Chicken Rustling in Southwest Berkeley
Missing: 7 ChickensI arrived at the Ashby Garden to feed the chickens as the sun was going down. There was an eerie silence as I approached the chickens' enclosure. It was like I was in a horror film- I turned my head to the left in slow motion, and didn't see a single roosting chicken in the coops! I looked at the new laying boxes underneath the coops- as if they would all be in there! Nope. The gate to the enclosure was open, and the bucket of food that was used to block the gate open was spilled on the ground. No sign of struggle, and the eggs that we were trying to get the chickens to sit on and hatch were still in the coop. The chickens' food and water containers are all still there.
The chickens are gone. The gate to the garden was locked, so either the person who took the chickens had the combination, or they jumped the fence and handed the chickens off to someone else (one at a time or in a bag or box). There is only one feather on the ground near the gate to the enclosure, so these people clearly knew how to handle chickens. And they likely killed them and cooked them up. They were stolen sometime between 7:30 Weds. night and 7:30 Thursday night. The person who was supposed to feed them on Thurs AM told me tonight that she hadn't done it this morning.
We had had the 6 girls since December of last year, and had only recently gotten the rooster. It seems like the disappearance could be related to the recent arrival of that noisy bastard- I have heard him as early as 4:30 in the morning. There are a few different sketchy characters who we are thinking of as suspects, but how can we really know who to blame or what happened.
photos of the chickens can be seen at http://www.themahtin.com
posted by mahtin @ 9:10 PM
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