chicken rustlers

we started off with 12 chickens - 9 hens, 3 roosters, two breeds - swedish blacks and the danish landrace. that was back in summer 2011. the next summer, they began to nest on their eggs and made themselves some more chicks.

those were a blend of the two races, as you can see in this photo...combo chickens and rather unique-looking. at the beginning of the spring season, we had approximately 30. husband took out a couple of roosters because they were driving us insane with all that crowing. oddly, they literally had a pecking order and didn't fight with one another. but that's because we've got plenty of room.

this spring, the hens got down to work, hatching out eggs in odd places - in an old wagon, out in the barn where the horses are stalled, so there were baby chickens and half grown chickens all over the place. we were up to around 40 chickens around here when we came out one saturday morning a few weeks ago to this:

initially, we were sure a fox had struck. there were about 15 separate piles of feathers here and there around the henhouse and garden and the henhouse itself was filled with feathers, as was the little nesting addition on the back of it. there wasn't a trace of a chicken or a single drop of blood. we were strangely impressed that a fox could do that. we expected that a bunch of the chickens were scared off and would show up again in the next few days. so we waited. and waited. and had a friend with a hunting dog come by to try to flush them out. nothing.

we talked to a lot of people. all of them were skeptical that a single fox or even a fox with a few pups could take so many chickens so bloodlessly. even the four little ones who were out in the other barn, far from the henhouse were gone. and to my knowledge, they had never been over with the main flock, so how could a fox know to go over there and take them?

and so we got to thinking. the day before they disappeared, a middle-aged danish couple came to look at some rabbits we had for sale on dba.dk (an eBay owned sales site that's more like craig's list than eBay). they pulled up in a rather battered black station wagon. the woman was very interested in checking the bunnies (there were still five left at that point) to see whether they were boys or girls (this is a nearly impossible task). so while she and i and sabin turned bunnies upside down and tried to see, the man wandered off, disinterested in the task. in the end, she decided it was too risky and she didn't buy a bunny and they got in their car and left. we departed soon after to go to the movies in vejle. it occurred to me later that i had told the "bunny people" that when they made an appointment - telling them they had to come before six, because we had somewhere to be and had to leave at six. so they knew we weren't going to be home that friday evening.

there are a lot of summer markets around in denmark and we think our chickens are going to be appearing at one (or more) of them. the big one is next weekend and we're going to go check, as our chickens, with their blend of the two races, are pretty distinctive. we have also reported the theft to the police and oddly, it's not the only reported chicken theft in the area. there are chicken rustlers afoot (thanks bill, for reminding me of that word). unfortunately, i had enough calls afterwards (and before i got to thinking about it) that their telephone number disappeared from my phone, but i am sure it had to be those "bunny people." the woman remarked on those 4 young chickens out there in the barn and how much fun they appeared to be having pecking around in the horse's stall. it took someone who knew they were there for them to disappear with the rest of the flock. and it explains why there was only feather carnage and no actual carnage. it also explains why our chicken-catching net wasn't where we left it.

many of the people we talked to suspected eastern europeans as the culprits and tho' we don't really know for sure, the people who came to ostensibly look at bunnies were as danish as could be. so it seems that anyone can be a thief.

yes, i have an accent

like most people speaking a foreign language, i speak danish with an accent. danish has three extra letters - æ ø å - which have been designed to make it nearly impossible for a non-native to sound like a native. when combined with some letters like a soft d (which sounds like an L in my ears), danes can produce shades of sounds that my ear is simply incapable of discerning from one another - sod sød sy ud øl - i could go on, but seeing them on the page doesn't have the same effect as hearing them. the differences are subtle and often, to my ear, more a difference in pitch than pronunciation. and i don't always catch the nuance of which word was meant in the course of a normal conversation (for years, when husband's girls were small, i thought they were asking for beer (øl) in the car, when really they were asking to get out (ud)).

but i go blithely along, speaking danish in my own unique accent, which i'm told is a hard-to-place combination of native english speaker/slav, which probably has to do with my years of studying russian. and i was quite content with this. until recently.

there's someone who i'm around several times a week who has begun mocking my accent. to my face. which is awkward in meetings or when you're standing there, trying to talk to the vet. every time i contributed to the conversation at a meeting last evening, this person answered me in a mimicking funny accent.  i'm not sure if it's a socially awkward attempt at amusing or if it's genuinely mean, but i'm definitely not finding it all that funny. he also oddly repeats words to me in swedish if i didn't catch what he said. i can't even begin to guess what that's about.

if you think about it, EVERYONE has an accent. no one is accent-free. my mom always claims that the area i grew up in south dakota is accent-free because tom brokaw grew up there and he "doesn't have an accent." i always thought that it was because his fargo-like original accent (because the accent where i grew up is pretty much identical to the one in the coen brothers film) had been beaten out of him so he could be a news anchor.

but let's face it, our speech, no matter the language, is colored by regionalisms and ticks and odd pronunciations. and yes, it's fun to make fun of accents and regionalistic tics - it's what makes fargo such a hilarious film or the canadian eh at the end of many sentences that bob and doug mackenzie effectively exploited for comic effect. but comedy has its place and if you're going to mock someone (which i love to do, don't get me wrong), you have to know them well and you have to have earned the right to mock them. you have to know where the line is and not constantly find yourself on the wrong side of it. because if you don't, it borders on something like that seems a lot like racism.

i was telling a friend about this whole situation and she was the one suggesting it was a bit racist. i'll admit i balk at that word, but it is something like racism. if i were indian and he were mocking me in an indian accent, it would be more obvious. but can it really be racism when a person of the same race mocks your accent? perhaps it's a racism born of xenophobia, but a belittling experience in much the same way as more obvious racist acts. whatever else it is, it's definitely unpleasant.

i guess i ultimately feel that i could take the mocking of my accent if the person doing it had earned the right to do it - by knowing me well enough and by being someone i respect and who i felt respected me. i fear that's what's missing here.