As it turns out, the man responsible for unleashing the terror squad of feral chickens on the unsuspecting populace of Highbridge, in the Bronx, is still around, and he’s worried about his flock. “Sometimes they cross the street, the cars hit them,” said Ramon Lopez, who operated the parking lot the chickens call home. “If something happens to me, I don’t want them to live in the street.” Lopez apparently got custody of the chickens when a different parking lot (with a coop) went out of business and he started feeding them. Now “everyone from cops to sanitation workers give him sickly stray chickens.” He can’t give them to the ASPCA because they’re mostly roosters, which are loud and pugnacious and hard to adopt. So they’re stuck in Highbridge, and Ramon doesn’t know what will happen to them if he has to give up on them.
If our past experiences with feral birds are anything to go by, when the chickens do find homes, it’ll go a little something like this: A family will warmly welcome a hen into the home, where the bird will play all innocent and nice, at first. Everything will be going fine, until she can manipulate the family children and turn them against one another. A series of strange accidents will occur: a kid on the playground will fall suddenly off of a slide and break her ankle. A brother will fall out of a treehouse that has mysteriously caught fire. A sister will nearly die when a car is inexplicably switched into reverse on a hill. Before you know it, the mother of the family will be institutionalized, ranting incoherently about the chicken’s true evil nature, and the father will wake up drunk and confused to find the chicken on top of him, in a desperate, grotesque attempt to seduce him. When he inevitably rejects her, the chicken will go insane and stab him to death.
Seriously, we’ve seen it all before. Do not bring these chickens into your home!
