Oops!

I just noticed that i haven't written in over two months. As faithful readers might noticed, i've changed the subtitle to twelve-year-old. My birthday was on  December 8. Also, we bought a bull, called Beuregaurde, or Beureguard, or something. We just call him Beu. We just got some new laying hens, even though the old ones still lay.

Two Things

     We killed the broiler chickens a week ago. If you're interested in how we kill them, go to the post called ''To Kill A Mockingbird' (I Mean A Chicken)'. There's a slight variation to the steps. We rented a plucker. The plucker looks like a big plastic can on a base. If you look inside the 'can,' you will see a rotating bottom and rubber fingers on it and also on the sides. When you start it, streams of water are shot into the container, and the bottom starts to rotate. When you stick the chickens into this, it looks as if the chickens are going to come out torn to pieces. But they will come out clean as a whistle, if you dipped the chickens in the right temperature of water, and stuck four at a time into the plucker.

     The other thing, (look at the title of this post), is that some new broiler chickens have arrived. One of them has some weird illness, and its wings are drooping and it can't chirp. It looks far all the world as if it is trying to make a sound, cause it lifts its head, strains its body, and opens its mouth wide, to the rhythm of its breath. But nothing comes out. Does anyone know about this strange ailment?

Moved The Hens

  Three days ago we moved the egg-laying hens to the back of our house so they wouldn't be so far away and so we can fill their water more easily. Here's a fact: moving twenty chicken-hearted (duh!) hens to a new living quarters is not exactly easy. Step one, run like crazy after one of the chickens. Step two, after 15 minutes, grab the tail feathers and lift it to your arms. Step three, get surprised by the bird's sudden flapping and let go. Repeat steps one and two. Step four, bring it all the way to the new area you made at the back of the house. Step five, repeat for all the chickens.

Needless to say, I wanted to wring their scrawny necks.

Got the goat

Yesterday my dad shot the goat through the neck. I don't really know what happened, except that it was a lot of work butchering it.  My dad didn't know how to butcher, so I actually had to get a wilderness survival book: "Extreme Survival" JG Press.  I don't want to write all the steps here, so search it up.  After my dad removed the skin, we took off the remaining fat and meat of the underside and stretched it out on a piece of wood to dry.  Today, we took it off and rubbed ground salt on the hide to absorb any moisture left, and also to remove the stench.

Tomorrow we'll add some fresch salt and, I hope, soften it.  I still don't know what I want to do with the skin once we're done fixing it up, maybe make some shoes out of it.

Lucky Dog Goat

   We've been thinking about slaughtering the goat since some weeks. First it was just a joke, but then my dad was looking at some slaughter company's website. Finally, my dad said we were going to get the goat, tie it up, and bring it to the slaughterhouse. Catching the goat was no problem, as you may have guessed. It was alot less nervous about us since we got it. The real problem was tying it up. It struggled and kicked. Then it turned out that the complicated leash thingy we were trying to put him in was to small for him. I had to go fetch a regular rope. Then we couldn't make it get on the truck. I had to go for the goat food. Finally we tied it by the horns, put it in the back of the pickup truck, and called the slaughterhouse. My dad learned that they couldn't kill anything right now. We had to wait until later. Like, days later. Anywho, we had to let the goat go. For now.

Green Eggs (and ham?)

   Remember the keets? Well, they've also layed eggs! We found two of them in their house. The eggs look greenish and are really small. Unfortunately, these birds are not good mothers for some reason and neither were the other layers. Or so we thought.

   One day we went to get eggs and there several hens laying. These hens usually lay were other hens have already layed, so we always check under the hens that are in the process of laying. Anyway, one of the hens, when we reached under her, went crazy and almost bit our fingers off. This was weird, because these birds aren't usually protective of their eggs. Turns out that this hen still had the instinct of guarding their eggs. Even so, that hen couldn't sit on the eggs and make them hatch, because the eggs are unfertilized, since we don't have any roosters of their species.

   But the keet's eggs are fertilized! There are some keet roosters, so the eggs could hatch. So we put the eggs with the hen that still had the guarding instinct. Now we just have to hope the hen dosen't notice her chicks look nothing like her.

Viper

   My cousins from Mexico came to visit. They came to the farm and are staying for two and a half weeks. They enjoyed gathering the eggs and watching the cows (albeit from a distance). They went into the forest an swung from vines.

   Then one day we saw the snake. Maria (my cousin) and me were going to the storage to get something when we saw an enormous snake, three and a half feet long. I took a picture, since my cousin wouldn't get thirty feet from the snake.

   Maria swore she wouldn't step a foot outside ever again. Just the next day, though, she was running outside again.