Little Moe with the gimpy leg
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Rebekah tagged him little Moe with the gimpy leg within the first couple of days after we got him. (She loves to quote lines out of old movies and said it was from Home Alone 2)
We’re raising 60 baby chicks this summer to butcher in conjunction with 5 other local families. free range and organic grain to supplement their caloric intake. We’ve had them now for 18 days.
While the other 59 chicks will run at the first hint of danger, Little Moe will just stand there…..one thousand one, one thousand two… before he hobbles away,dragging his right leg behind him. burying his little body into mass of other baby chicks in the corner of the room.
You’ve no doubt heard of the term “pecking order”. There really is such a thing in the animal kingdom. It comes from the chicken house.
Chickens really do establish who is the top dog (or chicken) in the flock.
Guess who’s @ the bottom of the pecking order?
Yep.
Little Moe.
I’ve always had a tender spot for the underdog even back in school. While I was not low man on the pecking order, I was certainly not at the top either. Which in large measure why I do not have many fond memories of my time in school.
I hated school.
It got worse once I hit 7th grade.
I can still remember Ray, Randy, and Jeff pushing Greg out of the locker room with nothing on but his jock strap. Where the teacher was I have no idea. Our locker rooms were right down the hall from the student center…
imagine getting thrown out into plain view of a group of your peers with little or nothing on…..
Another thing the bullies loved to do was come up behind you when you least expected it and pull your gym shorts down. they called it de-pants-ing… Luckily, neither of those things ever happened to me, but I lived in constant fear of it happening from 7th grade right up until my senior year.
There was a girl in our class…Her name was Debbie Cooper. Kids called her “De-coop” She was from a poor farm family. She’d developed early, was somewhat over weight, wore thick horn rimmed glasses. Gary loved to harass Debbie…until she’d take a swing at him and then he’d laugh.
We had another girl named Denise. Pretty. Transferred into our class when we were in 6th grade. Her mom had died and her dad was doing the best to raise 2 girls and a boy. I can still remember sitting in our 6th grade choir room, looking outside while another class of 6th graders were outside for recess. Gary (yep, same one) came up to Denise and pushed her down into the snow. Where were the teachers????
Denise was shy .
All she wanted was to fit in. Somebody tagged her with the nickname “Scarecrow” ….
Imagine being a girl with a nick name like Scarecrow.
Want to close with a short plug for an excellent book on this topic of bullying and emotional abuse.
Frank Peretti tells his true story in the book he’s titled The Wounded Spirit
It is a must read for anyone who has been in the receiving end of this sort of thing.
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Getting back to little Moe. I’ve already decided we’re going to keep him long term…. 
Any thoughts or experiences on this whole issue of pecking orders and bullying?
As always thanks for taking the time to read my stuff. DM
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Update 4 hours later.…just brought my tomatoes in for the night.
I’m in the process of “hardening” them…In case you’re new to gardening, these tomatoes were raised under a grow light in the basement and the cell structure in the plants is not strong enough to handle the wind and elements initially, so for a week or two before I finally plant them in the ground, I set them out during the day, give them a controlled exposure to the elements.
At night I bring them back inside and allow them to recover….unfortunately, a couple of the plants were really tested today and two of them snapped in half. My mind instantly went to this blog post about adversity and while some adversity is good for us (as Trish pointed out) making us stronger, it is possible to be broken long term…just like this:
Brandywine tomato plant snapped off by the wind today
2 trays of tomatoes just in from a day of adversity. Tray on the right doesn’t look to bad. Tray on the left had a harder day.
Tags: anger, bullying, Christianity, depression, emotional abuse, Life, relationships, self esteem, spirituality, verbal abuse
April 30, 2012 at 4:00 pm |
They are so cute.
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Thanks Joy! I promise to post lots of rooster pictures for you too btw DM
April 30, 2012 at 4:33 pm |
frank peretti’s book is good. Little Moe is adorable. Bullying is awful, our son has been through it, lots.
April 30, 2012 at 5:32 pm |
Awe, little Moe.
I was picked on a fair bit as a kid. And I think in some ways it made me stronger… I definitely have some scars, but overall, I made the best of the situation in the end. I somehow managed to still like school most of the time. And, I had to learn how to cope with it and many of those skills work in the workplace where people can sometimes be as mean as kids. I know others who were picked on significantly more harshly and they have some definite scars and damage to show for it. But, I also saw the reverse, people so sheltered that they still can’t deal with adversity in any situation because they were always hauled out of it before almost anything happened… And I mean anything. I grew up with a kid who was moved to three different schools because his mom felt he was being bullied every time he came home saying someone took a pencil or bumped into him in the hall. He didn’t finish university because the profs were “mean and unfair.” I sometimes wonder if he is missing out because he was so protected.
Bullying is awful. But (without trying to sound too harsh), so is the other side of the coin where people are sheltered to the point of not being able to function in a world full of bullies. Ideally we wouldn’t have to. But the issue is not just with children in school, but with adults as well. It is too bad, though.