Radical Homemaking | Dealing with Loss

It's Monday - time for our weekly installment of Radical Homemaking. Interested in learning more about what that means, check out THIS post and THIS post. 

We lost three of our four chickens this week. Something grabbed them and dragged them offsite for dinner. When I first began to transition my back yard, from a space, then filled with crab grass and ornamental bushes, we talked about whether or not we should have chickens. Plants are one thing - they grow and produce and die - but livestock seemed different. Our chickens would be cooped animals living on a very small plot of land. We'd let them loose in the garden as much as we could allow, but ultimately they were city chickens. We knew there was a real possibility we would loose them to hungry creatures that roam our neighborhood: raccoons, dogs, possum, coyote and even bobcat. But we decided to go for it - we wanted chickens.

Now, almost three years into our radical homemaking adventure, we've lost two of our babies. It's likely a coyote because the chickens are flat-out missing.  It was really difficult to grok the fact of their deaths, but we knew it was a possibility when we entered into this course of action. Of course, I wish they were here, but its also an important lesson for us and for our children to understand how food is made and how nature plays out. But it's a sad day at our house, indeed. We'll miss our sweet girls.