For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of having an animal rescue ranch. Nothing major, like the Best Friends animal sanctuary in the Utah desert, which houses approximately 1,600 dogs, cats rabbits, horses, goats, pigs and even a rooster named Salvador. Just something manageable: a sweet-tempered goat or two, a smart little donkey and some chickens saved from a date with cordon bleu at the 11th hour.
I don’t have any experience with goats or donkeys, though I do have a short but colorful history in chickens. When I was about 6, my father bought a tiny Easter chick from a pet store and surprised me with it. She was dyed pink, but, the mind of a 6-year old girl being remarkably fluid and inclusive, I named her Mr. Peepers.
Mr. Peepers and I became fast friends. She followed me all over the house and sat on my lap in the evenings while I watched TV. Once I stepped on her by accident.
“Where is she?” I recall yelling, only to finally become aware of a furious peeping underfoot. Incredibly, she was not hurt. And once my parents thought the family dog had gotten to her, as they found pockets of feathery stuffing scattered about my bedroom floor. When they arrived in the den to break the sad news, Mr. Peepers and I were snuggled up in my father’s recliner watching “The Monkees.”
Mr. Peeper’s story did not end badly, as far as I know. When she started to grow into a mature chicken, we donated her (anonymously) to a neighbor’s coop, where she was no doubt a surprise (still being pink) but would be well cared for. I was sad, but my true destiny, as I saw it, was horse ownership. I bade Mr. Peepers goodbye, and for the next six years waged an equine-themed campaign of startling proportions that would bring me a sadly neglected red mare named Sheba when I was 12.
But back to the chickens. After Mr. Peepers there was a short span of time during which my favorite thing to do was go to the mall with my best friend Bobbi and eat Chick-fil-A sandwiches. That I did not make the connection between Mr. Peepers and the sublimely spicy chicken sandwiches I adored, I can only chalk up to a kind of selective teenage blindness.
In my 20s, I lived for a month on a rural street next door to a woman who had a pet rooster. One night the rooster wandered into my yard, at which time one of my dogs had it for dinner. This was an especially tragic exclamation point in my otherwise happy narrative of chicken stewardship. In my 30s came a short window of time during which I sort of owned two roosters: A friend dropped them off at my farm; I discovered roosters do not have a concept of time and that they crow not only at dawn but all night and all day; and they wandered away two days later, much to my relief.
Which brings me to now. Backyard chickens are all the rage, and we finally have a backyard again that can house them. So, in the interest of research, my husband and I walked over to our neighbor’s house for a chicken meet-and-greet and a tour of their impressive coop.
I won’t lie: Even though some of the neighbor’s seven birds were quite beautiful, and despite the lure of fresh eggs, my husband does not relish the idea of chicken ownership. I can only surmise this is because he does not have a cherished Mr. Peepers in his history or a tragic altercation between rooster and dog to set right. He only has his farm upbringing, which did feature animals, the treatment of which was neither hostile nor doting.
Nevertheless, he will go along with the chicken plan the same way he went along with the horse plan years ago (he didn’t want one/we got two), the third dog plan (he didn’t want a third dog/we got one three times), and the senior dog plan (he didn’t want an old dog/wow, did we get an old dog).
It might seem I only want what my husband doesn’t want, but this is not the case. What’s truer is that while he loves animals, he knows they complicate life, and the more of them there are, and the older they get, the more complications arise.
I get where he’s coming from. Even though I’m more inclined to go all in where animals are concerned, I’m not sure what we’ll do. History writes itself every day, and right now my history in chickens is still unfolding.