The chickens spend their entire day looking for food and often fighting over what they find. They scavenge for anything edible. Sometimes, that means eating the vegetables we grow in the garden, and we constantly try to keep them separate so that the vegetables can grow in peace.
One perk about having chickens is that they will clean up compostable waste that they find appetizing. They love banana peels, so I often simply throw my banana peel out the window and watch them run around with pieces of it until it's completely eaten. This saves me the stinky trash and reinforces the importance of composting.
Thankfully, there are many chickens in the world, and they reproduce quickly. There is actually more of a danger in living so closely with chickens, and the health threat that poses to humans, rather than the extinction of chickens. It would be more healthy for the average homestead in Eswatini to have a segregated location where the chickens are, so that they poop far away from housing, or food and water sources.
It's fun to live so close to chickens, but sometimes they can be a nuisance or even a biological threat to health. Nonetheless, raising chickens is a vital practice in Eswatini culture.
