Okay, you’ll all have to forgive me, I’m not sure how to post a link to the original article, but I’ll try…
Anyway, I wanted to add a little story to this. Several years ago, we bought some ducks for the kids and let them roam in the yard. I’m sure most of you have already figured out by now, after the nutria rat story, that I live in the country… on 8 acres of land, by the way, and it’s lovely. Either way, we bought some ducks and kept them in the yard. After a few months without incident, we ran out of the duck feed. My husband was supposed to get some on his way home from work that day, but I still felt bad about skipping a meal, so I threw some rice out there from dinner the night before. The rice, by the way, was already cooked. Well, the next day, all of our ducks were dead! Some of them were split open!! Now, at the time, I figured that they were split open because the rice “blew them up” because I’d heard the story about not throwing rice at weddings. I just thought it only had to do with uncooked rice, so I didn’t think I’d be doing that to my ducks!
But now that I put a little more thought into it, I imagine some of them were probably split open because after they died, some other animal took advantage of the situation and tried to eat them.
But the fact still remains, blow up or not, my ducks were dead! The only thing I can imagine is that the rice killed them, but I don’t think it could have been because it expanded in their gut because the rice was already cooked. So, does anyone else have any ideas on why this might have happened?
I know!! I really never believed that rice, especially cooked rice, could “blow up” a bird, but this one really confused me. The fact that some of them were split open has me thinking that maybe some wild animal got to them, but not all of them were like that. It’s possible that they caught some sort of disease, or maybe they got into something poisonous, but I have always felt so guilty that maybe I’m the one who killed them with the damned rice. I will probably never know what exactly did it. I know that the rice was fully cooked, and it didn’t have anything else in it. I did leave it out, covered, on the stove, overnight. I gave it to the ducks first thing the next morning.