Can a Woman Love Her Chickens Too Much? (Holiday rerun)

Go ahead and laugh, but it's a question worth asking. When I published this essay asking that very question in the local paper recently, I got a lot of responses.

For a couple of days, at the grocery store, at the post office, everywhere I went, people would come up to me and say, "So, how are the chickens?"

Then they'd tell me their own chicken stories. There are a million of 'em.

The big, brawny police chief in the next town told me that, when he was a kid, he lived next to a chicken farm that had several thousand hens and 500 roosters.

It made me think of a fortune cookie: Man who lives next to 500 roosters (fill in the blank).

But today I heard the capper, sent to me from my friend Bill, a closet chicken lover who lives in Santa Monica:

Cops: Chicken dies, wife shoots husband

September 6, 2006

CHESHIRE, Ore. --A woman shot her husband in the back after he killed her pet chicken, the Lane County sheriff's deputies said. Deputies said they were sure that Mary Gray, 58, intended to shoot her husband, Stephen Gray, 43. They weren't certain if the husband meant to fire at the chicken.

"We don't know if it was an accident or if it was on purpose," Sgt. Clint Riley said. "It depends who you ask."

Riley said the couple had been drinking for much of Monday while they did yard work at their rented home in the town northwest of Eugene, and they began arguing after Stephen Gray shot the chicken with a .44-caliber handgun.

Deputies said he was then hit with a shot from a .22-caliber rifle, and is recovering. Mary Gray was arraigned Tuesday on an assault charge.

Hmmm.