Lady Sybil Is Hurt

If you are wondering who Lady Sybil is, she's one of our Chickens of Downton Abbey. Of course, whoever got hurt or sick first was inevitably going to be Lady Sybil. When my husband phoned me to tell me one of the chickens was limping, I knew it wasn't going to be good. It was only a matter of time before the pecking order began trying to take her out.

Chickens are worse than a bus of middle schoolers, I am telling you. They sensed the weakness in her straightaway and began pecking on her like she was dinner. To isolation for Sybil it was.

My husband with Sybil 

After looking up her ailments on different forums, we were fairly certain that she somehow hurt her leg. There are no bites, there are no bruises, no loss of feathers....nothing except a bent up leg she keeps limping on.

So, my generous dog, Oscar, donated to Sybil his cage as her sick bed. Sybil was put on quarantine not only to keep the rest of the ladies off of her, but also to give her a safe place to rest up and heal. Hopefully she won't go the same way as Downton Abbey's Lady Sybil...but there are no guarantees. She was just chilling in her cage for the most part, until my husband gave her a bath and then didn't dry her off because he thought she would dry naturally.... but she didn't. So then I had to bring her inside because it was 53 degrees yesterday and she was cold. We put her in a box and put a heater on her until she dried out.

My husband is kind of obsessing over the chicken when there really isn't much we can do. He said, "I knew going into this that we might lose a few chickens, but now that this has happened, I feel bad." I sympathize with him. It's human to feel bad, especially knowing that the chicken is in pain.

In all the hullaballoo of her being hurt and on quarantine and not knowing if she will get better the subject of slaughter came up. The thing is, if she's hurt and is not going to get better, then at some point or another it can be assumed that she will die. If she dies on her own, well, we can't eat her. If we kill her, then we can. It sounds a bit morbid, I know, but this is the reality of having chickens.

And if there is one thing I like it's fresh food. Is that bad?

Well, even so, when we were talking about it, (it being the killing of the chicken and all) naturally we began to talk about who would do it. The long and the short of it? Neither of us wants to. For me, it's not that I can't kill the chicken; I absolutely know I could...it's just that, I'm worried about my soul. Allow me to explain.

I once read this book and it had a lot of elements of buddhism in it. It said that the butchers were the lowest people on the karmic chain because they kill the animals. So that has me worried...it's not like we're throwing lobsters in a pot here, this is a chicken that I have petted and tried to heal and stuff. Also, I am afraid that if I do kill the chicken that I will changed in a way that only someone who has slaughtered an animal would be.... it's heavy stuff, you know.

But it's also the nature of things. I would want my chicken to be well killed, if that makes sense. With respect and everything, and perhaps the only person who can do that is me. Really, I am hoping that Sybil lets me off the hook here, and just gets better. If she doesn't, it looks like I've got a decision to make...

What do you all think? Will Sybil get better or not? Should I kill her and eat her or let her die of natural causes and not eat her? Leave it for me in the comment section below.