Is she pouting?

By definition, pouting is “pushing one’s lips or one’s bottom lip forward as an expression of annoyance or in order to look sexually attractive.”  So, I guess the “lips” part effectively eliminates chickens from any serious pouting accusations, even if you were inclined to think of a chicken as looking “sexually attractive” with or without lips.  Unless you happen to be a rooster.

But, I could swear that Little Red Hen is exhibiting all the behaviors one might associate with a pouting teenager (though in chicken years she is well into middle age.)  When I approach the run, the other girls gather at the hog wire fence and prance around, eager for their treats.  LRH approaches slowly, maintains a wary distance, and is careful not to make eye contact.  When the treats are distributed, the others fall all over their feathers getting to them; LRH walks off in the other direction oh-so-slowly.  Disdainfully?

Little Red Hen and Farmer Nyel — In Better Times

On the other hand, she spends a good part of each afternoon (as do the other girls) waiting at one of the doors for Farmer Nyel to come with meal worms.  We aren’t sure why, exactly.  Though she has always been the one to eat out of  his hand — will fly right up onto the wheelchair and sit on his lap — she will only eat a few mealworms now and only off the porch.  She has left the hand-to-beak trick to Clara and Slutvana.  Is she sulking because he lets them eat from his hand now?   Is she jealous?

Farmer Nyel makes no secret that she is his favorite.  Slutvana and Clara defer to her in all matters of the coop and the backyard.  So what is her problem?  “Pouting,” I read somewhere, “is when we are having an internal pity party because we haven’t gotten what we wanted.”  That doesn’t sound logical — not for Little Red Hen.

“She must be sick,” I tell Nyel.  But I’ve been saying so for four or five days now and that’s a long time for chickens to be laid up (so to speak.)  Farmer Nyel is far more pragmatic than I.  “She’ll either get better or she won’t,” he says.  I take heart that Clara did get better when she seemed to be suffering in the same way, but it only took her three days.  Maybe tomorrow LRH will be perkier.   You never can tell with chickens.