The Time I Let the Wrong Chicken Die

I grew up around animals. As I’ve previously mentioned, I grew up with a set of matching Labradors and when I was 13, my mom found her love of horses again and has been an avid equestrian ever since. Me? Not so much. Horses are large and unpredictable and they make me sneeze. That being said, I still know my way around horses and other livestock.

In high school, I was a very enterprising young lady. I worked a lot more often than I hung out with my friends and I was always willing to take on additional work. As such, I got a lot of “pet-sitting” jobs. 

For those of you not from the country, our kind of “pet-sitting” is not just going over to someone’s house and taking a dog outside to poop. It involves A LOT more poop. I would wake up at around 6am, head over to the barn, shovel the previous day’s poop out of the horse stall, mix up the food and associated elixirs.  Horse people invariably not only feed their horses, but give them 6,708 supplements to make sure they’re the horsiest horses that ever horsed, I guess? I don’t know. I just dumped what they told me to dump in the food bucket and didn’t ask questions. Usually I would have to give them some hay, which also makes me sneeze and wait for them to finish before letting them out. It’s not just walking a pug; it’s a lot of work. 

Everyone knew that I was as trustworthy as a 16 year old girl could be, so I got hired to do this pretty frequently. 

I also worked at a restaurant with my friend Rachael and her mom, Deanna. They had a menagerie of wayward strays that they had taken in over the years-dogs, cats, chickens, horses. Deanna had a big heart and would take in animals that no one else wanted. When their family went on vacation, I was tapped to be the temporary caretaker of her ragtag brood.  

The ragtagiest among them was an absolutely ancient chicken. I don’t know how long chickens usually live, but I can say with near certainty that this chicken had passed that mark years prior. It was so old it couldn’t stand up. To feed it, I had to walk into the chicken coop and put a special bowl of food right under its face so it could just kind of loosen its neck and let its head fall into the bowl. 

Feeding chickens is not rocket science. Normally, when you feed them, you just toss a bunch of chicken food into the coop on the ground or in a trough and that’s the end of it. In comparison to that, this chicken came with a lot of instructions. 

And now I’m going to need to backtrack for a moment and tell you a little bit about Deanna. She was a 1960s flower child earth-mother type who was stuck firmly in the wrong decade. She was a spiritualist hippie who believed in reincarnation and bought me my first set of tarot cards. She also believed that every creature, upon their death, should be celebrated with a funeral and burial ceremony. 

Knowing it was very likely that this chicken would pass on to the afterlife while on my watch, I was given explicit instructions as to what to do with the chicken, should that occur. I was to wrap it in a trash bag and put it in the freezer so the chicken could be respectfully interred in its final resting place when the family returned from vacation. 

On day 2 of minding the menagerie, I went into the chicken coop to feed the Methuselah chicken. As I was pouring food into her face-bowl, I felt something rush past me and out the door. Which I had neglected to close behind me. 

“Uh-oh, this is bad,” I thought as I closed the coop door and ran after the rooster that had escaped. At this point, I still firmly believed that with determination and my ability to run very fast, I could catch this escaped rooster. I was a tennis player, afterall. How hard could it be? 

I look back at my 16 year old self and I laugh and laugh. How hard could it be? The answer is impossible. Chickens can be caught-just not by clueless teenage humans. 

I quickly realize that this is going to be a lot harder than I thought. Despite my speed and agility, I cannot even get remotely close to this chicken. It is covering a tremendous amount of ground, high on its newfound freedom. 

I start to panic. This was not the chicken that I was supposed to lose today. 

So I did the only thing I could think to do; I called Richard. 

Richard was a family friend of Deanna’s and the sous chef at the restaurant we all worked at. 

“Richard! Oh my god! I’m panicking-one of the chickens got out and I don’t know what to do! I’m chasing it but I can’t catch it.” 

Richard as (and probably still is) one of the calmest (and most rational) people I’ve ever known. I never heard him raise his voice once; and when you work in a busy restaurant kitchen, that’s saying a lot. 

Richard laughs. 

“And why exactly did you call me to help you?”

“I don’t know! You know this chicken. I thought you could tell me how to catch it? I guess?”

“You’re probably not going to catch that chicken if it doesn’t want to be caught.”

“What if I throw a blanket over it?”

Richard laughs, “It’s worth a try I guess.”

This could not possibly get worse, I thought. I’m running around like a lunatic trying to throw a blanket over a wild rooster I can’t get within ten feet of. 

Then…it got worse. The dogs have spotted our wild chase and joined in. Deanna’s dogs were borderline feral and would chase (and attack) anything that ran. 

Finally, the moment they’d been waiting for

So now we have an escaped rooster, followed closely by two wild mutts and trailing way way behind is me, hysterical, screaming  and waving a blanket in the air.

Once the dogs joined the chase, I should have known it was over. There was absolutely no way I was going to outrun a bunch of crazy dogs on a mission. 

It felt like an eternity, but it was probably only about two minutes before the dogs caught up with the rooster. The wild chase was over in an instant. The dogs stood proudly over their downed prey as I looked helplessly on. 

Luckily, I knew exactly what I was supposed to do. I put the dead rooster in a garbage bag, put the bag in the freezer and went home. 

Deanna called me when they returned. 

“There is a dead chicken in your freezer, but it’s not the one you were expecting.”

You’d think that would be the last time I tried to chase and capture a domestic fowl on foot (it wasn’t), but that’s a story for another day.