Cock-A-Doodle-Dead.
They say you shouldn’t name your chickens, and now I know why.
Before I begin to tell the tale of a beloved chicken named Becca…
…I’M DOING MY FIRST-EVER SLAM!
Next Saturday, July 18 at 5pm (EST), I’m sharing a spoken word, or 500, at Nan Tepper’s Wham! Bam! Thank You! Slam! This month’s theme is Freedom or Fear? Join me, Amie Newman, Christine Destrempes, Claire Polders, Elizabeth Yoffe, Gloria Horton-Young, Natalie Serber, Rosana Francescato, ProfessorMeredith , and my girl Bridget Young , for a laughter and tear-filled zoom together. Tickets HERE. (Discount tix if you have a vagina, or plan on getting one.)
And now…back to our regularly scheduled programming:
I spent months upon months researching chicken-keeping. I weighed the pros and cons of a mobile coop/runs vs. a built-in coop/run, toiled over the best feed, and how to keep them safe from all of the predators western Connecticut has to offer: hawks, eagles, bobcats, raccoons, black weasels, foxes, coyotes, and of course the most deadly of predators, our own two, domesticated dogs. There were plenty of arguments to be made for heating the coops in the winter, and against heating the coops as chickens are supposed to keep each other warm and regulate their temperatures on their own, because no one wants to set their coop on fire with a space heater leading to death-by -fried-chicken. But I wouldn’t have to worry about that just yet, seeing as they would be maturing through the summer.
I’d joined FB groups and blogs, learned all about the different breeds and how to tell what color eggs they would lay, (did you know they have little patches of “flesh” under their ears that dictate egg color: brown for brown, white for white, etc!), and thanks to the wonderful world of our phones recording everything we say or type, I ordered many things that I didn’t need…just incase.
After trips to towns far and near, searching for their future home, I finally found the perfect henhouse + run on Facebook marketplace. Two weeks before the “due” date of their arrival, I’d stained their marvelous mansion inside and out. We all, and by “all” I mean my sons, Tor and me, spent DAYS hardware clothing the entire structure seven ways from Sunday to make sure that no aforementioned predators would get to them. I’d heard first-hand accounts of nightmarish scenes where a fox or weasel gets into a henhouse and literally slaughters an entire flock for sport. Children, waking up to collect their freshly-laid eggs, only to find a bloodbath of chicken parts flung all over the place, inciting them to become vegetarians at a very young age, and possibly not getting enough protein, stunting their growth and becoming almost-midgets. This kind of massacre wasn’t going to happen on my watch. I was going to be a good mother. And also, I’m a bad vegetarian.
The big day had arrived: May 30th, 2026.
Ten hens, of varying varieties, flapped their way into our lives and we were never the same.
The pecking order was already set: the big white one ruled the roost. She reminded me of the “Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman,” as she clomped around, making her presence known, instilling fear at every pop of her head. Like any fascist, she knew she had to have a few cohorts by her side in order to assert her dominance, so she cozied-up to the three older girls.
We started calling them the “Mean Girls” and then, as the Giantess grew on us, we named her Becca after a friend who bet us $20 that all of our chickens would die within one month.
The bet was on. The clock was ticking. I was going to win this because I knew the capabilities of my mothering strength could beat any predator, any insect, any virus that would come for my girls.
After about a week, all their fun personalities and quirks garnered them names: to name a few…there was Helen Keller (because her right eye would never open), Henriette “The Pioneer” who ventured out into the run first, Speedy, the one who we, still to this day, have never been able to catch, Ellie, after the Elephant Man, with her deformed foot, and Love who, out of the blue, decided to jump up on my leg and let me pet her like a dog.
Four weeks went by without incident. All were alive and thriving, and after receiving all of her fox-themed, dead-chicken-memed texts, Human Becca had to cough-up the twenty bucks and give us a round of applause for keeping EVERYONE breathing. But no sooner was Andrew Jackson’s face in our hot little hands…than Bird Becca started acting strange. She wasn’t bossing the others around anymore. She began hanging out with Helen, the blind underdog at the back of the run, then, roosting by her at night. A few days later, she began clomping around aimlessly. I blamed it on the heat wave and like a good mother, jumped into action by freezing half-gallon Ocean Spray bottles and running them out twice a day to keep them cool. But nothing changed with Becca. It only got worse.
She stopped going into the coop with the others at night. The Google said to pick her up and put her back in on a roosting bar to retrain her, but she acted drunk, and splayed out on the bottom. After four evenings of this, I called Cathy, the woman I got the chickens from. She informed me that the cause of Becca’s decline could be one, or more, of the following: worms, mites, lice, Marek’s disease, coccidiosis, or trying to pass an egg that is stuck.
I bathed Becca in a warm epsom salt bath incase an egg was stuck. I treated her with ivermectin incase she was infected with something. I put basil in her food, and electrolytes in the water, and still, she got worse. I sent the last video to Cathy and she wrote back one sentence. “I would cull (kill) that bird.”
That night, my hands shook as I googled, “How to wring a chicken’s neck.”
Here’s what it said:
“The best technique depends on the size of the bird. For adult chickens, hold the bird’s legs (and the wing tips if possible) in one hand, close to your hip with the underside of the bird’s body against your thigh. Using the first two fingers of your other hand, grip the head immediately behind the skull with your thumb under the beak. Stretch the neck downwards, at the same time pressing your knuckles into the neck vertebrae and pulling the bird’s head back. Neck dislocation should be achieved in one, swift pull. Be firm, confident and positive.”
How could I be “positive” at a time like this?!
The demise of this bird is proof that I’d failed as a mother!!! How could I kill my own kid? After researching other ways, to put Becca out of her misery, I concluded that I was neither “firm” nor “confident” about the idea of snapping Becca’s neck. What if I did it wrong and made her suffer MORE?!
I texted my eldest son, Colton, who had to kill a chicken for dinner when he was studying abroad in Nepal. He said he would “do it” when he got home from work. I didn’t want to know the hows about what he would “do” to “it.” But I felt terrible that my soulful, empathic, compassionate, Buddhist son would have this on his conscience. None of it felt right. I hated it all and was rethinking my entire role as a keeper of chickens. And a mother.
I setup the dog cage, put a towel around it, and pulled Becca off the floor of the run. Her breathing, weak. Her butt, crusted with shit and swollen. She didn’t deserve this. And by “this” I mean, any of it. Not to live like “this” or die like “this.” When my son came home, he got his sharpest knife, and he, along with Tor, Tor’s son, and myself, went to the wood-chopping stump. After some debate as to whether the axe would be better or the knife, Colton was confident that the knife would be more accurate and swift, than say, accidentally chopping Tor’s hand off while he held the chicken down for the deed. We said a few words in Becca’s honor, something like, “Becca, you started off being a bitch, but we grew to love you and we all will miss you dearly.” Not exactly poetic, but given the quick nature of her decline, there wasn’t time for flowery prose.
Even though I wasn’t the executioner, I made myself watch. She deserved at least that much respect.
My son raised the blade high, and in one swift swipe, her head popped off on the right, her twitching body on the left. Blood squirted from her neck onto Tor’s forearm. “I’m out,” he said, and walked into the house to scrub the evidence off his body. I wish I could scrub the evidence from my mind.
Every emotion swelled and I started to wail like a sobbing baby, and couldn’t stop. Colton wrapped his arms around me and held me like I was the child instead of him.
The son comforting the mother. So loving. So supportive. So…Colton.
My stepson, Lyon, Colton, and I walked Becca far out into the woods to feed the coyotes give her life back to nature. It was getting late. I wondered if the others in the flock would notice the disappearance of their friend, then wondered if they would be afraid of me after this. As the three of us solemnly walked back to the house, my stepson’s stomach growled loudly. This six-foot-three, big-boned man of Irish stock was always hungry. “Are we going to eat soon?,” he asked. I said, “Yes, dinner should be ready in about fifteen minutes.” Then, Colton asked, “What’s for dinner?”
…and I answered…
“Chicken.”
In Laughter,
LStL
p.s. The next morning my son woke up in a melancholic funk. In his wise way, he said, “It was sad knowing Becca wouldn’t wake up today, when we woke up today…and get to live. But, some things have to die in order for other things to live.” So true, son, so true.
LAUGHING MATTERS is a place for personal essays about the things we’re all thinking but don’t always say out loud: aging, creativity, fear, failure, love, and the strange relief of finding humor in the middle of it all. Here, I try to tell the truth without making it heavy, and find meaning without losing the levity. If you’ve ever laughed when you probably should have cried, you’re my people. ❣️
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OMG! I've been wanting chickens for years--no more. I'll get fresh eggs from a neighbor. This was heartbreaking and hilarious. I would have sobbed too. Of course, the Jew in me would have googled shechita. The Shocet is the person who kills the animal humanely, making the meat kosher.
oh, that photo and caption. that's dark sister, dark, dark humor.