CHICKEN SURGERY

The above title should arouse some curiosity. It is so brief it might more accurately meet the definition of an anecdote rather than a story. In any case the event took place in the life of a pioneer couple. It was told by Mary Day (husband Frank) at our Cherry Hill 5th Ward social August 17, 1991. The following account was related by her parents, Brother and Sister Elbert Brown, and happened shortly after their marriage which was somewhere around the year 1910:
Sister Day's maternal grandfather had given her parents a cow name Daisy and 12 chickens for a wedding present. They packed their belongings in a wagon and with their milk cow, and chickens drove to Hatch, a town located in a Sagebrush valley in Idaho. Mary said she couldn't find it on the map, but it was near Bancroft. Their farm was infested with gophers. The County (or some agency) paid a bounty for each gopher tail, which they collected in a match box. One way of eradicating the rodents was to use poison wheat. One Sunday they came home from church to find their chickens deathly ill from eating the wheat. Being very resourceful people and needing every chicken, they proceeded to perform a surgical procedure on each chicken which consisted of cutting the "crop" open, removing the poison wheat, washing the crop out thoroughly with soap and water - - then sewing it back up with needle and thread. They considered their efforts a huge success as they lost only two of the chickens.

NOTE: Just a few comments on "chicken or bird physiology" from Dr. Parker. As you know, chickens have no teeth. The grain or whatever they eat goes from their esophagus to the "crop," which is called by some, their "doggy bag," where it's temporarily stored. From there it goes to the gizzard (which you might call their teeth), where the food is ground up by bits of small gravel they must eat to aid digestion. If you've ever helped cut up a chicken, pheasant or whatever and have saved the gizzard to eat you'll find it has a very tough lining that you peel off and throw away. Without the tough lining in the gizzard the grinding process would destroy it. So, fortunately when Brother and Sister Day got home the poison wheat was still in the "crop," and they were able to clean it out.
I might add that gophers were a real pest on our farm and hard to get rid of. The worst thing they did was to make irrigating harder by tunneling underground, thus diverting the water so it wouldn't run down the rows to the end of the field.

January 31, 2009
Grandpa Parker