In Remembrance of Chicken Hattrup and a Suggestion for Donald Trump

Rest in Peace, Chicken. Waffles and Ginger probably won’t miss you. Especially Ginger because she was at the bottom of a three-chicken pecking order situation and has now moved up to being at the bottom of a two-chicken pecking order since your demise.

Every morning I open the door to let our three chickens out of their deluxe, split-level coop and into their yard to go about their chicken days. This morning something seemed amiss when only Ginger and Waffles tumbled out of the coop in a manner almost as graceful as Cosmo Kramer entering Jerry’s apartment. As the two chickens darted their prehistoric looking heads nervously about and began scratching and pecking the ground as usual, they didn’t let on that any bloody horrificness had happened in their sweet coop that night. I opened the nesting box, no Chicken. I looked in the window near their perching area, no Chicken. I looked again in the chicken yard and outer coop, no Chicken. Had I accidentally left her out in the yard last night to blindly fend for herself in the dark against hungry raccoons and thus becoming an easy dinner? Surely handfuls of black, iridescent feathers or torn bits of wan chicken skin mixed with a few mangled bones, wobbly, red wattle material, or splatters of chicken blood would have been present—but they weren’t. I opened the nesting-box door once more and leaned in to check the coop floor and sure enough, there she was, slumped in the corner like, well, like a dead chicken. As I walked across the yard to tell Tim, I had a flashback of Chicken sitting awkwardly in her nesting box the previous day with one of her wings spread out slightly, staring straight ahead at the wall and not moving at all. At the time it seemed mildly humorous but now I realize that she was dying and I did nothing to help save her life or ease her possible pain but instead was only slightly entertained by the vision of her, apparently, in pain and dying.

Chicken was a chicken. I can’t say she was particularly nice or special or laid the best eggs ever, she was and did none of those things. She did have a deceptively sweet cooing sound I could listen to all day, or at least for a few minutes each day while I threw our fruit and veggie scraps to the chickens each day. We acquired Chicken five years ago this month when an acquaintance asked if we’d take her because she was being excessively picked on by their other hens. At the time we had just one other chicken, Waffles, who was also a rescue so we were excited to add another and make it an official flock. Chicken, who was originally named after a character from a children’s movie that was utterly forgettable to me, was in sorry shape when we acquired her—she was a bloody, raw mess. I’m not particularly attached to our hens in the way one would be to a beloved pet dog. I don’t want to hold and snuggle these birds or put diapers on them and allow them to roam around in our house, although I would want to put diapers on them just because it would be funny. I do, however, care for them as I do most living things (besides earwigs, bedbugs, and yellow jackets) and try to make sure they stay alive and out of pain. I could not understand how Chicken’s former family would allow a her to be pecked so incessantly that her whole back end looked like a glop of ground sausage before it’s been squeezed into the casing (which, by the way, is the alimentary canal from the bottom of the stomach to the anus, mmm). There must be some reason they allowed this chicken to be abused because otherwise these people didn’t seem unusually cruel to me. Although I had been inside of their house a few times, I didn’t really know them well enough to not judge them for this situation so I’ll go a ahead and say that that they were probably too busy helicopter parenting their young child, holding him back from experiencing the thrill of new life, to bother noticing the gnarled, bloody backside of one of the animals they chose to take “care” of.

We had to keep Chicken and Waffles separated initially after Chicken came to live with us in order to keep Waffles from abusing her. This is common in chickens, the last to be added to the hen house is at the bottom of the pecking order. These birds are as mean as a gang of 13-year-old junior high girls drunk on their tenuous power—cornering the weakest one, squawking at her, then abruptly turning around and accepting her with open wings, only to chase the weak one away once again. As the days flew by, Chicken and Waffles settled into some sort of acceptable routine and Chicken’s bloody rump turned into a featherless, scabby situation then eventually healed and was feathered over completely. It took about a year, including one round of molting, for her to come into her healthy, shiny, iridescently black, bird self.

Chicken was an OK bird, as far as chickens go. It was her nature to be mean to the next chicken we added to our little flock; her little bird-brain certainly wasn’t able to figure out a kinder, gentler way. She’s not much unlike our president, Donald Trump (urp, excuse the acid mixed with flecks of yogurt spewing out of my sour stomach as I say those words together). Tiny bird brain = insecurity = lashing out at others and calling them names when feeling threatened. This bird-brained behavior is fine for chickens but an adult human is expected to take a deep look at oneself when these fear-based tactics come up incessantly. Mr. Trump, stop being a chicken. Use your little fingers to help pull your fat head out of your tight ass so you can finally take a look at your pathetic self. I know it’s scary, but for the good of all beings you need to do this. Leave the bird-brained behavior to the hens.