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Initially, I wanted them for the eggs. I wasn’t really thinking of how cute or sweet they’d be.” — Pet chicken owner Helen Dames (
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When she first ordered three hens from MyPetChicken.com (at $2.75 each)last June, attorney Helen Dames was attempting to fulfill her fantasy of becoming a farmer — as much as that was possible in her small Windsor Terrace backyard. “Initially, I wanted them for the eggs,” she says. “I wasn’t really thinking of how cute or sweet they’d be.”
Not long after she opened the box that arrived at her local post office, everything changed. Lucy, Penny and Tina stole her heart as 3-day-old chicks, and Dames suspects the feeling was mutual. “I was the first face they saw. I think I’ve been imprinted as their mother,” she says.
Seven months on, the hens still like to follow Dames around, sit on her lap or eat out of her hands when she feeds them every morning. “I didn’t think that would happen,” she says.
The hen’s chicken coop — a poultry mansion — was designed and constructed by Dames’ husband, David Stanavich. “We bought the little red chicken house [where the hens lay their eggs] from a mail-order company for $600,” says Dames. “But the rest of it, we built. It’s predator-proof and has a little run and a door, so the chickens can go in and out and still be safe.” (The household cat, CC, can only watch them from an apartment window.)
Dames is fastidious about keeping the coop clean, but compared to some other animals, she says, chickens are not high-maintenance. “A 50-pound bag of feed is $15, and that lasts two or three months.”
Unlike traditional pets, they provide for their owners in return. “My sister bought me a bumper sticker that says: ‘My pet makes me breakfast,’” she says. “And it’s true! They lay about a dozen eggs a week — which is a lot for two people so we’re starting to give them away. They have super yellow yolks and a nice consistency!”
Just hold the jokes about chicken dinners: “David didn’t want them initially, and at the time I said, ‘What’s the worst that can happen? We could eat them.’” says Dames. “We joked about one being Parmigiana, and one being nuggets. Now, I wouldn’t let anyone eat them and don’t joke anymore.”
Lucy, Penny and Tina had a similar effect on some of Dames and Stanavich’s neighbors: “The kids who live a few doors down came over to see the chickens and had so much fun. Then I saw their dad a few days later and he said, ‘You won’t believe it; the boys won’t eat chicken anymore. Thanks to your girls, they’ve gone vegetarian.’ I was like, ‘Sorry!’”
Despite still longing for a farm, Dames admits that she’s a novice. “The truth is I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she says. “But I’m learning. An organization called Just Food holds seminars on chicken-keeping in the city, and I’ve been to some of those.” In fact, that’s how Dames knew to prevent frostbite by putting Vaseline on her chicken’s feet, combs (the flesh on top of their heads) and wattles (the red bit under their chins), and why she stopped worrying that Lucy’s egg-laying had slowed down (It’s a winter thing).
Dames says her backyard experiment has gone so well that the yearnings to become a “real” farmer have died down. “If you had a farm, you’d have more chickens,” she says. “I don’t think you’d have the same relationship. With just three of them, there’s a lot of social interaction.”
Enough, she says, to recognize three distinct personalities in her flock: “Tina is mature and the most sensible, Lucy is the wild one, more independent, and Penny is sweet and always wants to cuddle.”
“Every [being] has a personality,” she says. “I love that the chickens seem to like being around me. That’s cool.”
pets@nypost.com