Emergency Backup Chickens

One of the things no one tells you about having chickens is that once you’ve built an entire infrastructure in your backyard and most of your chickens die, you’re like, “Well, we might as well get new chickens.” It’s a never-ending cycle.

And yes, we have chickens. Chickens are great, because you can keep them outdoors, where there are a bunch of animals anyway. It’s nice to see animals outdoors that don’t scare you in the middle of the night when you bring out the garbage. Also, according to a poll, chickens are the easiest animals to farm.

The hardest are bees.

So we’ve had chickens for a couple of years now. First we had Yapchick, who was our main chicken, and Baby Mo, who was our emergency backup chicken. Then we got a rooster, and then Mo hatched some of Yapchick’s eggs—a boy and a girl—so we had an emergency backup rooster, which is not something you want, because roosters fight.

But since the last time I wrote about them, some of the chickens died. And before you get all sad, you should realize that:

1. You eat an entire chicken about every 2 weeks.

2. This is the optimal situation. You want to outlive your pets. It’s better than the other way around.

So good news: We outlived our pets! So now we’re getting more pets. Because everyone was sad, l’maaseh. Particularly sad was the lone surviving chicken, who we aren’t even sure is halachically a chicken.

I’m talking about Baby Mo, who does not look like what you picture when you picture a chicken. For one, she’s a Bantam, so she’s half the size of a normal chicken. Also, she doesn’t really have a comb, and she has two thumb toes on each foot. In fact, the rabbi said I should probably stop calling her a chicken, because the entire reason we can’t consider her kosher is that we’re not sure of her lineage—there might not be chickens all the way back. But we don’t know what she is, and I can’t keep saying, “Baby Mo and the chickens.”

“Did anyone remember to feed Baby Mo and the chickens?”

“Baby Mo and the Chickens” actually sounds like a great name for a band. Not a good band. Probably one with incredible stage fright.

She definitely thinks she’s a chicken. She hangs out with the chickens, and we collect her eggs, and she doesn’t know we’re not eating them, and I don’t tell her. We give them to my wife’s non-Jewish co-worker who says they taste really good, and the last thing we want to tell her is that the bird laying them might not be a chicken.

But she’s the last one standing. The other 4 died, albeit not all at once.

It’s typical that our non-kosher chicken would outlive the rest. Maybe she has some bald eagle lineage in her or something. Are there any Bantam bald eagles?

Why am I asking you?

Our last chicken to die was Yapchick, who went on the first day of Chol Hamoed Pesach. While everyone else in the world was arguing about what to do that day, we started the morning burying a chicken.

Why did we bury it? Because we can’t flush it down the toilet, because it’s like 5 pounds. Including bones. Chickens might be the easiest animals to farm, but bees are easier to bury. Unless you’re too close to the hive and all their friends come to the levayah.

I suppose we could just throw it in the trash. We throw out chicken remnants all the time. And then we can come outside to find a cat eating it in the backyard in front of the other chickens. That’s an idea, right?

So my wife came up with the thought of burying it under her vegetable garden. It’s supposed to add nutrients to the soil, so that instead of growing just two tomatoes, we’ll end up with like three tomatoes. Hopefully. There are 4 chickens back there. Or we’ll have an animal digging up our garden, which we have anyway, which is why we only have two tomatoes. (My wife’s not bad at planting vegetables; she’s good at planting vegetables that animals want to eat. The most successful thing she grows is marror, which the local wildlife is not interested in. Maybe this will make the marror extra bitter.)

So at that point we were down to our emergency backup chicken. The problem is that you can’t just have an emergency backup chicken. What if that dies?

Actually, if that dies, you’re fine. You can have zero chickens, and you can have two chickens. You can’t have one chicken. Chickens are social animals.

The problem with having one chicken is that eventually it goes crazy and starts talking to itself. We’ve already caught her crowing.

Not at 5 in the morning, Baruch Hashem.

So we decided to get more chicks, to get more companions for our bantam eagle. Which meant that the sooner we did it, the better. Especially since it would take some time for the chicks in question to grow into actual companions for her. Like imagine you were lonely, so someone went out and got you a classroom full of preschoolers.

Plus it was Chol Hamoed, and this was a pretty good idea for a trip. The good thing about pets dying on Chol hamoed is that you can replace them and make a day of it. I’d already been looking for an idea the night before, and I couldn’t think of anything, and the kids weren’t contributing, and then we woke up in the morning and our second-to-last chicken was dying. So you have to be careful what you daven for.

So we went to the chick store. We were like the people who go to a pet store on Chol Hamoed and tell their kids it’s a zoo, except we actually came home with pets.

Though it wasn’t a pet store. Normal pet stores don’t have chicks, because technically, they’re not pets—they’re livestock. The technical difference is that if you have more than a certain socially-acceptable number of the same pet, you’re weird. Whereas with livestock, having less than a certain number is weird. No one goes over to a farmer and says, “You have way too many cows. It’s like you’re obsessed. Even two is too much.” (Though arguably, bees are livestock too, and two is too much.) In fact, the more of a certain livestock you have, the more self-sufficient you are. Especially if it’s Pesach and you’re buying chickens.

Okay, let’s put it this way: When we got to the store, they said we had to buy a minimum of four chicks. I doubt when you walk into a pet store for a cat, they tell you there’s a 4-cat minimum. Though there seems to be.

So we bought six (chicks). We did this because we actually wanted four, because we’d lost four, but apparently they don’t always make it to adulthood and not all of them are kosher despite the store labeling them as chickens, and not all of them are guaranteed girls, despite the store claiming they probably are. No one really knows.

We also bought a heat lamp, in case Mo decided she didn’t want to raise them and keep them warm or in case her wingspan wasn’t big enough for six chickens that were almost definitely going to be bigger than her in a couple of weeks. And then the store insisted we buy baby food, and we had to awkwardly fight them off, because it was Pesach. We had special Pesach food at home. We’d already bought like 10 lbs. of Pesach food, back when we thought we were feeding two chickens. We’d asked a shaylah, and were told to buy corn and freeze-dried insects.

Our chickens are Sephardi, apparently.

The lady was like, “Do you want to buy chometz baby food?” And we said, “No!” And she said, “So you already have food? Chicks need to eat.” And I didn’t want to say that we have corn and bugs that we’re planning on crushing with a hammer.

So we came home with new chicks, though we have to keep them inside until they’re big enough to handle the weather and being stared down by the neighborhood cats. But we did bring Baby Mo inside to show her what was going on so she would stop sadly crowing in the backyard. And we figured that she’s nurturing and she’d raised babies before that weren’t hers; she might be able to take these under her wings.

So we put her in with the babies, and she was confused to say the least. She was just standing there, like, “Who are these guys? They’re not my kids, right? Do you guys have an adult? Where’s your adult?”

No, you’re the adult.

Maybe we should stop calling her “Baby Mo.” Though we didn’t drop the “Mo” when we found out she was a girl. What is Baby Mo short for?

Because she’s a Bantam.

Very funny.

Baby Morah?

Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia and is the author of seven books, published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send questions, comments, or ideas to [email protected]. Read more of Mordechai Schmutter’s articles at 5TJT.com.