s interest for so long when writing about chickens, Richard Adams enthralled us with his rabbit stories but Richard Adams I am not. I would like to give this tale a happy ending but the handsome chicken was too arrogant to run from the neighbour’s dogs and they reduced him to a state that took him several months to recover from. A year later he’s still not quite right and his brother now rules down around our house with several wives including his bad tempered former nemesis. I did notice though that her latest clutch of chicks included several with gold and black coloring.
Perhaps the old flame never quite went out.