Year of the Chicken

The first thing you notice upon approaching their house is the chicken-figure boot-scraper on the front porch. When you enter the place, the object that confronts your eyes is a giant papier-mache chicken on a table near the door. And then you realize as you look around that there are chickens everywhere: porcelain chickens, plaster chickens, neon chickens, crystal chickens, wooden chickens and cartoon chickens.

At first, this seems an obsession as peculiar as collecting satin tourist pillows that say “I’ve Been to Alabama” until one realizes that this is the home of Bob and Lillian Zacky, and chicken is their lives.

As owners of Zacky Farms, they raise chickens, sell chickens, eat chickens, talk chickens and dream chickens, so it is not unusual that they are surrounded by chicken artifacts in almost every room of the house. If their toilet were in the shape of a roosting hen, it would not surprise me at all.

I spent time with Lillian Zacky the other day because as the commercial voice of Zacky Farms, she is the self-styled Queen of Chicken. A pleasant, middle-aged lady, her wifey-dear voice can be heard on radio selling the wonders of her family business. It is a sincere, unassuming voice likely to convince any listener that, to paraphrase a motto they’re considering, Zacky Farms Chickens are Noble Chickens.

It was fate that brought me to the Queen’s home in Brentwood. Her name was mentioned to me by a friend the same day I discovered it was the Chinese year 4691 . . . the Year of the Chicken! Well, actually, the Year of the Rooster, but what the hell. It was kismet just the same.

My interest in chickens is not limited to the Zackys. We own a half-dozen chickens. They are my wife’s, not mine, since I am not into owning anything that requires care and feeding. Children were an exception.

My curiosity was also piqued by an article in the Humane Society of the United States News. It said chickens can recognize and remember about 100 other chickens and like listening to classical music, both of which places them in a higher intellectual category than most of the people I know.

Another reason for my interest is that chicken is the only meat I eat. “Touch anything else,” a cardiologist told me, “and you die.” There’s nothing like the fear of death to enhance good nutrition. Others must feel the same. The U.S. per capita consumption of poultry has increased 52% in the past 10 years. This is definitely not the Era of the Cow.

The Zackys have been in the chicken business a long time. Bob’s father owned Sam’s Poultry Market in L.A. for 50 years before Bob and his brother Al parlayed the business into what it is today, processing 1.3 million chickens a week. They also process turkeys, but this is not about turkeys.

Animal activists will tell you that processing is a euphemism for killing, plucking and gutting a living creature. By that logic, the term could be applied to what we do to condemned criminals. We process them at San Quentin, for instance, although we do not pluck, gut and eat them.

However, these are chickens, not people. We are essentially omnivorous, and will eat anything that moves or grows. If God wanted us to be vegetarians, he would not have given us cheeseburgers.

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The Queen of Chicken assures me they do everything possible to give their chickens a happy, comfortable life before stunning them with electricity and, well, processing them. They live in environmentally-

controlled chicken houses with access to fresh air and sunlight. That’s better than the way 72% of all New Yorkers live.

Chickens are not, as activists like to say of dogs and cats, animal companions. Well, they are at our house, but that’s different. Mostly they are raised to be eaten. “Some say plants scream when they’re picked,” the Queen of Chicken said. “If we believed that, we wouldn’t eat anything.”

She tells about the time one of their trucks overturned, killing dozens of chickens. “Bob was in tears. I said, ‘They were going to die anyhow.’ He said, ‘Yes, but not like that!’ He was actually crying.”

As we talked, a stone rooster on a fireplace mantle stared at me. There was the same fierce look in its eyes as that of a priest who told me at age 12 I would burn in hell for harboring lustful thoughts. The rooster seemed to be saying, “Repent.”

I came away from the Zacky house with more respect for their noble chickens. “It’s not just our business,” the Queen of Chicken said in the same tone that has swayed millions to their fryers, “it’s a way of life.” I’ll be a lot more courteous to my wife’s chickens from now on. I may even play them some Beethoven.