Chicken Swinging

Chicken Swinging

Even though I’ve been working with CAS for almost a year and a half, first as a volunteer and currently as Outreach Director, I had never formally taken part in a rescue until last week. When my colleague Julie told me that I needed to go to Brooklyn to pick up a chicken that had been found wandering the streets, I was mostly filled with excitement over knowing that I would have a tiny role in giving this critter a new and better life.

However, this excitement was punctuated with intermittent periods of anxiety, as my dormant, long-standing, and totally unreasonable fear of birds started to rear its ugly head. As a kid and well into adulthood, I’d always had this nagging fear that birds in my vicinity would peck or claw me to death. I attribute that ridiculous mindset to two distinct incidents from childhood: cowering helplessly as seagulls descended on my sisters and me as we ate our lobster rolls on a seaside pier in Montauk, New York, and then on a couple of family vacations to the Philippines, watching in horror as chickens squawked, flapped, and ran for their lives from cleaver-wielding relatives who owned tiny farms in the countryside. Believe me, I know that this fear is utterly silly, but childhood moments that like can leave lasting impressions.

Anyway, so I arrive at the cat and dog rescue group in Williamsburg to pick up the chicken, and the wonderful woman who is on early morning cat duty introduces me to “Chickie” who had been camping out in a large rabbit hutch. The woman retells the story about how a local resident had found Chickie wandering the streets, after she had likely escaped from a group of chickens awaiting slaughter as part of the Orthodox Jewish ritual of Kapparot during Yom Kippur.

Kapparot involves waving or swinging a live chicken above a person’s head three times, in the belief that the person’s sins will be transferred to the bird, and that the “swinger” will escape divine punishment. The chicken is then slaughtered. As a recent NPR story reports, this ancient practice has been getting more popular in recent years, but it's also divided the Orthodox Jewish community. There have been numerous documented cases of extreme cruelty and neglect, where chickens are found filthy and emaciated, stuffed in cramped crates and left exposed to the harsh elements, and sometimes completely abandoned after the holiday passes: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=113179433. In the past, CAS has actually welcomed dozens of chickens rescued from such horrible circumstances.

After we got Chickie plopped down on a comfy bed of shredded paper in a large cat carrier, the chicken and I hit the road for CAS. She rattled around in the carrier a few times, and clucked intermittently on the 2-hour drive north, perhaps expressing her dismay at my selection of music, or maybe she was just asking “Are we there yet?” When we arrived at the farm, Abby Rogers, CAS’s Animal Care Director, and I got her settled in a spacious cage with lots of hay. Abby explained that while Chickie looked fairly healthy at first glance, she’d have to stay in temporary isolation while they conducted a thorough physical exam. As I looked into Chickie’s eyes, I soon realized that she needed a new name – something that conveyed strength and regalness. I decided on “Hatshepsut”, one of the few female pharaohs of Egypt; during her long reign, Egypt enjoyed much prosperity and good fortune. I’ve wanted to name an animal friend that for a long time.

Later that day, as Hatshepsut began to acclimate to her new surroundings and did all the cool things that chickens like to do, we discovered that she is actually a boy. He is sweet, gentle, and beautiful. So, his name is now Cheyenne, named after the Native Americans with present-day communities in Montana and Oklahoma, and who figured prominently in the resistance by Plains Indians to white settlers in the 18th century.

Thanks to Cheyenne, and my other feathered friends at CAS, I think I can finally put to rest that pesky and irrational childhood fear.