by Emily Caldwell, staff reporter
Where do the chickens go, or where are they allowed to go?
They’re allowed to stay in the yard, in the garden yard. And in the coop, too, but sometimes they manage to get out.
Why are they there? What’s their purpose?
The purpose of them being there is they’re just another animal that we’re allowed to have here on campus. We’re not allowed to have a lot of animals on campus, and we don’t have a lot of support from administration, so we decided to get chickens. We have a poultry judging contest team, and we have animal
science classes. All of those animal science classes pertain to the chickens also. They hatch infertile eggs because we don’t have a rooster, so we actually sell those eggs.
Where did they come from?
That’s a Ms. Tillman question, I have no idea where they came from. I know we ordered them online and they came as 2 dozen little chicks. They’re all different breeds, including mixed breeds. Two dozen came from some website online, and they literally delivered a box of chicks to our door. Half of them died, and some of them we sold, so now we only have, like, a handful.
Do they have names?
They do have names: there’s one black chicken, and that one’s name is something like Shaquita, and there are several white chickens, and they have white girl names, they’re really basic names and we change them all the time. There’s a few brown ones, but they don’t have names except for one. The smallest brown one’s name is Jeffrey, I don’t know why.
Do people, either in FFA or not, use them for something?
Yes, so for poultry judging this year, we’ll be using them to help us judge live birds, because in poultry judging you judge live birds. In our events and in our animal science classes, we feed them, water them, take care of them, pick up their eggs, do what they need us to do. Their health is their responsibility, though, they take care of themselves.
Do you have any funny stories that come to mind when you think about the chickens?
There’s been a lot of funny stories. I know one time, the chickens got out, they get out all the time, like out of the yard, and they went across the street to the church parking lot. They’ll also go to the front of the school and just march around. We get calls very frequently saying, “hey, your chickens are out,” and that’s kinda funny. And our rooster disappeared, we don’t know where he went. When we started looking for him there was this stack of metal out there in our metal shed for the Ag Mec kids, and we heard him somewhere in there, but we never found him, so there’s this chicken noise that’s always around but we can’t find it.
