Tallulah was listless. At least I think it was Tallulah. We had four identical Plymouth Rock chickens, and we'd only gotten around to naming two of them -- which two, we weren't quite sure.
After googling "San Francisco" and "bird hospital," I secured a diagnostic appointment for the chicken, who lay uncharacteristically still near the water dish in the coop in our backyard.
The chickens came from my son's first-grade classroom. At the end of the school year, they were going to be sent to the farm if no one claimed them, so we took them home.
We feed our chickens twice a day, give them fresh water when they need it, and clean their coop weekly. In exchange, they produce eggs every day, eggs that we eat, and share with friends, and feel a little bit smug about: We are masters of our urban farm. We eat locally. We tend these beautiful creatures and live in harmony with them. I can't quite say the chickens are our pets, not in the way our cat is our pet. Yet they are somehow part of the family, and so I sat in the waiting room, waiting to tell the vet about my listless chicken.
Others in the waiting room held parrots and cockatiels in elegant wire cages in their laps; I held my chicken in a cardboard cat carrier. My friend Patrick was visiting from Boston, and I'd dragged him along to the vet, claiming it would be an adventure. Patrick and I looked at each other and tried not to titter in this somber place where people brought their beloved pets, a place where we had brought a farm animal.
As we waited, a woman spoke to the vet about putting her parrot on Lupron. Lupron is used to treat many things in humans, most strikingly for halting puberty in transgender children. A transgender parrot. Patrick and I glanced at each other and couldn’t contain our nervous laughter any longer.
At last the vet brought us into an exam room. She asked somberly, "What seems to be the trouble with your chicken?" I bit the inside of my lip to keep from giggling. She examined Tallulah, listened to her small heart with a stethoscope, peered down her beak. She found nothing obviously wrong -- no impacted crop, no pasted vent, no broken bones -- and said that tests would be required for a diagnosis.
On the drive over, I'd imagined a speedy diagnosis of some common chicken problem, maybe an egg stuck in the chute. But there was no stuck egg, no simple answer. We reviewed options and associated costs: X-ray, fecal analysis, blood work.
As we discussed diagnostic tools, treatment plans and discharge orders, I pressed my lips together and flared my nostrils in a moderately successful attempt at mirth suppression. The vet was so earnest, so impassive. She did not know whether we considered Tallulah to be livestock or a treasured pet; I wasn't sure either. I just knew that when the vet proposed the options, they sounded absurd -- and I chose among them anyway, the way I would have for our cat, who I once took regularly to the feline ophthalmologist to treat a rare autoimmune retinal disorder. Extreme measures for our cat made a certain amount of sense. She was our pet, we slept with her at night, she purred and loved us back. I was not going to let her go blind. In that spirit, I agreed to an X-ray and a fecal analysis. I thought: That makes sense.
I did not think: On a farm they would break this chicken's neck and toss her behind the barn. I did not think: We haven't even named them all, maybe we haven't even named this one. I just agreed to pay a great deal of money to diagnose the woes of the chicken I could only assume was Tallulah; it did not occur to me to do anything else.
The vet said that when we took Tallulah home that night, she would need to be kept away from the other chickens, in a 90-degree environment. Patrick and I strategized -- a box in the bathroom with the heat on? A borrowed dog kennel in the hall closet near the furnace? In my heart, however, I knew: I did not want to take Tallulah home. She was languishing. She was stinky. She needed special care. I liked chickens that peck in the dirt and lay eggs and look pastoral. I was aware that I was a small-hearted person who did not deserve to own chickens.
It was past my children's bedtime, so I left Patrick to wait while the tests were done, and I went home to give goodnight kisses. In an hour, I would pick up Patrick and Tallulah. We would put her to bed for the night in the warm box in the closet by the furnace to await test results.
It was not until I was in the car driving home that I was overcome. Not with a giggle, or a chuckle, but with crazed, swerve-into-oncoming-traffic laughter as I understood the ridiculousness of this situation. For authorizing exorbitant tests, I was ridiculous. For not feeling more pain over Tallulah's obvious distress, I was ridiculous and wicked.
I called my husband Evan and choked out a confession: I just agreed to $300 worth of tests on the chicken. He became, like me, gasping and maniacal. "For that money," he sputtered, "we could buy 150 new chicks." But Tallulah, we knew, was at least part pet. We had to try to save her for our children.
When I got home I snuggled the kids on the couch. I explained that Tallulah was very sick, and we were waiting to find out how to help her. They stared at me with big, worried eyes. Then the vet called, saying the news from the X-ray was not good.
She explained that Tallulah's crop -- her chicken stomach -- had exploded. The grit that naturally occupies the crop had moved throughout her body, causing widespread infection. She offered to operate to clean out the grit, but she could already tell there was a great deal of necrotic tissue. ("Did you smell that?" she asked me.) She added that there might not be enough healthy tissue to close the incision. The surgery had a very uncertain outcome.
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