If you’re scared of chickens and their feathered kin, you’ve got Alektorophobia; an irrational fear of chickens.. as well as their eggs …often related to a previous traumatic experience involving feathered fowls.” In other words, chicken-related PTSD. I don’t have it, but my friend’s wife, a Japanese émigré to Canada, suffers from it. Sounds like a total nightmare to me.
It got me thinking. What incident involving a bird could possibly be serious enough to throw the infant brain into such a funk? But then my wife told me about her experience with a stroppy Canada goose when she was three years old. She doesn’t remember it -her parents told her about it- but its lingering effects have haunted her ever since. It’s a common enough story. Strolling around in Stanley Park one afternoon, and ending up being chased by a rather large, ornery Canada goose. Happens to everyone in Vancouver at some point. To a 3-year old, a pissed-off Canada goose is a pretty big bundle of angry, hissing feathers – almost as tall as a toddler, and more than capable of inflicting a nasty nip or two. As a result, my wife claims that she’s hated -not feared, but hated- Canada geese ever since.
As a dad, I can see that fear of birds, especially chickens, would rule out all sorts of regular kiddy activities. Petting zoo visits, that staple of any happy little kid’s weekend, would be fraught with anxiety. It would also rule out some tourist destinations that attract BC residents looking to escape the west coast winter gloom. Lovely verdant Kauai, for instance, the fourth largest island in the Hawaiian chain, which –as anyone who’s been there knows- is a chicken-infested hell.
Chickens are everywhere in Kauai. Step out of the airport and they’re in the car park. Stop for a hike, and they’ll be ambling along the forest trails. Go to the beach and you’ll find them scratching in the seaweed for bugs. Pull over for a picnic and you’ll be over run in seconds by poultry trying to snatch your sandwiches. In fact, there are so many fowl on Kauai that my friend has never felt able to take his alektorophobic wife there for fear she’d lose her shit at the airport baggage carousel.
Strictly speaking, Kauai’s chickens are not wild, but feral. They come in all shapes and sizes, from scrawny chooks to big colourful cockerels. Originally domesticated, they were brought to the island by the Polynesians as a source of food, but quickly returned to the wild because conditions on the island are nigh on perfect for them. In the absence of any serious predators on Kauai, they set to work doing what chickens do best; they laid a shit-ton of eggs and made lots of new chickens. The scale of the chicken infestation can be seen in the video linked below. A word of warning to those of a nervous disposition, it gets violent.
The lack of natural predators, coupled with the decline of sugar cane farming on the Island in the 1980s created the population explosion. A rather pointless on line discussion of the problem noted that if Kauai had a mongoose population (they love to eat eggs) they would soon reduce the chicken numbers to sensible levels, but Kauai doesn’t have a mongoose population, so they don’t kill chickens (see what I mean? Bit pointless that one.) And a lot of chickens would perish in the flames of the burning sugarcane fields if they still burned them after harvesting, which they don’t; a lot more than the non-existent mongoose does.
Chicken-related calamities are common on Kauai. The most serious came in 2014 when a bird stumbled into an electrical switchyard and tripped the circuit breakers, knocking out power for nearly half the island. A utility spokesperson noted that the bird didn’t survive the encounter with their high voltage equipment; even tough-as-nails feral chickens have their limits.
To counter the rapidly growing flocks, the State government in Honolulu has been trying hard find ways to redress the natural ecological balance on the island. They hired contract chicken exterminators to catch and kill them; a valiant effort but only partially successful because it costs on average US$108 per bird to do away with one chicken. What they hadn’t properly accounted for is that feral chickens are a bit too smart to sit around compliantly waiting to be caught and killed. Kaui’s local paper, The Garden Island (since 1901), takes up the story.
Deputy Customer Services Director Randy Leong, was charged with the task of eliminating them, under the decidedly sinister $160,000 citywide “feral chicken mitigation program.” (mitigation…there’s a euphemism if ever I’ve heard one.) But once it became apparent that they were too smart to quietly submit to extermination, a rethink was needed. Leong, in a finely crafted statement said
“I don’t want to humorize this, but really, the chickens often cross the road and go into properties such as the state, federal properties and private properties such as condominiums, or strip malls or apartment complexes. If a city contractor were to enter a residential neighborhood and traverse through the neighborhood and go from one home to another, the city could be exposed to a myriad of claims.”
Strike one for the chickens.
When a threat to the chickens’ well-being did finally pop up, a mystery disease that started killing them in 2015, the authorities tried hard to find out what was doing them in so they could combat it; an interesting contrarian counterpoint to Randy Leong’s officially-sanctioned extermination efforts. So,with the failure of control measures, the chicken population of Kauai continues to grow.
I’m reliably informed that exposure therapy is the leading treatment for phobias, the aim being to sanitize your brain of all negative hen emotions and desensitize yourself to poultry. A good place to start would be the meat department of your nearest supermarket. Go and take along hard look at what chickens are actually good for, and next time you’re having a panic attack, visualize them dismembered in little white trays, or lying breaded and tasty in the heating display at the local KFC. Looking at pictures of chickens can also help, although spending long hours at a desk in the local library glaring angrily at farming handbooks is probably ill-advised. One website even suggests virtual reality technology to alleviate symptoms of anxiety, although where you’d buy a therapeutic 3D chicken visualization beats me.
Thankfully, not being remotely afraid of them, I have no need for alektorophobia therapy, unlike my friend’s wife. She’s er.. chicken.