"Plank" saves the day

"Plank" and her adopted baby

Yesterday I was going to drop the lone chick off to my friend Eirlys, who thought one of her broody bantams might take it over, but on reflection, I thought she had enough of her own problems to deal with as a fox had just broken into her barn and had massacred fifteen of her best laying hens.
The fox problem around the village seems to have heightened somewhat, and daily, villagers who have been walking their dogs have reported daylight sightings of foxes down the felin and Gypsy lane.
Hopefully some of these animals will be shot by local farmers, and I now realise that culling is necessary despite some of the bleatings from the liberal left who cry out that foxes are just doing what comes naturally.
Some locals rely on their animals to get by and big loses of stock are not only heart breaking, they can be financially crippling.
Anyhow enough already.
I still had the problem of the lonely chick to deal with, so after a bit of thinking I resorted to some basic psychology and hatched out an idea.
Like people, some animals are "thicker" than others, it's just a fact of life, and more often than not I have found that the denser the animal is, the more benign personality it possesses.So after scanning the stock I settled for a "thick as mince" buff orpington who I rather cruelly have nicknamed "plank"
Plank seems to understand just three things, ....food, water and bedtime and she is last to react in all three categories, I picked her up ( even this took a while to register) and sat her down in the shed next to the chick.
Nothing much happened at first.
Plank sat blinking  for a while , picked at a bit of corn on the floor then looked at the  jumping chick with a somewhat perplexed expression. The chick, (who had ten times the mental capacity) realised that all of her birthdays had come at once and dived headlong into plank's feathers like a mole burrowing underground,  and this is where  she has stayed for the duration.
A little victory...I am hoping!