Of all the things that could be running through your head when you’re waiting in line for kaparos on a busy Erev Yom Kippur, I feel like the main thought is, “Should I just raise my own chickens?” I mean how hard can it be if Schmutter’s doing it?

Apparently, I’m raising chickens. As I might have mentioned in a couple of articles, one of my kids brought home a chick from school and another brought one home from his friend’s farm, and they’ve been growing at an alarming pace. But we still have them.

Because we want to see if we’ll get eggs. Not because we plan on killing them.

Not that people don’t ask. One thing I’ll tell you about having chickens is that if you have chickens, everybody immediately asks if you’re going to use them for kaparos. And you have to say, “No!” Because once you use them for kaparos, you no longer have chickens. Also, we do not yet know their genders. We’re planning on finding out when they either crow or lay eggs. We’re hoping for the latter, because we already have alarm clocks, and so does everyone else in town, I’m assuming.

But first of all, I think that once you name your chickens, you’re not going to do kaparos with them. And our chickens do have names—there’s Baby Mo, who is the slightly older main chicken, and there’s Yapchick, who is the assistant chicken. Yapchick mostly follows Baby Mo around and does whatever Mo decides to do.

“Oh, we’re pecking the doormat now? Okay.”

Also, if you do get your own chickens, unless you’re planning on going to a kaparos place anyway, you would have to spend time learning shechita. And you have to find a poor family and convince them to take your bloody chicken that you shechted yourself.

But it’s your choice. So today, we’re going to talk about some things that go into raising chickens, based on my experience specifically, so you can make an informed decision.

Anyway, in my experience, you might want to keep your chicks inside, at least at first, because literally everything in the world eats chickens.

You also might be worried, at least at first, that if they’re living in your backyard, you may forget that you have chicks because you only remember to feed your goldfish like twice a week, and he’s living in your house. So for example, we put ours in our living room, which is also where I used to work before I got chickens. They live in our fireplace for convenience, though not the kind of convenience you’re thinking about. The fireplace doesn’t actually work.

The birds’ main tafkid is to peck everything in the house. Mostly, they’re looking for food.

I’m like, “#1, I keep giving you food. #2, I clean this floor 10 times a day now. You’re not finding anything.”

“No, we’ll find something!”

They also eat bugs. I mean so do spiders, but I’d rather keep a chicken as a pet than a spider. You’re never sitting around the house and all of a sudden a chicken starts lowering itself onto you from the ceiling.

“How do we have chickens? I keep this place so clean!”

To be honest, I’m not always sure how to let them know that something is food. I point to the food, I dunk their heads in the food… I can’t always just hand it to them, because they startle very easily. You throw a piece of food to dogs, and they catch it in mid-air. You throw a piece of food to chickens and they scatter. Then they say, “Wait. Was that food?” And they slowly come back. Sometimes.

The weird thing is that even though chickens are scared of everything, they’re not scared of bugs. Whereas people are scared of bugs. Or at least hesitant with regard to bugs. Yet we call them “chickens.” Also, I’ve been to kaparos, and people are pretty scared of chickens too.

And the chickens aren’t easy to catch because they’re fast. You have to run while keeping one hand close to the ground to catch them, but you’re also trying to catch them somewhat delicately, and you’re also trying to avoid stuff on the floor that they are not avoiding. They leave these things on the floor ahead of time, to get you. As soon as you clean them up, they’re like, “Oh, no!” and they leave more.

And on top of that, it’s the assistant chicken’s job to run interference. When I’m trying to pick up the faster one and it starts running away, the assistant will run along behind it even though I’m not chasing it at all, but I can’t catch the faster one because I’m trying not to step on the slower one. The faster one is very smart, because it’s keeping this other chicken near it on its payroll just to slow me down. When the assistant was hired, it asked, “What’s my job? Is it just to follow you?”

“Yes.”

So all in all, just a few weeks ago, we weren’t sure we wanted to keep these chickens, and now my wife is having my son build a coop despite his zero knowledge of chickens other than that his friend has a farm. So maybe the same thing will happen to you! Unless you have crawling babies. Then this whole thing would be a hygiene nightmare

But for us, I think the plan is to do one of those things where when the animals are brought outside, our house is going to be so roomy. We’ll be like, “What an empty fireplace! Free to plug anything in! And also no little presents everywhere!”

But for now, they’re mostly inside, though my wife did suggest I buy little harnesses so we could take them for walks.

I think her plan is to walk them like dogs and say things to people like, “She won’t bite.” I’m not sure what her plan is if we meet up with someone who is actually walking a dog.

For now, the harnesses seem to be too big. But the harnesses would definitely make kaparos easier. You could do a whole crowd of people with a single chicken! Not our chickens, because they keep falling out of the harnesses.

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He has also published eight books and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].