The Incident

I suppose it's time Dana and I talk about The Incident.

One morning when we were both out at the farm, I was getting ready to do all the morning chores, sneaking around to keep from waking up Dana. As I reached the chicken coop, I opened their door so they could go out into their yard, but none of them wanted to go out. Being the completely sane person I am, I started talking to them, asking why they didn't want to go out into the yard. They only stared at me with their beady little eyes.

And then I saw him.

The rooster laying in the middle of their yard.

At first, I thought he was dead. He had to be, right? He didn't seem to be moving, anyway.
And then he lifted his little head up and breathed out a heavy sigh before settling his head back into the dirt.
I slapped my hand to my face and muttered an "oh no" before going inside to wake up Dana.

Dana was rolling over on the couch, probably trying to ignore me slamming the front door. But I couldn't let her keep sleeping when I was in crisis mode. I told her she needed to get her fine booty out of couch to help me figure out what to do. Naturally, we called Lauren to find out what to do.

Lauren gave us a solution we weren't too happy about.
"Well," she said. "You can either hack its head off with an axe or put it in the freezer."
Oh, yeah. No problem.
Not.

Dana and I decided that the guillotine would be the quickest way to go. Since she and I are both avid animal lovers (who like animals more than people most of the time), we wanted Senor Rooster to be in pain for the least amount of time possible. After searching through the shed for a sharp axe, we only ended up with a dull one that we were scared wouldn't quite do the job. Plus, since he was in the yard, the low netting kept us from being able to get a good swing in. But we were determined to help out poor Rooster (who, btw, will have his name revealed to you in a post to follow).
We entered the yard, armed and ready. Dana lifted the netting so that I could get in a good swing. Just as I was getting myself all ready to go and follow through with murder, poor poor Rooster looked up at me with his sad eyes and let out a pitiful "bbbbbbraaaaaaaackkkk."
Which was followed immediately by my similarly pitiful, "That's it. I can't do this."

At this point, Dana decided that she wanted to shoot it. Which, quite frankly, would have made this whole ordeal quite a bit easier.
No go.
(Who are you that you don't have chicken-shooting guns, anyway?)

She and I, therefore, set out to freeze Rooster. We found a postal box (which hopefully you didn't want to use in the future), some garbage bags, and a shovel and headed back up to the yard. But once we got ready to scoop him up, he was so obviously in pain that we just couldn't do it.
So we decided again to axe it.
And then gave up.
Decided to freeze it.
And gave up.
Decided to axe it.
And gave up.
Decided to freeze it.
And succeeded.
We had to use two shovels and scoop him up from either side, but we did finally get that heavy load into the postal box. We covered him with the garbage bags and carried him out to the back porch freezer.
Wanting to insure his quick death, we turned the freezer up to Arctic, shut the door, and left.

Poor Rooster.
Poor Dana and Kelly.
Poor freezer holding the dead body.

I'm never eating chicken or chicken by-products ever again.

--Kelly (and I'm sure Dana will tell her side of the story soon)