The End of Attila

Our chooks are called Utensil and Attila the Hen Two. Utensil, a big, fierce Rhode Island Red, derives her name from sources too obscure to go into here. Attila Two is named after Attila One.

We bought the original Attila as one of four Light Sussexes – neighbours wanting the other three. The lad superintending our purchase grabbed each hen unceremoniously by the legs and shoved them into a cardboard box, throwing Utensil into the deal almost literally. The chooks took all this philosophically.

Back home, we handed over the three other Sussexes, and left Utensil and Attila boxed in the garage. W’d read that if you wait till they’re asleep, you can rehouse hens by simply lifting them onto their new perches. Staggeringly, it worked. Next morning, Utensil woke in a terrible temper, stomped up and down her new run squawking furiously, laid a double-yolker and promptly settled down. Attila just behaved as if she’d always lived there.

Attila emerged as bottom hen in a two-hen pecking order, but didn’t seem to care. She was a quiet chook, and we thought not very bright (like most middle-class parents, we were concerned over our progeny’s intellectual abilities. Utensil, based on the temper and the double-yolker, was we felt obvious Oxbridge material).

Both chooks were sold as ‘point-of-lay’, but as Attila showed no signs of laying, we assumed she was younger than Utensil. She certainly looked smaller. Meanwhile, the other three Sussexes were laying like mad, which depressed us.

Then we noticed that Attila kept falling asleep, often in the middle of the lawn, standing up and in mid-sentence, like an elderly Don at a garden party. She started having long lie-ins, and her adolescent wattles faded from healthy red to pallid pink.

We consulted Martin Gurdon’s superb ‘Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance’. Though not a reference book (it’s far too funny) there are helpful chapters on nursing sick chickens; sweetcorn plays a big part. We also read the pull-out guide to chicken diseases in the Smallholder http://www.smallholder.co.uk/poultry/, and, hypochondriacs that we are, decided she had most of them.

Nothing helped. As she got weaker, I moved her into the utility room on a towel; I felt Martin Gurdon would approve. Should we take her to a vet? Do vets treat chickens? If we were manly farming types with egg-quotas to worry about, perhaps we would simply wring her neck and call it a day. But I’m not a manly type and don’t know a thing about killing chickens, so I bundled her up and took her to the surgery.

By now Attila couldn’t raise her head. The vet confirmed that she was hours away from death and it would be kinder to her to end things. I said goodbye to Attila, who was visibly slipping away, and left.

Back in the vet’s waiting room, I explained to the receptionist that sadly my chicken was now defunct, and asked for the bill.

Even as I was writing out a cheque, a volley of very loud, indignant squawks issued from the surgery behind us, followed by protracted and blood-curdling strangulated gurgles. Clearly, the vet didn’t know much about killing chickens either.

We all pretended we couldn’t hear anything, and I handed over my cheque.

So we bought another Attila, and Utensil couldn’t tell the difference. After a while, neither could we. And I’ve never, until this day, told anyone the truth about the death of the first Attila, and how I Chickened Out.