Cracking the Case on Egg Corruption

A few weeks ago, I was rudely awoken in the middle of the night by a terrible squawking.

I ran outside my house to find a young possum, oh possum if you're an annoying person, had decided to spend the night in my chicken coop.

My chickens had woken up and somehow backed it into a corner where it was frozen in fear with its mouth open, trying to look too scary to eat.

In the middle of the night, in my pyjamas, I had to pull it out of the coop and then set it out of the chicken's area and shoo it off.

Every morning, I feed my chickens from a barrel of treats I keep on my deck.

I take their layers, pellets, and water.

Chickens need a pretty specific protein percentage in their diets to lay eggs.

They also need some grit and some calcium.

I also provide them with CD-ROMs, which are fun toys for them, take care of their medical needs, and of course, I clean out their coop regularly.

In return, my four girls lay me two to three eggs a day, an amount that varies by season and by their age.

I have two Americana crosses, chickens that were bred to keep the colourful egg gene of the Chilean Araucana, but to remove its genetic tendency to produce chicks who would die in the shell.

These chickens lay colourful eggs.

My other two girls are Rhode Island Reds, who lay brown eggs.

I've had chickens for most of my life.

As a child, we had a much bigger coop in a part of a field with a big fenced-in run where the chickens could run around.

We buried the wire fence to keep foxes out.

When my cousins were smaller, I remember thinking it was very funny that they would go into the chicken coop using the chicken-sized door.

I used to love going to livestock markets as a kid, and I still sometimes do when I get the chance.

I like the shows as well, where you can steal the breeds of chicken and how different they are.

I'd always beg my parents to let me save up my pocket money to buy some kind of exotic poultry.

I like having chickens in part because it just feels like part of living for me, but also because I think it's really important to remember where our food comes from, which is to say that all food comes from the soil, the sun, the sea, and from things that turn those things into something we can eat.

Lots of our food in this country comes from animals, and it can be very easy to forget that if your food comes in boxes and packages.

Every chicken has a personality and every egg comes from a chicken with a unique and different way of being.

I think most of the eggs I've eaten in my life come from a chicken that I also fed and cared for.

For a long time, I didn't eat eggs because my chickens didn't lay them.