Your Food Is Killing You!

Your food is indeed killing you.  I'm not only talking about the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) Movement even though we are generally proponents of MAHA and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  Today I'm talking specifically about out at our henhouse.  There are things in our henhouse, that if they are eaten, they can get you killed in one of two ways.

This seems to be a recurring theme on the blog each year once the temperatures start warming up.  Big rat snakes (we call them chicken snakes) slither out of the woods looking for a free meal.  Our henhouse seems to fit the bill for them.  They curl up in a nesting box and eat our eggs!  This is why I purchase chalk or ceramic eggs and place them in the nesting boxes after marking them with a Sharpie since they look identical to a real egg.

If the chicken snake eats the chalk egg, well, they get stopped up.  They cannot pass the chalk egg and get a case of constipation that a quart of Metamucil with a Dulcolax chaser couldn't clear up.  Having eaten a real egg, the snake crawls through a fence or rubs up against something to break the egg so they can digest it.  With chalk eggs, there's no breaking them, and the snake will die.

Here's one I found in the henhouse yesterday that was feasting on eggs.  I hit him with a pipe and through him out of the henhouse.  The chickens were nervously cackling, happy he had met his comeuppance.

From the looks of the snake's girth, it is a pretty good guess that he has two of our eggs in his belly.  Can you see them?

If they are chicken eggs, there's no way I'd ever recover and eat them.  However, if they are my chalk eggs, I want them back!  Time to find out.  I got a shovel and dissected the snake.  I used my Croc to coax the first egg out of the snake's belly.  Look!  It is a chalk egg.  You can see the black Sharpie mark I put around the egg so that I don't gather up the chalk eggs when I pick up regular eggs each day.

Then I squeezed the second egg out.  You can see the 'X's' I marked on the chalk egg to differentiate it.  The fake eggs were covered in snake ooze.  I'll let them dry out in the sun all day before picking them up and placing them back in the henhouse egg boxes.  They are doing their job!

Here is a photo of the entire crime scene so that you can see how I got our eggs back!

Your Food is killing you!  Especially, if you are a snake!  You get killed if you get caught in the henhouse.  You also get killed if you eat a chalk egg or two.  I left the dead snake as a memorial, a reminder to other snakes in the area to mind their manners.  There's plenty of rats to eat and I won't do a thing about them.  However, if the snakes come into the henhouse and begin eating eggs, they will pay a very steep price.