Living on the outskirts of London for my entire life meant that I had never seen a chicken in close proximity, except for those I prepared at work and those that ended up on my plate. I was very familiar with chicken as a food and completely unfamiliar with the animal itself. My lack of knowledge would be remedied however when I stayed with my now girlfriend for the first time. Pandora was a chick who lived in a pen in my girlfriend’s room during winter as he was too young to be entrusted to the care of the two ducks and rooster living in the garden. I was terrified one night when I awoke to Pandora, having just escaped from his pen, strutting towards me in the dark like the velociraptors from Jurassic park hunting the kids in the kitchen.
I have been referring to Pandora as a male throughout this, however we believed him to be a she at the time, a belief that was corrected when ‘she’ started to crow at around 4am every morning, a sound which is amplified when heard in a closed room and not particularly pleasant to be awoken by.
I was working in a restaurant at the time, and the late shifts meant I did not appreciate being woken up two or three hours after falling asleep every morning, and so we decided to move Pandora into the garden with the other birds. Unfortunately a few months after moving Pandora into the coop, a fox managed to get inside and take Pandora and the ducks, leaving only Hendrix.
Hendrix is a particularly ornery bird, only safe from the fox due to the fact that we kept him separate from the others as he had a tendency to bully them. Now I had still been wary of the birds up to this point and spent very little time interacting with them, but I also began to feel bad for Hendrix being left alone all the time, thus began my possibly futile attempts to tame him. over the past three months of being furloughed from work, I have been pecked, spurred, scratched and charged multiple times. Hendrix’s favourite trick is to saunter towards me casually, then as he gets closer he drags one wing on the ground and charges at me sideways like a drunk stumbling out of a pub.
Yet Hendrix and I have slowly built an understanding between us, the understanding seeming to be that he will eat the cherries that I pick for him and scratch for the corn that I scatter for him, yet should I dare step foot inside his coop all bets are off, the lower half of my body transforming into something to attack as soon as it crosses the threshold. I understand that this is evolutionarily ingrained into the brain of the rooster, as protectors and providers of their flocks they are supposed to attack that which threatens their territory. As soon as I open the gate Hendrix will potter around the garden outside of his coop, he will happily eat corn from my hand and follow me around, clucking away and scratching around the plants. This dichotomous behaviour was startling at first, but I have learned to respect Hendrix’s boundaries whilst also standing my ground and now we get along just fine.
