White Hens Will To Live

I noticed yesterday when I went into the barn to feed White Hen that there was still a lot of food in her bowl.

But she is always knocking her bowl over and there’s lots of laying pellets and sunflower seeds on the top of the hay bales in her stall.   She often prefers to eat from the bales, scratching at them as she would if she were outside, digging in the soil to unearth insects.

This morning her bowl was half full, but I saw when she pecked at her food, she picked it up in her beak then dropped it again.  It seems like she was barely swallowing any of it.  So I brought her some meal worms and  I saw her  pecked at and swallowed them.

This afternoon I was looking at some of the portraits of White Hen this morning.  And I saw in one of them that it looked like the end of  her beak was chipped.

So I  googled “broken chicken beak”  and found that the tip of a chickens beak is very sensitive.  If it is broken or chipped,  which happens, it can make it difficult for a hen to eat.  But by soaking laying pellets in water it will become a mash that a chicken with a broken beak can easily eat.

White Hen was on her roost and when  I held the bowl of mash up to her.  She immediately reached into the bowl with her beak and started eating.

She gobbled up the mash, making little satisfying peeps each time she took a beak full and swallowed it.

It reminded me of when she first showed up at the farm after being missing for five of the coldest most snowy days of winter and I gave her something to eat.

White Hen is 11 years old, which is old for a hen, but when I saw her eat then and today, her eating  seemed more than just survival, it seemed desire for life.

It reminded me of when we brought our donkey Simon home after he had been neglect and starved.

When I first looked at him, he was so emaciated, I though it was best to just put him down.

But when  I saw him with the child of  the Animal Control Officer  who rescued him,  I felt differently.  Because I saw a connection between them.  I saw Simon responding to that child with affection.  I could feel the tenderness pass between them, and I knew he still had life in him.

A few weeks later, I saw it again when he was living at Bedlam Farm and one morning he greeted me with a life affirming bray.

There have been times in my life when I  thought it would be easier not to be alive.  To not have been born at all.  And I have often questioned the idea of life as a gift.

But that day, when I heard Simon’s bray, it was so loud and joyous.  As if it came from the depths of his soul, and I too felt, for the first time, the meaning of the will to live.

I held the bowl of mash for White Hen as she ate.  She was ravenous, but also seemed grateful.  A desperate longing finally fulfilled.

A chickens beak will grow back, but because she’s so old, I don’t know if White Hens will.  Or it may just take longer.

So from now on, until something changes,  I’ll be feeding White Hen her pellets soaked in water.  Because, like Simon, she still has the spark in her.

And I’ll keep listening to her and watching her.  As long as she isn’t suffering or loses her will to live, she has a home in the barn to live out her days.