Chicken Love

This is What Happens When Caring Goes Viral

Team Photo: Lindsey Lohen, Fluffernutter and Free Range Kahlo

As promised last week, we’re taking a little emotional break this week and talking chickens. Specifically, we’re talking Emotional Support Chickens (ESCs) a subset of Emotional Support Animals (ESA’s) that are popping up in dorms, on planes, in shopping carts, etc. According to sites that track these things, about 1 in 6 Americans owns an ESA, and searches for Emotional Support Chickens specifically are up 80%. Additionally, the business of ESA fraud is way up with 1 in 9 people getting scammed in some way, so….count your chickens, people! It all seems a tweensy bit inflated to me but what do I know?

Without a doubt, pets give good love; but they also need a lot of care, which is where the fake versions come in. I started thinking about the value of inanimate therapy pets with the robotic cat Artie, featured in The Upside of an Unwanted Move. At elder care residences there are always lots of stuffed animals kicking around on shelves and beds and windowsills. Even animals get calmed by stuffed animals. Our black lab will not go out to do her business at night or in the morning without a stuffed bear in her mouth, and will also shamelessly swipe them from children and the elderly. But…chickens?

A SHORT HISTORY OF ESCs

Annette Corsino opened The Knitting Tree LA fifteen years ago or so. Along the way, she and her son created a pattern and kit for knitting ESC’s based on the OG pattern traced to the late Bev Galeskas for Fibertrends. They assigned each version of the kit names, like Chick ira, Hennifer Lopez, Betty Egg White, Lindsey Cluckingham, Hendrick Lamar. You get the picture.

So far the Knitting Tree has sold more than 30,000 patterns and 5000 kits (the pattern plus all needed yarn and embellishments) to people in 60 countries. After the LA wildfires last fall, the store organized fundraisers and knitted chicken donations to help people affected from the fires. The news caught hold of it. It’s officially trending, a foreign word in this household, but someone in my family was listening.

GETTING WITH THE CHICKEN PROGRAM

Beatie had gotten reinterested in knitting when she was trying to find something for Nina to do with a friend in a neighboring room, and discovered Nina could still knit (see Fidgety Fidget). She figured out a simple pattern for a hat, and we made a bazillion of those, while Nina knitted a few rows now and then, and her neighbor mostly wound the yarn in a ball. It did serve as a way to get Nina reminiscing about her youth and that itself was gold.

I’m not sure what got Beatie onto the chickens, but when she searched it up and found this video, “it was love at first sight,” she recalls. She started with a kit—first for Lindsey LoHEN and then for Free Range Kahlo. Then she went on her own, modifying the basic pattern with her own embellishments—racing stripes on the bottom, fur accents on the neck and tail, crocheted bits of flair as needed. She’s now on her seventh chicken and is part of two Facebook groups—Emotional Support Chicken Kal/Cal with 5.6K members and Emotional Support Chickens! Knit and Crocheted with 15K plus members.

“I answer a lot of questions on the FB groups,” she explains, noting the vast range of chicken knitting skills, from “amazing” to “is that even a chicken?” All of them garner support online, feeding the chicken-knitting fire. The groups do not allow any talk of sales. “The whole point is giving them,” says Beatie.

Each chicken takes her about four days of focused work, which she finds addicting in a weird way. “Nobody makes just one. I don’t know whether it’s the feel of the yarn or the movement or what.” They become more real when you put the eyes on. When you weight them, stuff ‘em and fluff ‘em it’s all over. You’re hooked.

The gals at rest and in progress; hens at work; a glimpse of the yarn stash

THE COOP

She made one for her husband then another for a friend who is sick; another for an elderly friend going into assisted living and another for that friend’s daughter; then Fluffernutter for our favorite innkeepers and another (as yet unnamed) for her own daughter who lives alone and probably needed a little company. I started wondering if I could figure out how to make one. Then one day, she called me when I was really struggling.

‘You’re getting a chicken!” I protested weakly. I’d be fine. This would pass. But she insisted. A few days later Beatie sent me a picture of a beautiful chicken with a fluffy neck and tail. Love at first sight indeed. Of course, every chicken has a story and for the maker, as with a mother and child, it is impossible to pick a favorite. The non maker, however, can have a favorite. My favorite is currently in a cozy box on her way to me. I’ve named her Hazel, a very classic straight up name, in honor of a Great Aunt I never was able to meet; but her stage name—because everybody needs one of those—is “Chickie D.”

At the Knitting Tree, shoppers instinctively pick up display chickens and carry them as they browse. ESC’s are even making their way into doctor’s offices where anxious patients clutch them. Reportedly, hugging a chicken-sized pillow to your chest helps heal surgery sites.

As one person somewhere down my chicken-knitting video rabbit hole observed, “I think because the world is such an uncertain place, filled with anxiety and loneliness, these chickens give people permission to have a laugh, and be a little vulnerable.”

Up Next: Back to our story. You might want to grab a chicken.