Run-Chicken

The Run-Chicken Automatic Coop Door is designed to make your days

easier and transform chicken-raising into a happy, carefree activity.

from Run-Chicken.com

Our chickens plucked each other all year. Bald backs. Bloody rumps. Pecking order, people call it.

For months, I tried everything: solitary and paired caging of bullies, then the bullied, in a corner

of the run. They didn’t stop. Five minutes free, the lead tormentor jumped the sweetest one.

I gave her to another flock, who, starting at a square one, reportedly reformed. Still, her brutal

habits carried on in the remaining hens. Cruelty is both inborn and learned as self-defense. Come

molt, I bought feather fixer feed. October brought gold and bitter cold. Hens mostly stopped laying.

The automatic, light-sensitive chicken coop door—made by a start-up in Ukraine, pre-war,

a country, strangely, shaped like a running chicken, I swear: that marketable logo emblazoned

proudly on the door—froze up, stayed closed, trapped chickens in the warmth. Busy, I missed it.

(How could one now dare complain to a company in Ukraine to seek a motor’s replacement?)

Two days later, squinting, the birds emerged, new feathers sprouting like toothpicks from necks,

backs, once-hacked wings and tails; some already bleeding stumps on the handsome brown one,

the usual target. Damn it. I prayed a little, I guess, to whatever abstract chicken goodness exists,

that as the hens would finally see each other fully plumed, whole again, they’d quit craving blood

and power, live and let live, prove themselves better than men. By December, they did. They did.