WITH THE RECESSION in full swing, urban families are catching on to the latest craze: backyard farming. As a Manhattan resident living in an overpriced, uptown studio, I can understand the appeal of making fewer trips to the Food Emporium. I’ve even fantasized about growing tomatoes on my patio, though the area seems averse to attracting any sunlight. But reading about New Yorkers looking to save a buck by raising chickens for meat and eggs reminds me all too vividly of the spring that my own roosters wreaked havoc on my block in Queens.
They came as an Easter gift from my father in 1989. As a five-year-old, my basket of foiled chocolates and sugar-speckled marshmallows paled next to the shoebox of yellow and black baby chicks, which chirped short songs, pecked at my fingernails and defecated in my hand. Intended to be smaller, furrier members of the family, these chicks had no agenda.
Rather than ask favors of our feathered friends, we treated them like typical domestic pets. We cuddled them as babies and walked them on leashes when their necks grew thick enough to sustain small, cotton collars.They ran races around our swimming pool while my dad, a chicken’s referee, stood by blowing a whistle. My mother covered my newborn brother’s eyes when we fed them chicken off the barbecue. And after long, active days of fun and cannibalism, my father bathed them and blew their feathers dry with our canary-yellow Conair blow dryer until they puffed up like poultry-shaped pillows.
Afterward, he did the same for me. But it wasn’t long before our adorable box of chicks grew into what they always aspired to be: roosters.
Raising chickens is legal in New York, but the 311 website states plainly that roosters are among the city’s many “illegal animals,” in addition to dolphins, camels and, of course, whales. However, we didn’t have 311 in ‘89, nor do I think my animal-obsessed father cared. He certainly didn’t question it the previous Easter when he bought me ducklings, also illegal in New York. Fortunately, the ducks died before they could disrupt the peace in the neighborhood. (One ripped its own head off in a tragic beakcaught-in-the-cage-door accident; the other ate some bad shrimp.) But once our adult chicks started crowing, sleep-deprived neighbors gave us an ultimatum: Get rid of the birds or deal with the police.
The rooster disposal posed an initial conundrum for my parents. Short of serving them up as dinner and establishing my need for therapy sooner than planned, there were few easy methods for discarding them. But a solution was found when my grandparents in Long Island heard that a woman in their town just purchased a $2,400 pet buffalo from an animal farm, which she was keeping in her backyard. The line of thinking here was that surely a lady with a buffalo could handle a few roosters.
On the off chance she wouldn’t actually want them, we decided that asking her permission was far too risky. Instead, like bandits with a squawking trunk, my father, grandfather and I drove out to Long Island on an October Saturday to force them upon her. Though it wasn’t particularly hot out, the air conditioner was on high so as not to roast the roosters. Arriving, my dad pulled his green Buick over to the roadside and turned to Grandpa. “Let’s get the birds,” he said, assuming his pretend-gangster voice.
Too small to help carry out the task, I watched from the backseat, crouching just below the window and peeking through kidsized fingers, as the two men in my life heaved my winged pets into the yard one by one.The buffalo snorted and his tuft of hair bobbed up and down across the fence. As the homeowner, alerted by the crowing, darted from her front door, screaming threats of police, Dad and Grandpa ran back to the car and we booked it toward Queens.
Losing the roosters smoothed things over with the locals, but I wondered for a while what came of my Easter gift. I missed our afternoons spent together on the lawn and frowned at inanimate candies for Easter Sundays to come.Years later, though, I received word on the birds when a local newspaper published an article about a buffalo named Nicky living in Suffolk County. The piece stated that, over the years, Nicky, apparently named after the Buffalo Nickel, acquired pets of his own: a cat, birds and “three chickens.” My roosters were doing just fine. As city residents yearn for the cost-efficiencies of rural life, the lines around urban farming are blurring. Who knows—the sound of clucking in Manhattan may soon become as familiar as rumbling garbage trucks and aggressive taxi horns. But after seeing my baby chicks thrown to a buffalo in the suburbs, I have muted aspirations for raising anything more than a houseplant.
I’ve just moved to a building on East 83rd Street with a clear no-pet policy and couldn’t be more relieved.
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