Editor’s note: The views expressed in I Am So Popular are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the outlook or beliefs of anyone else in the IST network.

The best way to efficiently kill a chicken, as far as I know, is to lop off its head. Next best is to break its neck. Neither method appeals to me. I don’t eat chickens—I certainly don’t want to kill them. But when one is an urban chicken farmer, as I was off and on for years, one stands the risk of having to take out a bird now and then.

Chicken execution proved to be necessary with my flock last fall when I got a call from Starsky, my then roommate, informing me that the dogs had gotten into the chicken pen. Of my four birds, one was dead, one was hunkered down trembling, one was missing, and a fourth was flopping around, no hope for survival.

I was at Warren’s house at the time. We were early into our relationship and he’d already witnessed enough drama—for being incredibly popular often comes with a component of frequent high drama—that I feared enlisting his help might be some last straw for him. I got off the phone and faux-bravely announced I had to run home and slaughter a bird and I’d be right back.

Warren would have no part in sending me off to carry out this task alone. He retreated to his garage, reappeared in an old torn shirt and paint stained shorts, and announced, “These are my chicken killing clothes.”

Back at my house, we assessed the scene, which was precisely as Starsky had described it. Warren and Starsky sent Bambi, my other roommate, and me into the house so we would not have to witness what came next. But Bambi couldn’t resist peering out and reporting back what was literally a blow-by-blow attempt on Warren’s part to put the mortally wounded chicken out of its misery.

He used the business end of a shovel and beat the bird. This was ineffective the first time. And the second time. And a few more times after that. But the culmination of multiple shovel bops finally yielded the desired results.

We took the two remaining living chickens—we’d located the missing one—over to a friend who also has a backyard flock. Then we loaded the dead birds into the car and took them to a field near Warren’s, to offer them back to the earth. I was surprised, in the following days, the number of friends who wished aloud that I’d brought them the bodies, assuring me they would’ve made a nice meal.

I’m done with chickens now. Not because I don’t love them, I do. Nothing like big, fresh, brown organic eggs, deposited daily in the backyard. But that bloody night made me face a certain fact: My home, which had inadvertently become an ark, was overpopulated. With my travel schedule getting busier and my desire to spend multiple weeknights at Warren’s, it wasn’t fair to my roommates or my animals to have such a menagerie.

We hit tipping point last summer when a friend called to report having rescued a terrified kitten in the middle of MLK. Would I take it? I barely hesitated— while many adults puzzle me, I get along famously with most warm blooded animals and quite a few children.

That kitten brought the pet tally up to eleven. She was a fiery little thing, totally nocturnal, and super high maintenance. I never was a cat person but my son, little Saint Francis, had taught me to appreciate cats and we’d been through a number of them over the years. (Unfortunately, having almost always lived on very busy streets, we also lost a number of them.) But this kitten’s fate in my life was to be a foster, and soon I adopted her out.

With the kitten and the chickens gone, I was down to six animals: four dogs and two cats. Though that was nearly a 50% decrease, once I started cutting back, I started contemplating downsizing even further.

It was not an easy thought to entertain. In my world—excluding the chickens which, though I like, I do not bond and sleep with—when you adopt an animal, that animal is like a child. You don’t take on a pet for fun and then send it away out of convenience. I made a commitment to love each beast that came to me until the end, and I had always planned to keep it.

Until.

Something I hadn’t thought about back when we were bringing home kittens and guinea pigs and puppies and barnyard animals was that one day my son would grow up. Back in the old days, my house was constantly crawling with boisterous little boys, and they doted upon the beasts, and ours was a home with some Never Neverland qualities to it.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have the foresight to know that kids grow up. I think it was more of a denial thing. I certainly didn’t contemplate that my son would become so independent so quickly, and that at sixteen he would waltz off with a social life of his own, and a job to keep him busy, and that his time for animal loving would thus be curtailed, leaving this job to me alone.

Last January, Super Kitty, our most favorite, craziest cat ever, got creamed by a passing car. As we always do for the furry ones, we held a proper funeral, spoke loving words, shed tears, shared memories, lit candles.

By this point, I’d sent Tatum, the middle child dog, off to stay with friends for awhile, an experiment in seeing what it might be like to scale down the pack. My heart, uneasy at this decision, was soothed some knowing that the home she went to had a not-grown-up boy who always wanted a dog and who, as my son once had, played the electric guitar for her.

But Tatum came back and so again we were at five animals, a number that has held steady. All of them are rescues. Tatum came from a goat farm in Dripping when she was a few months old. Princess Bubbles was a stray that wandered into our lives in 2002, the smartest dog on the planet, a Boston mix with a severe underbite and a Napoleon complex, who tolerates being dressed in various costumes, including a pink silk princess dress and a hot dog ensemble that always prompts her to scowl in a way that suggests she is plotting to kill me in my sleep.

Satch, the oldest, is a pit bull heeler mix that came to us by way of Town Lake Animal Center. A psychological mess, he is prone to random aggression and would lay down his life for me, which is a nice sentiment unless you are jogger that crosses our path too closely. Courtesy of his disposition, he will never visit the inside of any of Austin’s fine dog parks. He literally walks on a short leash, and only by my side, for I am the only one he minds.

Then there is Rebound, the divorce puppy, an allegedly full breed Boston, who came to me from Kinky Friedman’s Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch last spring. Rebound is easily the dumbest dog ever born, prone to running into walls and falling over randomly, for no apparent reason. But she makes up for her mental challenges with a combination of speed and cuteness that prompt her to do things like kill squirrels, bring their bodies in the house, and look up with the most adorable look on her little face, proud of her hunting prowess.

For a while there, I thought I might get a couple of goats. A previous goat owner dissuaded me with real life examples of how goats are trickier than one might think. But I was blessed last summer with possessing Happy the Goat for a day, a little guy I rescued when he was hit by a car. How I cried when, while I was at the vet’s to get him emergency surgery, his human tracked me down.

Next year, I’m leaving the country. For a long time. Though I have nineteen months to come to grips with the idea, just thinking about dispersing the pack makes my stomach churn with anxiety. I imagine Satch, who is pretty old, will have already headed to that doghouse in the sky. Tatum will be happy wherever she goes. Rebound, with her pure blood and hold me hold me hold me oh I love you so much ways will be simple to place. And my friends in Germany, who love Bubbles and whom she loves in return, have offered her a chance to become an ex-pat. (I’m sure she could learn the language in a week.)

For now, we carry on intact. I still get emails from people who know I am a sucker for the beasts, who inform me of this or that animal that desperately needs a home, that hold that bait before me knowing I might be persuaded to again grow the pack a little more. I hold firm and block out the thought of how my “no” could mean another animal stuck in a shelter, doomed for an early death.

And I conclude with my favorite kind of trip: a guilty one. People? There are pets a plenty out there that need you. They don’t talk back and they worship the ground you walk on. Get one today. I promise, you’ll feel really popular if you do.

Spike Gillespie is more popular than John Lennon. She blogs at LaunchPadCoworking.com and www.spikeg.com. And she is the Head Mistress of The Dick Monologues.