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| A few minutes after giving the flock some treats, Lime decides to tear a bit of skin. |
When I paid my daily visit to the chickens, they started tugging and pecking hard on my pants. As I shooed them away with a wave of my hands, Lime all of the sudden pounced on it and gave my hand a painful peck.
Down I looked, and surprisingly a small bruise was quickly forming.
I ignored this, and bent down to pet Lime as I always did. Usually she wouldn't mind, but this time she snapped and turned her head around to peck my hand off of her feathers. I withdrew my hand to avoid the peck and with hackles raised, she attacked again!
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| Lime turns around to deliver a flying peck. . . |
Lime missed.
I playfully lifted her up at eye level and she snapped again, this time at my face. I let go and Lime plopped back onto the ground.
She shook her vanilla colored feathers as she steadied herself and started ramming against my knees. Her feathers were all fluffed up in confrontation mode. Lime circled me several times, each time tilting her head to meet my gaze in a stare of defiance. After a few seconds she gave up and went back to her food bowl.
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| I experimented with her reaction towards a glove. She hated it even more than my hand. |
I felt a sort of betrayal in friendship. Lime had never attacked me before, she was the friendliest pullet in the flock. Lime enjoyed human companionship and would be the first to greet me at the door, she followed me around the chicken enclosure, and came running (most of the time) when called.
Yet. . .
How could such a friendly gal suddenly want to draw blood?
Had Lime lost her docile temperament to the recent freezing temperatures?
I wondered if she thought of me either as this:
OR
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| An example of the "ice cream truck effect". |
