Chickens on my lawn

This is a bit surreal.I went out my room this morning for breakfast when Mark sighted me and waved and ran towards me to catch the lift. While he was running, he kept yelling something in Tagalog that I couldn’t quite hear because he was some distance from me, but I did catch “manok” (chicken). When he got to where I was, he was asking, “Did you see the chickens?”

I didn’t know why I should have seen chickens, I told him, and he pointed me to the terrace, the courtyard on the first floor (our dorm…or “College” as we call it here…is open-aired from the first to the fourth floor). Sure enough, there were chickens on the terrace, squawking and pecking on the floor. There were twenty of them, and I thought it was hilarious, until I saw that about half of them were dead.

It makes sense to assume that our College just got pranked (at least that’s what Mark tells me), because no one here would have any reason to do something like that, and because there is very much a rivalry among the Colleges here in UNSW (though our handbook did say that the rivalry should be limited to the sports and academic arena, but then rules were always meant to be broken. Or at least bent).

Anyway, the staff and administrators are in a bit of a flutter (no pun intended), and the inspectors from the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) just came to take the chickens away.

Here’s a couple of pictures: