Heart Broken

Today while I was out getting groceries and running errands an awful thing happened. I had one more stop to make before i would be heading home. My husband would be home before me. I told him be sure and check on the chickens because I've been gone for several hours. I hadn't expected any trouble but wanted him to check on them. When I got a call back from him 5 minutes later I realized something was wrong. Sure enough - the dogs had gotten back into our yard and had killed - at that point he thought all of our chickens. Luckily I was at my sisters house picking something up when he called. I got out of the car and went to her door. I was shaking and very upset and I needed to calm down a bit before I drove the 20 minutes home.

A few minutes later I got a call from my husband. He was telling me we had a couple of chickens alive. We had lost Feathers - my husbands beloved rooster. He was a beauty. I think I have shared a photo of him on here before. I'll try to do a post to show him next time I'm on my other computer. Anyway I knew I needed to get home to help him look for chickens just in case.

He had called animal control. They came along with a police officer took the report and then began looking for the dogs.  Someone in the neighborhood behind us told them that they had seen the dogs 45 minutes before. Within about 30 minutes they found them. Come to find out they were not strays. Which honestly upset me more because it's not like they were hungry and looking for food- no they were killing my chickens for sport...

My husband and I had to go through the yard picking up a total of 15 chickens. We have 2 that we could possibly still lose. On Monday we lost a total of 3 chickens. So we may end up with only 6 chickens. Our hearts are broken. And feel so weighed down.

Here is what we have left:
3 white chickens
2 black chickens(one is very traumatized - will get a better idea of how she is tomorrow- she went and got into a laying box and stayed put)
1 Easter egg chicken
1 black and white chicken- we think it may be the one that was gotten pretty bad on Monday not-sure if she will make it
1 buff chicken- she is in awfully bad shape and I won't be surprised if she doesn't die before morning.
 We will probably end up with 6 chickens out of the 26 that we started the week with.

On Monday night we worked to make our yard safer. On Tuesday I worked on our fence. We had a fence slat that needed to be replaced and we were waiting for pay day to get that taken care of but that is how they got in. Oh I had put a pretty heavy rock over in front of the hole in the fence. So I thought till we could replace it that things would be safe. I was wrong....so wrong.

So there you have it- we are emotionally drained. I'll probably be taking a blogging break at least till Monday.