I noticed a couple of weeks ago that she had lost some weight, but she was eating well, barging her way around, and being very sprightly. I mentioned the weight loss to DH, and said that I thought she might need to be dispatched before long.
There was no change to her demeanour, until yesterday. Yesterday she wasn't interested in courgettes, or corn, and she seemed to be not quite all there. I caught her, checked her over for wounds, gave her some Nutridrops. It was possible that she was brewing a softy, although I didn't think so. She didn't seem in any distress, we didn't really have any suitable dispatching implement, so we decided we'd take something with us today so we could do the deed if she hadn't improved.
She was in the coop, on the floor, already dead, when we arrived. I'm glad we didn't have to dispatch her ourselves; DH is one armed at the moment, so we would have been worried about not doing it cleanly.
She was a lovely, friendly, cheeky girl. She and her sister Norah are our last remaining offspring of Roo and Rose. Rose was one of the original Welsh Black girls we brought back from Castle Farm when we settled on having an Indian Game cross breed for our table birds. Roo was already there, we'd had him for a year I think by then, he was our first home-hatched cockerel. We hatched him and two girls for the table, but when it came to it we couldn't do it. We'd got too attached to the 3 of them.
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| The young Batty |
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| Grown-up Batty |
A lot of them are senior citizhens now, so I'm trying to be mentally prepared for it.
Goodnight sweetheart xxx
