Ever since our kids came home with chickens, everyone we tell wants to know if they’re boys or girls. Like it really matters. I’ll tell you this: I’ve had numerous animals in my house over the years—kittens, snakes, parakeets, a hamster, various fish … I don’t think I’ve ever known if any of them were boys or girls. I kind of let them have their privacy.
We actually have a fish right now, as I write this. No idea what gender it is.
With chickens, gender kind of matters, though, because if you have a female, you might have eggs every morning, whereas if you have a male, you might have angry neighbors every morning.
I once wrote an article about how at the end of the school year, your kids will bring home all kinds of things that you’ll have to figure out how to store. Well, apparently, if your kid is a preschool teacher, she’ll bring home animals. My daughter brought home a chick. She also brought home a fish that she’d accidentally kept alive from when they taught the letter dalet all the way until the end of the year. She was the only morah who consistently remembered to feed it. Though ever since we’ve gotten the chickens, I don’t think anyone’s remembered to feed the fish. At least not consistently. My other kids do not even remember that we have a fish. It’s not nearly as exciting. You can’t take a fish out of its bucket and hold it up and say, “Oh, it left a present on my hand. Whoops, it jumped onto the floor.” And then chase it around, under furniture.
Also, fish don’t really make noise, that we know of. Whereas when she brought the chick home, it wouldn’t stop chirping. So my son called his friend, who runs a farm, and asked, “How do you get chicks to stop chirping?” like maybe there was some screw underneath that we had to tighten. And his friend said that chickens are social animals, not unlike my son, and the chick would not stop chirping because it needs a friend. So my son went to the farm and picked up another chick that is about a week or two older.
Anyway, we might not know their genders for a while. From what we’ve read, unless we’re professional chicken tenders, we won’t know for weeks.
Get it? Chicken tenders.
Apparently, the average chicken doesn’t lay eggs until it’s about 16–24 weeks old. (They have to at least be bigger than the eggs.) Which sounds like a long time, until you realize that my daughter didn’t get a job until she was 18. And she keeps the money. Whereas with a chicken, we get the eggs! That’s what sold my wife on this, I think. Do you know what eggs cost in the store these days? You can get free eggs, just for the price of feed and bedding and grit and toys and a chicken coop!
I’ve been trying to figure out the genders, though, for the sake of the people who keep asking. I’ve been reading things like, “Males have pointier feathers and larger combs.” Than what? I have two chickens! Of different breeds! And no one’s grown a comb yet!
Either way, it will be a while. I don’t even know if the chickens know.
So for the time being, we’ve been alternately calling the chickens “he” or “she.” My wife and daughter usually say “she,” my sons usually say “he,” and I go by whomever I’m talking to. And if I’m talking about both chickens, I choose a different gender for each so my listener can keep the story straight. (I usually call the bigger one “he” for some reason, mainly because I’m bigger than my wife.) If only there were some gender-neutral pronoun we can use for animals whose gender we don’t know.
Oh, wait; we can use “it!”
This is the other reason gender matters: We have to come up with names. Gender should affect names, right?
Not really. Because #1, the chickens don’t even realize they have names. We give them names so we can talk to each other about them. It’s purely for lashon ha’ra purposes. Number 2, the chickens won’t be offended if we give them names of the wrong gender. And #3, we can give them names that aren’t actual names and therefore don’t have a gender. Like there are no human beings I know named “Schnitzel,” for example. Except this one kid in camp.
Basically, what we decided was that the child who came home with each chicken gets to name it. But that hasn’t stopped the arguments: Schnitzel and Fire Popper, Cornflake and Pretzel, Chalifasi and Temurasi, Smitchick and Boychick… The kids do not stop arguing about names. This has been going on for weeks, and no one is letting up.
See, this is why you don’t let your kids name each other.
In the meantime, I’m glad there’s a little one and a big one, because that way, while the kids figure this out, my wife and I can say, “the little one” and “the big one.” I don’t know what we’re going to call them if the little one gets bigger than the big one.
For now, though, my daughter named her chicken Yapchick, which sounds cute until you realize that there’s no actual chicken in yapchick. And my son named his Baby Mo after one of his cuter cousins whose parents once owned chickens. But those might just be the names for now.
“What if it survives to adulthood?” I asked. “Will we call it Adult Mo?”
“No,” my son said. “Baby’s his first name.”
“So his last name is Mo?”
So for now, the big one is Baby Mo. The name sort of befits it, though, because it has serious FOMO. I’ve already mentioned once how it feels the need to join us for Shabbos meals. Well, it also feels the need to pop out of the bin whenever we hold Yapchick, which is a lot, because Yapchick is cute. And then it walks around and does the constant chirping thing. So we have to hold this big one, too, every single time, even though it’s not as cute, so it doesn’t get a complex.
Oh, you know how they say that chickens can’t fly? That’s a lie. Or else what I have is not a chicken. I mean, if I don’t know how to figure out gender, there’s no way I know breeds. There are only two genders. The other day my son was holding Yapchick near where I was working, and Baby Mo popped out of the bin and landed on my desk. (I’m getting a lot of work done these days.) But yeah, chickens can’t fly.
That said, we don’t really lock them in the bin most of the time, so we basically have free-range chickens. In our house. You know how when you go to the zoo, there are just some loose chickens wandering around, like, “Are these guys even aware this is a zoo?” That’s what our house is like. Every day, they have to explore the entire living room, pecking for food on my hardwood floor that I sweep a thousand times a day now.
“Is this food?”
“No, this is a present you left earlier. Stop pecking it.”
They never venture too far from the bin, because they know that that’s where the food is. But what if there are more things they can eat? Like the little plastic base from a shtender?
So now I’m checking constantly to make sure they’re still in the bin and not under the wheels of my desk chair. Because if you’re going to find food on the floor, it’s a pretty safe bet that’s where you’ll find it.
For the most part, they have a big-sibling/little-sibling relationship.
The big one is like one of those uber-protective five-year-olds who call the baby, “My baby.” Oh, because you do all the work, right?
But in the meantime, if, for example, I give them a handful of blueberries, the big one will pick one specific blueberry to eat, and the little one will chase it: “I want this blueberry, too!”
I feel like a parent.
“There are like ten blueberries!”
“No, I want the blueberry he has.”
Mind you, the little one was the first one to taste the blueberries in the first place and realize that they were good. Baby Mo didn’t even realize they were food. He was scared of them. But now Yapchick only wants the blueberry that Baby Mo is eating.
Whatever Baby Mo does, Yapchick copies him and follows him around like a little sibling. Like the big one says, “We’re going to peck on the hardwood floor fruitlessly for a bit,” and the little one says, “OK. But I’m going to run around you and try to peck the same exact spot you’re pecking.”
“Hhh. Fine.”
It’s like we have a chicken and an assistant chicken.
And then the big one sits down, and the little one stands over him ready to take his orders because it doesn’t know how to sit yet. But really the big one just looks annoyed, like it’s exhausted, because the little one does not go to sleep. It just nods off standing and its head drops lower and lower until it’s sprawled on the ground, until it hears literally any sound, and, “What? I’m awake!”
When will this babysitting gig end?
Anyway, that’s it for now. We’ll look in on the chickens in a few weeks, unless they end up under my chair. I will, of course, keep you posted on the gender thing as it develops, in case you’re trying to earn shadchanus. n
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 MSchmutter@gmail.com. Read more of Mordechai Schmutter’s articles at 5TJT.com.