Falling in Love

I’m not sure I know exactly when I fell in love with her. I think it was probably the moment I first saw her, or first heard her sweet little peep in the backseat of my hatchback. And then that love grew and deepened over time, as love does.

Fannie was one of 40,000 Cornish Cross chickens, a.k.a. “broiler chickens” being raised at a Colorado chicken facility that went bankrupt in the winter of 2019. They turned off the heat and stopped feeding the birds in their sheds. A local sanctuary, Luvin Arms, found out what was happening and got permission to go in and rescue as many as they wanted.

They were only able to rescue the ones they had homes for. I saw something about it on my social media feed and without knowing what I was doing, volunteered to take two. I ended up taking eight. I’d never had a relationship with a chicken. I didn’t really know how much of a relationship was possible. I just knew that they were suffering, and that I could help at least a couple.

I made the five hour drive to Warm Springs, GA where all the chickens destined for new homes in Mobile, AL were being temporarily housed at Full Circle Farm Sanctuary. I believe I probably already loved her even when she was just one little white lump in the backseat along with about 20 others. I loved them all in the way animal lovers love all animals, in the way Buddhists love all sentient beings and that Universal Love becomes tangible in the face of a real life sentient being in your presence, especially one so innocent and vulnerable, one who has just escaped from hell.

I brought them all home, and after the other local people had come and collected their chickens to take them to their new homes, I was left with 8 little white clouds whom I couldn’t tell apart. Eight little earth angels with snow white feathers and faces red like kisses. A couple were smaller or bigger, but otherwise I couldn’t differentiate them. I put different colored leg bands on so I could tell them apart. And I quickly realized that there was one in particular who was always following me around. Every time I walked out to the yard, the little white bird with the green leg band would come running over to me. If I sat down, she would stand at my feet and look up at me with penetrating eyes, chirping up a conversation. Initially, I didn’t know if the chickens would want to be held, but when I picked Fannie up, she relaxed in my arms, and I knew that was exactly where she wanted to be. I named her Fannie after a great cousin on my mom’s side I never knew. Because she was family now, and that’s what people do. They name their kids after relatives.

Fannie was the loveliest creature. She was dignified and elegant. She was curious about everything and so smart. When there was food around, she, like every other Cornish Cross I’ve ever known, went wild. But otherwise, she was calm and self-possessed. While her sisters scratched around in the leaves or luxuriated in their dirt baths, whenever I walked out into the yard, Fannie would drop whatever she was doing and come running for me, following me around until I’d stop and pick her up and hold her in my arms and tell her how much I loved her.

Fannie passed away this past spring when she was about 5 1/2 years old. All but one of her sisters are still with me. So it feels like Fannie died far too young. But the truth is she was bred to be killed as a six week old baby. That’s when chickens in the meat industry are killed. If not for that farm going bankrupt, and all the rescuers jumping in to save them, I never would have known her. She never would have had a life. She never would have been able to become who she was.

I never really felt like I had enough time with her. I always knew her life would be too short, that the end would come too soon. When I first adopted them, I didn’t think any of them would live to be more than a year or two based on their terrible breeding, the results of genetic manipulation and human exploitation. Maybe that’s part of why I never took her for granted. There wasn’t a day that I didn’t make a point of holding her in my arms and stroking her pink cheeks.

A couple years ago, she developed a respiratory infection, and I brought her in the house to monitor her and make it easier to treat and medicate her. When she got better after a few weeks, I put her back outside with her sisters, but at bed time she’d go to the door of the run and look into the house expectantly. I think I held firm for two or maybe 3 nights before deciding that she would just forever sleep inside. It was clearly what she wanted. And it was what I wanted too. So for the last couple of years of her life, she would sleep right next to my bed and then go outside during the day to enjoy her sisters, the sunshine and the fresh air, and all of the simple pleasures of freedom and safety.

One morning, last spring, when I went to wake Fannie up, I could see she wasn’t herself. I got her into the vet right away. The local vet sent us to the specialist at Louisiana State University teaching hospital about four hours away. I got pulled over for speeding on the way there and of course I sobbed to a confused highway patrol officer. We went in through emergency after watching the sunset together on the ride over. She got a blood transfusion that night, but didn’t get better. She was scheduled to have a second transfusion a couple days later, but she died before she could get that.

I was only a few minutes away from the hospital getting lunch when it happened. When they called to give me the news, I remember the feeling of collapsing into myself, of wanting to rip open the fabric of space and time and follow her wherever she had gone. Losing her was one of the most painful experiences of my life, but she left all the love with me. All the love she brought into my life is still in my heart forever. Losing Fannie was and remains one of the great heartbreaks of my life. But I can’t think of her without feeling my heart melt and overflow with love, without seeing rainbows in my mind’s eye. I don’t know why she loved me, but I’m so incredibly grateful that she did. She was the most amazing tiny feathered person. She was perfect, from her prettiest little face to her daintiest little toes.

She lives in my heart forever and will forever motivate me to create a world where all beings are respected, treated with kindness and mercy and compassion, a world where we all can experience what it is to love and to be loved.

Real love is not restricted to our own species anymore than it is constrained by any other category we use to differentiate and divide ourselves from each other. Real love is boundless both in measure and reach. Real love has no limits. My love for Fannie is not different in kind or degree from the love that I’ve had for dogs, cats, or human beings. Love is love. Real love transcends all of the limitations and boundaries that we have created and use as ways of dividing us up into hierarchies of those who are superior and inferior, deserving and undeserving. Love knows no such bounds. Love leads us to truth beyond human convention, beyond the limitations of our minds. It is real in a way that our human constructs are not. Real love transcends the illusions of hierarchy and supremacy. Real love is revolutionary. Real love can change the world.

When I was on the way to LSU with Fannie that last time, as the sun was setting out her window, I told her how much I loved her, and I told her that she would change the world. I tell her story to anyone who will listen because I do believe that if the world knew Fannie and others of her kind, there would be a revolution. A revolution rooted in love.