Backyard chicken trend’s sad consequence: abandoned birds
Poultry rescuer’s mission is to foster compassion for the vulnerable animals
CHICAGO— The orphan chicken came to Robert Grillo in the usual way.
A woman who’d found the injured bird slumped on the side of the road on Chicago’s South Side scooped up the chicken, came across Grillo’s name online and sent an email. It happens about five times a week to Grillo, a soft-spoken, part-time graphic and Web designer who has a pet white king pigeon named Elba and a chicken run in his backyard.
Grillo rescues chickens, a mission that exposes an unsettling consequence of the popular backyard poultry movement. For a number of reasons, would-be urban and suburban chicken farmers ditch the birds in significant numbers.
But Grillo is attempting to do something more than save a few chickens from a catastrophic end. He’s using the rescues as a marketing device, trying to foster widespread compassion for an animal he says is largely underappreciated and mistreated.
“Backyard chickens need to be rescued for the same reasons as other animals we care about need to be rescued,” Grillo said one recent afternoon in his backyard. The rescued South Side chicken, which Grillo named Rosa for the reddish hue of her feathers, rolled in the dirt in her enclosure.
“They have the same kind of needs,” Grillo said. “They have the same capacity to form companionship and lifelong bonds with us.” Grillo is selective about which chickens he brings to his neat brown-shingled house.
Each month, he said, he receives nearly two dozen calls from various sources for rescues and ends up taking on two or three that are in the most dire need.
In most cases, Grillo arranges for treatment with Dr. Peter Sakas, a veterinarian at Niles Animal Hospital who has been caring for birds for 32 years. Once the chicken is on the road to recovery, Grillo often houses the animal in the enclosure behind his back porch for a few days until he places the bird in a compassionate setting.
And, for each rescue, Grillo composes a blog post, including photos and, if possible, video, of the entire experience. That message delivery system is aimed at promoting sympathy for the birds.
Each individual story, he said, is much more effective at creating affection for chickens than video of hundreds of them on a farm.
The conventional explanation for why abandonment occurs is that the would-be caretakers were caught up in the popular movement of raising backyard chickens and then became decidedly less enthusiastic after discovering — too late — that the birds require a fairly complicated commitment.
But Jennifer Murtoff, an urban chicken consultant, said the reasons vary. Some chickens wander away; chicken owners move to an area that prohibits the birds; hens stop laying eggs and the owners no longer want to care for them; people mistakenly purchased a rooster.
The solution to the problem of chicken abandonment, Murtoff and others say, is taking a class on raising them before acquiring a bird, or reviewing various websites.