Dear Mark,

I would like to share the story of a very special bird; a chicken to be exact. I know a chicken isn’t a conventional American pet but Silkie was very special to me and my family. My wife has severe allergies and we are unable to have any furry pets until I found Silkie. She belonged to the daughter of a client of mine who had received her as a chick as an Easter gift. I was at this client’s home in the Chicago suburbs for a service call and met what I first thought was a small dog napping on the sofa. It wasn’t until this creature raised its head and clucked at me that I realized that I was looking at a chicken with what looked like fur. My client made the formal introductions and explained that it was a sad day since the village was coming to get Silkie to be destroyed as she was a barnyard animal in a residential area. In other words she was a code violation. I picked Silkie up and she made a purring noise like a cat. That was it for me. I live in a rural area and brought her home in my service truck.

Silkie traveled with me on my service calls many days. She kept a dialog with me all day and loved to meet people. The more people she was around the happier she was. She even scared off a P.E.T.A. activist at the KFC when he tried to take away her piece of fried chicken. My wife discovered that she did not have any allergic reaction to Silkie and she started sleeping in a basket next to our bed. I have several medical conditions and we quickly found that Silkie sounded an alarm when I was having problems at night and may have saved my life on more than one occasion. She became the subject of my son’s psychology project and he taught her how to read basic symbols using Operant Conditioning.

Silkie Chicken was a part of my family’s daily lives. She chatted with us, comforted us, and constantly warned us of danger. One day she was out in the front yard for a stroll hunting insects a few dozen feet from my wife when a coyote ran out of our grove of trees and carried her off before anything could be done. That was the last we saw of her and our last memory was of her crying for rescue. But coyotes are what they are and we could not catch up. We searched for her the rest of the day all the while knowing her fate. It has been several years now and we have another pet silkie chicken but I can’t talk about Silkie without tearing up. She was loved and will always be missed.

Steve from IL