Old McDonald had a farm? Nah? It's a place in the Hamptons.

When I read the brief piece on those summering in the Hamptons with a rent-a-chicken set up (coop and layers) in their backyard, I thought it was a parody.

Here's the scene when "Homestead Ida" and "Farmer Joe" DeFrancisco, farmers who own a Rent the Chicken business paid a call on one of their customers.

Alina, a leveraged-buyout attorney turned stay-at-

home mom, strode out in a tie-dyed caftan, with a stack of diamond bracelets. “If you want to know anything about the chickens, you’ll have to ask my four-year-old,” she said. The four-year old, Oliver, was clinging to his au pair in the pool. “Be Prepared,” the coup anthem from “The Lion King,” boomed through outdoor speakers. Rich, Alina’s husband, who runs a renewable-energy business, emerged from the kitchen in a bright-blue bathing suit, holding a tequila on the rocks.

“Hey, Ollie, can we put on something a little less ominous, please?” he said. He stretched out on an outdoor sofa and explained how he’d heard about Rent the Chicken: “I was at a polo match where a guy was telling me about leasing horses, which turned me on to his whole incredible world of renting animals.” The family will return their rental chickens in August, when their children, Oliver and Ellis (“like the island,” Alina said), go back to school in Houston. (Source: The New Yorker)

Where. To. Begin.  

There's the tie-dyed caftan paired with diamond bracelets. (Snob that I am, I wasn't surprised to learn that Alina was from Houston, and not the sort of ultra New Yorker who hits the Long Island Expressway helicopter pad every Thursday to buzz out to the Hamptons for the weekend. In my imagining, the Hamptons crowd wears linen, and rich person versions of Ralph Lauren. Understated. Or just slob out, fuck-it-all style. Tie-dyed caftan and diamond bracelets? I'm guessing the chickens they rented might well be the only friends they have out there. But what do I know? The people I know on Long Island live in the part of Long Island that's an extension of Queens.)

And while nice of them to bring the au pair with them on their vacay, but what does Alina do all day. I'm sure that tie-dying does eat up part of the time, but maybe Alina should be spending less time piling on those diamond bracelets and more time helping scared little Oliver get over his fear of being in the pool.

And Rich first hearing about the possibility of renting an animal when he was at a polo match!!!

What's polo speak for "to the hounds!"

And I don't like to think of myself as the kind of person who picks on kids, but I wouldn't bet against Oliver and Ellis being insufferable little brats. No fault of their own, of course. (C.f., diamond bracelets, polo match.)

I was, of course, aware of the growing interest in folks keeping chickens, which got a big boost during covid, when everyone was nesting and trying to avoid grocery stores. 

But I wasn't aware that you could actually rent a chicken, along with coop and chickenfeed, and - if your summering on Long Island or some other summering place - return the kit and kaboodle come September. 

I guess it's something of a vacation for the animals. They get to be in a presumably less chaotic situation: fewer chickens squawking, less commotion, a room coop of your own (almost), more attention from the little Olivers and Ellises of the world - and from the Alinas and Riches. 

Because this family was going all in on their chickens. 

They've been buying extras, like a small "picnic bench"  where the chickens sit and enjoy a special treat

...according to Rich, “Oliver likes to mix a special concoction of saliva and worms for the chickens.”

Rich and Alina aren't the only Hamptonians who rent from Homestead Ida and Farmer Joe, who do their homesteading and farming in Wallingford, Connecticut (a suburb of New Haven). 

After that stop, the couple moved on to visit the chickens rented by Ivy, a New Jersey anesthesiologist, who welcomed them "wearing a wide-brimmed green visor and bicycle shorts." Which sounds a lot more Hampton to me than the tie-dyed caftan. Ivy's got her brood with her - kids and grandkids - with her for the month of June.

 “The short-term chicken rental was just perfect for us!” Ivy said.

 What's all this go for?

For twelve hundred dollars, Rent the Chicken will deliver a chicken coop, two to four “egg-laying-ready” hens, more than a hundred pounds of feed, and instructions on “how to keep your chickens happy.”

On the sentience continuum, I don't think chickens are all that close to our end, but it's still rather kindly that there's a focus on keeping chickens happy. I'm sure happier chickens do more egg-laying. As for happiness, well, for starters, egg laying's got to be better than being turned into a broiler. So there's that.

Things can, of course, go a bit wrong. Chickens are living and breathing, so they can, like, die. I suspect that occasionally happens when a kiddo gives a chicken a little overenthusiastic attention. So, a good opportunity to explain life and death that's a little less fraught than the death of Grammy. 

But if the chicken buys the farm out of sight of the children, some parents opt to ask for an emergency delivery of a look-alike chicken so the kids never know. (A strategy that I believe is frequently deployed with the family fishbowl.)

But death isn't the biggest issue:

One of the biggest problems the chickens face: overindulgence. “We can always tell when spouses don’t talk,” Ida said. “A chicken will never turn down a second meal, so if families aren’t communicating the chickens come back to us heavy and waddling.”

Oliver may want to lay off those spit and worm feeds at the chicken picnic table. Just saying.