Did I accidentally kill my pet?
Hey guys, this is a bit of a weird question, but obviously it's an upsetting topic and I'd like to know what others think...
So my partner and I have been raising some baby chickens, we hatched some here and the others we bought at 1 day old. We really love them and care for them. Today I went downstairs to the brooder (big secure box with heat lamp for keeping baby birds in) to give the chicks some food and water, and I opened it to find something horrifying... One of the chicks (a Welsummer x Rhode Island White, 8 weeks old, her name was Haven) was dead. But, horribly so. She had gotten her head out of the brooder lid, body inside, and her neck was crushed under the closed lid. So her body was there, all stretched up tall, stuck there with her poor little head on the outside of the brooder, and her neck just crushed completely flat. She stayed like that for a few seconds, then her poor little body flopped backwards and fell lifelessly into the box. It was so awful. At first I thought that, because the pad bolts on either side of the lid hadn't been fastened, she may have tried jumping up, moved the lid a little, and gotten herself stuck. I boxed up her body and took it up the road to the vet clinic for disposal.
My girlfriend called me and I told her the bad news. Turns out she knew when it must have happened... The afternoon before when someone had come over to buy a couple of the chicks, and she closed the lid up afterwards. She heard a really loud squawking but when she looked back, she couldn't see anything unusual, and the noise had stopped, so she figured they were just having a squawk because suddenly there was two less in there. They do make a lot of noise when you change their conditions or pecking order, so that made sense.
But apparently she'd closed the lid on poor Haven's neck without noticing, and the squawk was her dying D=
So I'm being really supportive and caring, and obviously I'm pretty sad about it, and it was horrible seeing what I saw... When she starts getting kinda mad at me and telling me it's my fault. I got the brooder (it had been a small dog kennel that I converted), and the lid is a bit heavy (it's about 7mm MDF, probably 90x90cm), and my girlfriend has said to me before that she finds it a bit awkward to use because of that. She's telling me that because I got the brooder (which we've used regularly for months now, on at least 6 different occasions), and she told me she found it awkward to use, and I didn't go buy something else that would be easy for her to use, that it's my fault that poor little Haven was killed =( Apparently, it's my responsibility to provide something safe and secure for the chicks to live in, and when I pointed out that I had actually done that, she said it was still my fault because I didn't want to buy something different (which would cost over $100, probably a lot more).
I didn't feel that this was my fault, but a really sad, horrible accident. I didn't even feel blame for my girlfriend, because it was of course an accident... But she's turned it on me. I feel so horrible about this - Haven was a beautiful little pullet, strong and healthy, she would have grown up and had a long happy life with us... But now, she's gone, so quickly, in such a random accident... And my girlfriend is telling me it's my fault. That I should have interpreted 'I find this awkward to use' as 'I could potentially kill our animals by accident because I cannot use this safely'. And why didn't she get something else herself if she found the one I got so hard to use and genuinely thought that her inability to use it posed a threat? It's just opening and closing a lid... How would I know that she couldn't safely do that? It's not an unreasonable weight or shape or anything... I can't just assume that she has these limitations out of nowhere without completely thinking that she can't do physical things at all... And she's used it near daily, multiple times a day, for months - I just wouldn't know, I don't get it.
Anyway, sorry for the wall of text, I just feel terrible =( So do you think that I'm responsible for this horrible accident? Do you think I was negligent in my care for our chicks by not buying something different? Should I be feeling this guilty?
Cheers.