By Christine Heppermann
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012
Review by Karen Davis, President of United Poultry Concerns
“Chickens in the yard. Chickens in the shower. Chickens upstairs and downstairs, in the kitchen and under the couch. . . . How did they go from
helping dogs, cats, and pet birds to helping chickens?”
In North Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the inner city, there’s a magic kingdom you can glimpse through the peephole of a wooden fence. This is the home,
in a busy neighborhood, of Mary Britton Clouse, her husband Bert Clouse, and Chicken Run Rescue, the nonprofit rescue, rehabilitation, referral, adoption,
and education center founded by Mary and Bert in 2001. It all started when six Thai roosters, impounded by Minneapolis Animal Control after a cockfighting
raid, needed a refuge. Mary and Bert already had several rescued animals, including parakeets and doves, but chickens? “Fighting” roosters?
City Chickens
tells the intriguing story of how Chicken Run Rescue got started, and how and why it operates. Each morning, Mary and Bert are awakened by the crowing and
clucking of their “guests,” as they call their cherished residents. They spend the day cleaning cages, medicating sick birds, soaking infected
chicken feet, rescuing hens trapped in snow drifts, running to the vet, driving long distances to place a single chicken in a home Mary has approved
through her meticulous online adoption service, and much more. I’ve visited Mary and Bert and watched their indefatigable dedication in action.
Technically, City Chickens is a book for children, but it is really a book for all ages. It’s arranged in short, vivid chapters accompanied
by photographs, including overhead views of the Clouse’s small enclosed yard – from the wreckage it was when they first moved in to their
transformation of it into a lovely garden for the chickens to enjoy. Their basement is a chicken hospital; an upstairs kitchen is the emergency room.
Looking at the tranquil house and garden through the peephole, you would not guess the energy expended inside to give suffering chickens a first or second
chance at life.
We get to know Mary and Bert and several of their shelter residents by name and through each bird’s personal story, lovingly recounted by Christine
Heppermann, who describes how she went from a more or less impersonal interviewer to becoming a chicken adopter herself through Mary’s online
“Adoption Chronicles.”
As we read, our education broadens. We learn about inner-city cockfighting, hideous university experiments on baby chicks, poultry industry atrocities, and
how the urban chicken-keeping trend has swelled the number of cast-off chickens. “Not everyone who raises city chickens is prepared for the work that
goes into taking care of animals,” Heppermann writes. “Or they purchase chicks thinking they are hens, and one or two – or all –
turn out to be roosters. And so Mary and Bert get another call. And another and another.”
Rather than summarize the stories of individual roosters and hens featured in City Chickens, I urge everyone who loves chickens already, or who
would like to get to know them better, as well as learn something of the nuts and bolts of running an urban sanctuary for chickens, to buy, read, and share
this book. If you’re wondering about adopting a few chickens for companionship, City Chickens will instruct and inspire you. You’ll be
moved and enchanted by the story of Billiam the rooster and the kind family who adopted and loves him. You’ll be touched by the luck of Miss Manor
the hen, “from the moment of her capture” by Bert at the Friendly Manor apartment complex in freezing snow, to Miss Manor’s bliss in her
garden of earthly delights at Chicken Run Rescue.
Mary Britton Clouse is a visual artist whose haunting portraits of chickens have been shown in galleries and praised by art critics around the world. Yet
she tells Heppermann that her chicken rescue work leaves little time for art these days. This is sad, she says, but look at it this way: “The world
will survive if I never do another painting, but if we don’t take in a chicken, it could mean the difference between life and death for an
animal.”
Amazingly, Mary manages to rescue chickens from the evil effects of human ignorance in both essential ways. I speak for chickens everywhere in thanking
Mary and Bert. I am grateful to Christine Heppermann for including a page in City Chickens about United Poultry Concerns’ Humane
Alternatives to School Hatching Projects, “Hatching Good Lessons.”
City Chickens
is inspired by the love of chickens and by two incredible people who are spreading that love through their tireless energy and talent. The work of Chicken
Run Rescue, as Mary and Bert describe it, “is compelled by our belief that taking animals off of our plates and putting them in our hearts is the way
forward.” Order your copy of City Chickens and put this wonderful and unique treasure on your gift list. To learn more about Chicken Run
Rescue, visit www.chickenrunrescue.org
Karen Davis, United Poultry Concerns