At about 4 am (Thursday), as I sat down to begin this article – the intended topic, chickens – coincidentally, the loud, frantic squawking of a chicken broke the pre-dawn silence.
It sounded as if one of the street fowls had jumped over the fence into the back garden. In Tobago, wild fowls wander around practically everywhere, like a national bird.
I could hear Sheba (one of my two dogs) barking in the vicinity of the fowl’s squawks, but not in a manner that seemed predatory. More like: “Ey, what are you doing in my garden?”
My other dog, Venus, inside with me, seemed aware of the visitor and was eager to go out. When she was a few months old, her best friend was a baby chicken I had rescued and named Magnet, on account of the manner in which he would stick onto Venus, seeking warmth, love and protection. Venus could open her mouth like a cave and he would walk in, then walk back out seconds later; only then would Venus close her mouth – so careful was she with her tiny new friend.
As they grew up together, inseparably close, I filmed countless endearing moments of their interspecies love. In 2018 I used some of that archival footage to create a short film – Venus and Magnet – which won Best TT Short Film at that year’s Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival.
The chicken-loving Venus of then is not the Venus of now. Soon after I released her into the dark, the squawks of the fowl became frantic cries for help. By the time I got outside, a large rooster was motionless on the ground, surrounded by a snowstorm of cream-coloured feathers.
Venus the avenger was standing proudly above it. She had once protected Magnet by gallantly grabbing and de-feathering a proud cock that had come into our garden to attack him. I saw when she rushed to her friend’s defence, showing no mercy to the invader, who eventually managed to escape from her jaws by a lucky feather. Lesson learned, he never returned.
Closing the gate to the back garden so that the dogs would stay to the front and not hamper the corpse, I retreated inside to teach my early-morning online yoga session, intending to remove the victim’s body afterwards.
After the session, I was surprised to meet only feathers in the back garden. As if by the miracle of resurrection, the chicken had disappeared.
Some time after, alerted by sudden loud chicken clucks, I returned to find Venus staring up into the neem tree. The rooster, with his new "haircut," was standing on a high branch, clearly having just played dead to save his life.
Sadly, not all fowls can "play dead" to escape slaughter. I say that as a vegetarian and animal lover who admittedly shuddered slightly upon reading a recent article about TT’s consumption of approximately 1,000,000 chickens a week/52 million per year (according to the Poultry Association of TT).
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Many who eat meat see the average animal as "food"; many who do not eat meat see them as sentient beings deserving of life and welfare or, at the very least (sinc
