What if there was a peacock on board?
Dexter took the cake last week. You know, the peacock who wasn’t allowed to board a United Airlines flight? Dexter’s owner, a New York City-based performance artist, Ventiko, tried to board the flight with Dexter from New Jersey to Los Angeles on January 28. This beat all the other bits of news, sucked you right in.
I wouldn’t have had the guts to troop into an airport with a peacock on my trolley. Even a parakeet would have made me self-conscious, but a fullblown bird? Hats off for the confidence of Ventiko.
In not my most animal rights-friendly vein, I was thinking, we need more Dexters. Last year, in January, there was Easter the turkey who flew with her owner Jodie on a domestic flight in the US. These random, oddball bits of news are such a respite. The contents of newspapers are otherwise teeming with sleepy hollow reports of Jaitley and the budget and Trump and his state of the union speech. We need more Dexters and Easters to inject a dose of magical realism in the everyday.
The non-magical realism though was that Dexter didn’t meet the ready-to-board guidelines because he’s a big, heavy bird.
Ventiko, with whom he lives in a NY loft, offered to book him a seat even though as D is V’s “emotional support animal” (ESA), he doesn’t need a ticket to travel. Emotional support for what, I want to know.
What’s a person doing with a bird, you might ask. Well, The Miami Herald reported that Ventiko bought a pair of peacocks (the pair for $200) for her multisensory installation, “On Beauty,” at Art Basel in Miami Beach in December 2014. There was Etta and there was Dexter. Etta vanished into the woods one day with their peachicks. Either Ventiko decided to keep Dexter or Dexter decided he wanted to stay with Ventiko.
Ventiko has been spotted walking Dexter in Brooklyn with a lead. Can you imagine this in
Ventiko has been spotted walking Dexter in Brooklyn with a lead. Can you imagine this in Dubai?! It’s early morning, and there, coming at you, is a peacock on a lead
Dubai?! It’s early morning, you’re out doing the milk and groceries run, parents are waiting with their kids for the school bus, and there, coming at you, is a peacock on a lead.
It dawned on me then that I don’t live in an exciting neighbourhood. Sure, bright pink stretch limos pass by every now and then, and I used to see an orange Lamborghini parked down below and wonder about people’s tastes, but this? On leads, I’ve only seen dogs, rarely cats… and oh yeah! — a picture of that leopard in an SUV.
Anyway, according to Business Insider, this ESA pattern is routine. The airline, Delta, had seen “an 84 per cent increase since 2016 in incidents involving improperly trained animals, including urination, defecation, and attacks on passengers and crew members”.
Reading this made me change my mind about a daydream that it might be fun to be plonked alongside a peacock on my next flight to Delhi. In the daydream, a fellow Indian, of the boorish variety, is plucking feathers from the bird’s train as a souvenir to take home and give to his/her kids to play with. It used to be one of the joys of childhood, playing with peacock feathers, dipping the non-plumey end in an ink well, pretending to be a scroll writer in medieval times….
But this dream-busting idea of peacocks defecating on the person sitting next to the bird sobered me up straightaway. What if the person next to big bird was me? What if they ran out of Kleenex on board? I realised my selfishness in thinking United Airlines has no sense of humour. I just wanted to have been there to witness the squawking commotion, this fabulously irregular occurrence, so different from a routine checkin. But the authorities have a point. They even warned Ventiko three times: no bird, no bird, no bird. Ventiko had it coming. But Dexter, if he wants, doesn’t need a boarding pass to fly. I hope he knows that.
nivriti@khaleejtimes.com