Chickens
If I had pet chickens, they’d have names like Henrietta, Maude, Olga, Matilda, Harriet, and Esther. I usually am not a fan of animals with human names (like dogs named “Steve”) but for some reason, it really suits chickens.
“What the hell is your obsession with chickens?” Bee asked me one day. Why she doesn’t inquire about my other deviant obsessions, I don’t know. Maybe she decided to tackle them one at a time, and in fifty years or so she’ll have me all figured out.
I grew up with non-standard pets. My family is freakishly allergic to all things furry, so we never had dogs or cats growing up. We did have, at times, hamsters, rats, and guinea pigs, and a rabbit in the backyard, but none of them lasted as we either grew bored of them or my mother became bored of cleaning up after them, which was more commonly the case. She would then announce to the two of us that “our father was allergic to [insert furry animal here]” and away that pet would go.
My parents’ living room has always been a regular indoor aviary. While the Budgies, English parakeets, Lovebirds, and Finches would come and go, she always had the Double-Yellow Naped Amazon parrot. Bird people are fond of spelling out their pets’ species. While dog people do this to an extent, bird people are much more defensive about it. Never call my mother’s parrot a Yellow-Naped Amazon, when it is in fact a Double Yellow-Naped Amazon. The lovebird I used to own was a Lutino Peach-Faced Lovebird, and don’t you forget it. Jujy would like you to know that she is a Pacific Parrotlet, also sometimes known as the Celestial Parrotlet, blue mutation. Touring our living room was like birdwatching in South America, or Africa, or Australia, with the added distraction of my mother teaching you all there is to know about parrot behavior no matter how you tried to avoid her.
My one attempt at owning a regular pet (a dog) failed, and so I am back to things like Pacific Parrotlets and someday, Bantam Chickens. We’ve had chickens and ducks in our backyard ever since I was in middle school. My mother used to volunteer at my old elementary school while my brother was in attendance, and his second grade class would, once a year, watch the miracle of chickens hatching via a classroom incubator. While cute baby animals and little kids are often photographed together or used to sell cameras and grape juice, in real life they make terrible companions. Baby animals are fragile and small children are clumsy, and this results in poor, flattened creatures whose lives end up being shorter than a common housefly’s. As such, my mother would often end up bringing said fragile creatures home where my brother would inadvertently step on them in the backyard. I guess more of them made it than would have otherwise in a second grade classroom.
We named the chickens things like King Arthur, Napoleon, and Julius Caesar, even though they were all hens. My father could never remember any of these names so he called them red chicken, black chicken, and white chicken. Neither naming scheme turned out to be optimal for various reasons. For one, Caesar and King Arthur could never be distinguished because they were both black, and “black chicken” could never be identified because there were two of them. This was remedied one day when we found King Arthur (one of the black chickens), dead behind the coop where she had gotten stuck, with ants crawling in and out of her eye sockets. Boy, we really ran around the backyard screaming about that, until my father removed her after insisting we go back inside the house. I don’t know what my father did with King Arthur. I have an inkling that he dumped her in the garbage can, which is what he did with so many of the other victims. I’d watch the garbage men take the trash out on Mondays, and know that there was a dead chicken in there named King Arthur, underneath the bag of kitchen trash. We were never to speak of the animals that got sent to the dump.
Not all our backyard pets met untimely ends. Many of them lived for 15 years or longer, although the ducks never seemed to last as long as the chickens. My parents still have one chicken left, after all these years. My father puts chicken scratch in the garage where he sits all day browsing the web or making ammunition, and the chicken struts in and sits down on the rug by the foot of the stairs. He often picks the chicken up and pets it and then sets it free in the backyard again, where it wanders around doing myriad chicken activities, like scratching the dirt and eating bugs.
My father spent many of my school years battling chicken-eating raccoons. When I look back on it, a dog would have been a really good way of protecting the backyard fowl, but we couldn’t have one, as I explained earlier. Instead, my father built solid wood traps out of plywood that only our pet duck would get trapped in and spent the evenings running outside with whatever weapon was handy when he thought he heard the “coons.” He shot one of them dead in the backyard with a handgun and told the neighbors he’d been firing a BB gun. The neighbors, being 80 years old and hard of hearing, apparently believed him. He hacked another raccoon to death with a shovel, and that was before he slipped in a mud puddle and fell on his back. Ah, for the love of chickens.
Chickens make people do crazy things, as evidenced above. And when you discover that Superstar’s nickname for me contains the word “chicken,” it becomes all that much more understandable.
