I’m telling the kids that our rooster went off to live on a farm. It sounds like a lie that parents tell their kids, but it’s true.
He’s in a better place. He, um, went to the other side.
Ever since I ran an article a couple of months ago about how most of our chickens died (I’m a humor writer. I have chickens.) and we had to buy a new flock of chicks on Chol Hamoed Pesach so our lone remaining hen, Mo, wouldn’t be lonely, people want to know how they died.
“You want a story? I’m not a doctor.”
They died. It was a humor article, so I wasn’t going to get into it. You guys want to laugh at some weird things, but okay, here you go:
They got sick, I think. I don’t know what they had, but every sickness manifested the same way: We noticed that the chicken was walking funny. And our first reaction was always, “Something must be wrong with its leg!”
That’s like thinking, “Most people who die end up in a bed first. So it must be their legs.”
I don’t bring my chickens to the vet. They’re not on my health insurance. I paid less for them than I pay for the dead chickens I get in the supermarket. Should I pay for X-rays? Should I bring it to the dentist, and when they’re about to do my X-rays and they leave the room, I pull the chicken out of a bag and stick it in front of the scanner?
I don’t even know which leg. Wasn’t it limping on the other leg yesterday?
And it’s not like they made it obvious. Chickens are social animals; they don’t want anyone to know anything’s wrong, so they they stagger around and hope no one will notice, kind of like Joe Biden.
But I’d pick them up move their legs back and forth, hoping that when I bent it in whichever way made it hurt more, they’d say, “Owowowstop!” and I’ll know. And then what? I don’t know. One step at a time.
This isn’t a very exciting story. I know it’s not what people want to hear when they ask how your chickens died. They want to hear something like, “A bear broke into the coop.” Some exciting answer that you maybe caught on video.
It’s not like they all died on one crazy weekend. It was one at a time over the course of six months. But now I’m thinking maybe I should start giving sarcastic answers.
“How did this one die?”
-“He didn’t see the train.”
-“He was assassinated.”
-“Sharks.”
-“Texting and driving.”
-“Got too close to the grill.”
-“She stuck a fork in the toaster.”
-“She got in trouble with the mob.”
-“She was running with a shechitah knife.”
In fact, it might have been better if these things did happen, because then we would’ve eaten whatever eggs we had left. When a chicken dies for undiagnosed medical reasons, we throw out all the eggs just in case. All the eggs we ate so far were perfectly safe; it’s probably the ones we’re up to that are a problem. We don’t have an FDA. It’s just guesswork, like Mexico.
So when our second-to-last chicken died on Chol Hamoed Pesach, we said, “Now what?” You can’t have just one chicken. It’s like having one kid. Who’s it going to play with? You?! You have things to do.
We’d wanted to get more chicks the old-fashioned way – by hatching them in a school. That was how we’d gotten our first chick (Yapchick) – when my daughter brought it home from kindergarten. (She’s 22.) (She teaches kindergarten.) But that would take too long.
Mo had come from my son’s friend’s petting farm in Monsey. But as far as we knew, this guy wasn’t just giving away chickens on Chol Hamoed, which is probably his busiest time of the year, yelling at kids to stop feeding the goats matzah.
But apparently, there’s more than one way to crack an egg. And seeing as we were looking for a Chol Hamoed trip anyway, we drove out to a farm supply store. Because chickens aren’t pets, apparently. They’re farm supplies. The difference is that if you want a pet, you can buy a pet, but if you want chickens, you have to buy a minimum of 4. Which was fine, because we wanted to replace four.
We bought six. Of as many different breeds as we could. But our reasons were fourfold:
- Variety is fun.
For example, we picked something called a Starlight Green Egger, because we thought it might be fun to have green eggs, and if we understand the Dr. Seuss book correctly, they don’t taste that bad once you get over the color.
- Just in case someone’s not a girl.
Girls lay significantly more eggs. And they don’t chase people screaming.
The store guaranteed that all the chicks were girls, probably. So we got a couple extra, just in case.
- Just in case someone isn’t kosher.
You’d think that all chickens are kosher, but as we found out with our first group, it’s only the ones that have a mesorah. And none of the bins actually said whether the chickens were kosher; you had to just know, like European hechsheirim.
- It’s easier to tell them apart if they’re different breeds.
We need to keep track of which one’s which. Which is the one who’s walking funny? Did the injury switch legs, or is this a different chicken? Did it switch chickens?
As it is, two of the ones we picked are the same breed, because I knew for a fact that breed was kosher. And we don’t know which is which.
And you’re like, “Why does it matter?”
Well, one of them actually did hurt her ankle, as a chick, and we were trying to monitor it to see if it was getting better, and people kept saying, “She’s walking just fine.”
“No, that’s the other one.”
It’s like when you’re missing one shoe and everyone keeps finding the one you have.
And you’re like, “Why not make a siman?”
We did. That might be what hurt her ankle.
See, my daughter’s first idea was to put nail polish on one chick. But then everyone started pecking her feet out of curiosity. And my daughter said, “Yeah, come to think of it, when I’m wearing nail polish, they peck at my fingers.”
So my next idea was to put a rubber band on someone’s leg. And the next day she was limping on her ankle. We figure she must have caught it on something.
I have no idea how many times we switched their names. This must be how parents of twins feel.
“What do you mean? Manny’s the one with a rubber band on his ankle, and J.J.’s the one with toenail polish!”
We didn’t want to give the chickens names that turned out to be the wrong gender, again, so we figured we should name them after food. Food doesn’t have genders, and Pesach has no shortage of foods.
Yapchick worked out.
So we have Zroa, who came with fully-developed wings; Beitzah, who has a white spot on her head; Karpas, who’s our green egger; and then no one wanted to name a chick Marror. So we named our black chick Matzah, because it isn’t the ideal color for matzah, but let’s face it; and then Lukshen and Kichel are the two yellow ones we can’t tell apart.
And people are like, “Lukshen is chometz.”
Well, not Pesach lukshen. We specifically had Pesach lukshen in mind. We don’t eat gebroktz, so we make something called lukshen for our soup that’s basically an omelet with potato starch in it.
And you’re like, “That sounds dry.”
Yeah; that’s why we put it in the soup.
When we got home, I immediately emailed my chicken rabbi.
(Yes, I have a chicken rabbi.)
(The rabbi is human.)
Turns out one chicken has no mesorah, and it’s the green egg layer. Who knew?
So then we thought, “We could probably keep her anyway, because we’ll always know which eggs are the ones we can’t eat: the green ones.”
But then I read that 5% of green eggers don’t actually lay green eggs. Which could be a problem.
So okay, maybe we’ll get rid of it. We’d originally figured that if one isn’t kosher and one’s a boy, that still gives us the 4 we wanted.
Turns out one of them actually is a boy. It’s the green egger. So he’s definitely not going to lay green eggs.
I guess he’s the 5%.
So we brought him to the farm. The farm was perfectly willing to take him, provided I dropped him off in their front office in a cardboard box. Though they didn’t tell me that part until I got there. So I had to drive around Monsey looking for a box, and then come back and leave the box in that day’s “incoming chickens” stack. (There were two stacks of boxes, in the office with the cashier lady.)
So if you ever visit this farm, perhaps on Chol Hamoed, you might see Karpas.
Might. I forgot to poke holes in the box.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.