A Little Chicken Chatter

  I feel so rotten that I'll try to lighten the mood with a conversation I had this week.  I'd listed an ad in a local paper offering free freezer-burned frozen meat for game-farm animals, etc. Some months ago, the same newspaper ran an ad from a game farm asking for just such offerings. I believe it may have unfortunately closed since then.
  Anyway, a man called from pretty far north, some place like Fort Plain or such. He was curious to know how I'd burned frozen meat. And at a game farm?
   So I explained the circumstance and said a woman from Salem had taken it for her chickens.
   "Oh, chickens are voracious carnivores," he said. One time on the farm he put a baby goat in the chicken coop overnight because it was cold out. The chickens were already roosting, so he didn't see any problem. But the next morning when he went to get the goat, he found it mostly devoured. The Rhode Island Reds lay the largest eggs, but they are also very aggressive he said. When he saw the little goat's mangled pecked-at body, he wanted to kill all those chickens. They had chicken for dinner every night for weeks, he said.
   We chatted some more, mostly about chickens, and he said he had enjoyed talking to me.