Egg-Scellent

What a visual delight, to open the sleeping hutch of our chook tractor and to spot a perfectly spherical bantam egg!  What a miracle!  Even though we don't eat eggs, I still appreciate the thrill of finding them!

Beautiful little egg

Spence, or Henny Spenny!

So what do we do with the eggs our two little bantam chooks lay?  We hand over a half dozen to neighbours, our son and of course, our cat, Shanti, who loves to eat an egg yolk per week!  It is a great little boost to her diet and apparently a great fur conditioner.  We saved them from the pot, as they were, quote from my friend, "lazy little tarts!".  The fact that they were not the most efficient of layers did not faze us at all.

Currently the chookies are brooding, which means that they decline to get out of bed every morning and would happily sit there all day and night, if I didn't push them out of the sleeping quarters!  They sound like my teenadults!  They peck out all of their tummy feathers to line the nest, so that if they had eggs to sit on, they would sit there until they hatched.

What if everyone had a couple of backyard chooks?  They are quite comical to watch and make great little pets for families with young children.  Eating up the scraps from the kitchen, thereby reducing household waste, helping to weed and fertilise the veggie beds, eat the snails, slugs and insects........ and providing healthy, nutritious eggs that are not a product of cruel battery/factory farming?  We have recently supported a great organisation called SAFE.  They fight against animal cruelty and have just put out a fantastic advertisement about factory farming.  The ad makes for compelling viewing.  Make people think.  The age-old ethical debate whether or not animals should suffer for us......... (won't go there in this post).