— Both comical and alarming, the chickens would encircle us, trying frantically to jump up our legs
by Molly Wadzeck Kraus
In animal rescue, it’s an open secret how many people are drawn to the work because of their own trauma or disconnection with others.
At age 19, I found myself reluctantly fulfilling an internship obligation at an animal sanctuary in Upstate New York following a year-long struggle with mental illness, leading to my withdrawal from college.
At the farm, my name appeared beside “The Sheds” on the calendar almost daily, where I would feed the ever-ravenous meat broiler chickens recently rescued from abandoned poultry farms after Hurricane Katrina. Bred for rapid growth and early death, their skinny legs buckled as they struggled the climb up into the coops.
“I know they seem like they’re starving, but you can only feed them this much per meal,” shelter caregiver Megan informed me, gesturing to the plastic measuring cup in her hand. “Otherwise, they’ll eat themselves to death.”
In my early weeks of training, I worked with Megan at the four isolated red sheds where the broilers lived, conducting health-care checks and dispensing medication. Opening their doors in the morning unleashed an onslaught of red and white, barreling toward us with an escalating cacophony of squawks. Both comical and alarming, they would encircle us, trying frantically to jump up our legs.
“It’s okay, little muffin,” Megan would coo, cradling the birds on her lap, tending to their bleeding, infected foot pads. I would watch her brightly colored nails replace gauze, flush wounds with saline and rewrap with self-adhesive tape.
The animal agriculture industry labels the grim fate many broilers face as “flip-over disease.” It wasn’t unusual to discover them dead in rigor mortis from this sudden-death syndrome. Sometimes, they would die more slowly, and we’d hold them, watching as their bright red wattles transformed to purple and they suffocated to death.
I, too, had been suffocating in my own way, carrying on an unwelcome family birthright of bipolar disorder. Following through with my commitments, such as this volunteer gig, was supposed to be the way through my depression.
During my final months in college earlier that year, phone calls with my dad became my reason to wake up. A mainstay of his pep talks was sharing passages from Richard Carlson’s “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff . . . and It’s All Small Stuff,” an inspirational book in which he found solace because his depression manifested as overwhelming worries.
When I officially dropped out, he made the three-hour drive to my college, packed up my dorm and silently chauffeured us back home. He had no questions, only space for me to decompress, sinking into the scorching leather seats. My father’s depressive episodes were grim, all-encompassing events that encased our household in a fog. Mine clamored down like a sledgehammer, forcing my family to pay attention.
My last phone call with my dad was nothing of note. Barefoot outside the farmhouse, he told me, “You sound happy. It’s so good to hear you happy.”
A week later, my mom’s best friend called to tell me he’d died. His heart had finally given out, like a chicken with flip-over disease. I went home for the funeral, slipping deeper into my depression.
At the farm, they had recently acquired guinea fowl, and the arrival of the large African game birds brought a wave of chaos. The gray-blue and white speckled guineas are easily startled, neurotic creatures with calls like screeching car alarms. They roosted high in the trees, and we often couldn’t get them inside at dusk to protect them from predators. Late at night, I’d sit on my front porch, watching them in the treetops, willing them down to safety into their barns. Often, I would give up, letting them roost where nature intended.
You can’t reason with wild things who are so sure of their decisions, appearing to act opposite to their interests.
Perhaps this is what my mother had in mind when she urged me to go back to New York. She wanted me to fulfill my commitment to the farm, an intuition telling her to release me into the wild, allowing me to find a future awaiting in another time zone, worlds removed from the living room in Texas where my dad died.
I went back knowing that in many ways, farm life was easier, with the comforts of routine and binders organized by task and protocols. But the labor itself was grueling and drenched in an emotional toll so thick you had no choice but to carry it everywhere.
Grief doesn’t one day appear waving its hands; it slithers in between the cracks rising from underground like awakening cicadas after 17 years, buzzing and growing in intensity until you can hear nothing else.
Sometimes, that grief is for a chicken.
The rooster sat on my lap, languishing, waddle and comb turning crimson. His pale beak opening and closing, in rapid succession. “His comb is turning purple!” I shouted into the walkie-talkie to our shelter manager Kate.
“Oh, sweet little baby,” I whispered, mimicking Megan’s comforting tone. Other shelter caregivers told me I would get used to it, that they are dying all the time. I wasn’t sure I could accept this norm.
After his last breath, I wrapped him in a towel and removed the ID band from his scaly, still-warm leg. Cradled like an infant against my chest, I walked him down to the shelter offices, his long, unfurled toes dangling, plopping in tandem with each footstep of mine. Then, I locked myself in the bathroom and cried my first real cry since my dad died.
This little chicken, bred for death, pierced through my numbness. As each bird died that first year, I moved their paper charts into the deceased binder, officially retiring them from the farm roster, like a paper menagerie of all the loss.
Hours stretched to days, then to weeks, then to months. The way time moves differently as you get further away from the onset of grief.
After the internship, I became a full-time shelter caregiver on the farm for a while. Over the years, the occupied sheds decreased from four to three, then to two, and finally to only one, as the broiler population dwindled to under a dozen.
I still have my dad’s weathered, dog-eared copy of Richard Carlson’s book, with his favorite passage highlighted: “Ask yourself this question, will this matter a year from now?”
I’ve spent years unraveling the timeline of events. How every loss on the farm bled into the sorrow I carried from losing my dad so young, nearly 20 years ago.
Staying at the farm was an attempt to make sense of loss, to attach new meaning to what the others said about getting used to it. Sitting with a rooster dying on my lap time and time again allowed me to explore how I could reinterpret the pain. After a while I began to understand my grief more than fear it. I could sit still with it and think about my dad. One day I realized I no longer felt like I was suffocating.
Now when I see people who are struggling, I tell them about the broilers, and how they helped me with my grief. I explain how sometimes, releasing ourselves into the wild is the only way for grief to settle. On the farm, I learned to appreciate the beauty and accept its transient nature.
I can’t recall what happened to our guinea fowl flock. But I like to imagine they listened to their instincts and flew away, realizing they were better off wild, too. Beautiful, and fleeting.
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