Muddy Chickens (CTTWWS)

 We had a flock of chickens for a while.  I think I was around 10 years old.  There might have been as many as 8 chickens, maybe more, maybe less.  Two roosters, the rest hens.  The roosters I could catch without much difficulty, but the hens were too fast.  

I had a favorite puddle in the driveway.  It filled up from a leak in the hose faucet when we watered the front garden.  I played in that puddle a lot.  

There's this thing you can do with chickens.  When they're upside-down, they kinda go into a trance.  You can hold them by their legs, their wings go out, and they go stiff.  

Now, dropping a chicken into a mud puddle onto its feet isn't very entertaining.  It doesn't make much of a splash, the chicken has no emotional reaction, it just walks away the same as you dropping it anywhere.  But if you hang the chicken upside down first, then drop it into the puddle, you get a big splash and lots of clucking and a flustered, shaking chicken runs off.  

I tell my children that this is what I did as a child because there was no YouTube.  

I don't remember which came first, the roosters attacking me or the puddle torture.  But I got quite scared of those roosters after they flew at me with their sharp parts a few times.  It always happened when the hens were around, so it was likely a protective move.  It wasn't until recently that I made the connection between my treatment of the roosters and their aggression towards me.  

Please don't think that I was an evil child.  I don't think I was.  I never mistreated people or misbehaved at school.  My parents had old, farmer-type opinions of animals (although my mom was certainly displeased when I told her about the game I played with the chickens and the puddle).  They were even more dismissive toward emotions, so maybe this was my way of acting out my feelings.