Pets I Used to Have

Today's Long & Short Reviews question asks about the pets reviewers used to have.

Since I want to post a lot more short reviews and also do some errands today, I'll keep it short. I've lived with a lot of pets--not even counting the "pet rock" discussed in response to a previous L&SR prompt. In this post I'll reminisce about the first one.

Some introduction to the breed may be necessary. When I say my first pet was a chicken, it seems, most people think of a different kind of bird than I have in mind. 

This photo from Poultrykeeper.com is not what Linda looked like. She had that red-brown-yellow color all over, except for some dark brown wing and tail feathers. Folding the tail in like that is a submissive display Linda probably never made. Her tail feathers were usually fanned! When I was growing up, most farms had free-range chickens and kept a few descendants of Old English Game chickens to protect their mixed flocks. Everybody knew what a yellow Game hen looked like. Old English Game breeders, however, don't recognize that type. Our yellow Game hens might have been crossbred with Buff Orpingtons or some other more gentle breed. They weren't gentle but their coats resembled Buff Orpingtons'.The saying was that you can't tame a Game chicken. You can, and my brother eventually did, but it's easier to tame almost any other breed. However, Old English Game chickens do share humans' territory on friendly terms. Like cats, if you move away they'd rather stay in their own place and go feral than move with you, so you have to find a near neighbor who's willing to look after them. If fed and protected from predators they can live five years, occasionally even longer. 

Old English Game chickens may once have been related to Cornish Game chickens, but as the breeds have evolved they now have little in common. Old English Game chickens are bred for strength and toughness, and are one of the few chicken breeds that can go feral and live long enough to reproduce. Cornish Game chickens are bred small enough that one person can eat one bird at one sitting, and docile, and even as chickens go the ones I've seen seemed extra-stupid. They can live longer than a year but they mope around the yard as if they knew someone was going to eat them and wanted to get it over with now.

My first pet was a chicken--a tough, long-legged, yellow Game hen. She and her two multicolored sisters strayed into a neighbor's barn one morning. 

By this time we had moved back to the Blue Ridge Mountains and rented a house in the neighborhood where I live now. Back then the local wildlife had been hunted down so that chickens could roam freely around people's yards and gardens, keeping the weeds and insects down. This system made the chickens useful, but sometimes they strayed. 

The neighbor traced the hens to their original owner. The original owner didn't want them back. Dad offered to trade one Plymouth Rock hen for the three Game hens and for the Game rooster the three hens had probably come to visit. Everyone was pleased with the trade. 

I already had two Brown Leghorn Bantam hens. They seemed like a chore, not pets. They thought they knew something about children and ran away, flapping and squawking, when I brought them food. To make the chore more interesting I was told that when one of the hens raised some baby chicks, the chicks would grow up around people and would be friendly. 

Game chickens are not known for their friendly dispositions. Ours were not pedigreed "feathered warriors" reared for the purpose of staging fights, but the rooster did stray around picking fights with other roosters. Of the three hens, the two multicolored ones were sassy and bossy enough to scare the bantam hens, and the yellow one was the boss. "She'll be the best mother hen," Dad opined. "She won't let anyone come near the baby chicks." When the yellow hen got ready to brood, she didn't just peck at his ankles; she flew up in his face, going for the eyes. 

Most chickens can't just leap into the air and start fllying. The breeds raised on meat and egg farms can accurately be described as flightless birds, able to flap just enough to break their fall if they jump off a perch, but hardly more than that. Even in the smaller breeds, like Game and Ancona chickens, what flying the birds can do usually has to start with jumping off a perch. This hen was in the minority of Game hens who can actually fly--not far, but enough to get back onto their perch if approached by predators.

So this fierce little hen was put in charge of six brown Game eggs and six little white bantam eggs. The five hens had been assigned names: Sally, Suzie, Sarah, Shirley, and the bossy one was Linda. I'm not sure that even Linda ever knew she had a name. I was five or six years old, and neither Linda nor her mate looked little to me.

When the baby chicks hatched, though, on sunny afternoons I went out and picked tender young weeds out of the garden to hold up to the chicken-wire "screen door" on their coop. Instinctively I wanted to offer these treats to the baby chicks, and stroke their fluffy little heads with a fingertip. I didn't really want to get that close to Linda. Like most Game chickens she bit all of her food, even tender little leaves and grains of wheat, as if it needed killing. 

A funny thing happened on those afternoons, though. Unlike most chickens, who stop learning anything new when they reach their full size, Linda was paying attention to my behavior. She figured out that I was scared of her. She changed her whole policy. Whatever I might have heard about her going for humans' eyes, she seemed to be saying, had nothing to do with me. She knew my intentions were good. She'd even let me touch her feathers. 

Not that she ever followed me around the yard, or answered to a name, as a pet hen would do. She was still the queen of the chicken coop. Sometimes she followed her mate, and sometimes he had to follow her just like everyone else. But eventually the babies' feathers grew in, and Linda stopped brooding over them and started laying eggs again. She laid her eggs in straw-lined nest boxes we provided. If she happened to be in a box when anyone else reached in to remove any other eggs other hens had left there, she'd bite the intruding hand. She never bit me. I could reach into the warm space under her. So everyone interested in motivating me to do more of the chicken-keeping chores agreed that she'd become a real pet. 

This boosted Linda's reputation in the neighborhood. She was not only unusually strong and bold, but also good with children. Linda was still alive, not noticeably mourning for her mate or sisters, when after four years we left the neighborhood again. A neighbor was glad to take her, and, unlike most of the baby chicks she had reared in her lifetime, Linda never seemed like the base for chicken soup. I was told not to expect to find Linda alive when we went back home. "Little animals have little lives. Linda was four years old when we left. Chickens hardly ever live more than five years." But when we came back Linda was still strutting around the neighbor's yard, bossy as ever. Roosters usually make a big show of aggression when anyone approaches the flock, then run away if the intruder calls their bluff. Linda didn't run. Nobody was going to bother her brood while she was alive. That was how the neighbors knew she was the same bird. They had a few other slim, leggy yellow hens who looked very much like Linda, but no other hen had her attitude.

She didn't rush up and greet me as a long-lost friend, though. The neighbor had a lot of grandchildren who looked a great deal alike, and I'd grown and changed since Linda had seen me, so probably she didn't recognize me. She seemed happy where she was, and meanwhile Mother wanted to try raising "Easter Eggers" anyway. So instead of reclaiming Linda we bought some of those little Araucana-bantam crossbreeds from the neighbor.

Linda died of old age in her seventh year. By that time I had raised and trained a batch of funny, fluffy Easter Eggers who did silly tricks on cue when my brother and I, and sometimes our baby sister, sang our repertoire of mostly Sunday School songs. They really were pets, like the dog who belonged to a neighbor but went to meet my brother and me at the bus stop and "told" all the kids she was my pet, or the pony who had got out of the habit of carrying children but liked to hang out with me in the orchard. Linda never was what I'd call a pet. But she had taught me how to like chickens, and even respect them, for what they are.