Save the wild fowls

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).

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 (since the world we live in will always want to provide for its meat-eating population) a good life and humane "slaughter" (if such a thing exists). But that is a topic for another article.

Some locals love meat (especially wild meat) so much that almost any moving being is "good for de pot." Is any animal sacred to that brand of "meat mouth"?

It is this thinking which led me to wonder about the tragic fate of the breeding birds and incubator or eggs that were stolen from the Wild Fowl Trust in Pointe-a-Pierre on World Environment Day – of all days.

Ordinarily, one would think that anyone daring to perform such a risky heist would be doing so with intentions of trafficking the birds in the illegal and prolific local wildlife trade. But...would anyone stealing such exotic and identifiable creatures (blue and gold macaws, fulvous whistling ducklings, muscovy ducklings, etc.) be foolish enough to risk being caught doing this? Possibly, if they felt (as many do) that "the police will do nothing."

The horrific thought crossed my mind...could these despicable thieves have stolen the birds and eggs for some exotic food cook-up?

May it not be so. May those stolen "wild fowls," like the one this morning, also be "resurrected." And may justice be served.