AUSTIN, TEXAS — Chicken owners, rejoice: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued an official statement alerting it’s perfectly safe to dress up your chicken for Halloween.
The CDC issued the Halloween-related notice on Thursday, essentially advising people to go nuts in dressing up their avian friends in costumes. The terse headline to the news advisory — “Erroneous Media Reports About Chickens and Halloween Costumes” — palpably betrayed scientists’ ruffled feathers related to chicken dressing.
“Despite news reports to the contrary, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not warned people against dressing chickens in Halloween costumes,” the succinct advisory read. Regardless of what CDC researchers might personally think about dressing up chickens for Halloween, it would appear that the misplaced attribution in other news reports is what may have made them madder than a wet hen.
Fake fowl news!
But in the next sentence, CDC officials did what they do best in offering practical safety tips to ensure safe chicken costuming: “However, we do advise people with backyard or pet chickens to handle them carefully to keep their family and their chickens safe and healthy,” CDC officials wrote.
Those safety tips are:
This is big news across Texas, where chickens abound.
Broiler alert: We learned in the course of reporting this story that it’s exceedingly difficult to discern hard figures for chicken populations. One site placed the state figures at a mere 28 million, but Texas Monthly magazine — chronicler of all things Texana — placed the numbers much higher at some 600 million .
The statistical chasm appears rooted in the numbers of domestically raised birds versus those on chicken farms. Depending on how they’re categorized, this difference also yields something of an existential crisis for those hens classified as broilers. This means that they are not raised as pets, and probably aren’t destined for Halloween get-ups.
Texas Monthly reported back in the day that farms in the state raised more than 600 million broilers in 2007, up from 260 million in 1988. What this means is that there were some five chickens in Texas for every person then.
Reader Sofia Andry of San Antonio, Texas, submitted this photo (used with permission) of her chickens. No word if she plans to dress them up for Halloween.
According to the website statista, there are more than 28 million chickens in the Lone Star State — the nation’s fifth most populous state in terms of its chicken head count. The mind thus boggles as to the chicken costume combinations. Like financial data found on corporate annual and quarterly statements, statista places its counts based on thousands to economize against extraneous zeros.
But its tally is a very rough chicken calculus. The real numbers at a granular level are exponentially greater, according to TexasCounties.net, which places the number at 120 million. Sadly, there is no statewide chicken census counts every ten years (how fun are visions of census takers knocking on chicken coops for household interviews?), making it hard to pluck out reliable data on their changing numbers. The most recent data was from TexasCounties.net’s 2012 count that placed the overall chicken count then at more than 120 million.
Central Texas has its share of chickens, with 14,402 of the critters counted in 2012 across Travis County where Austin is the seat, according to the website. That’s roughly half the number found in Bexar County with 7,548 feathered residents in the San Antonio that same year.
But that’s chicken scratch compared to other more rural counties where the beaked denizens rule the roost. Shelby County in East Texas is the true bird behemoth, with more than 25 million chickens calling the area home (at least until they’re eaten). Gonzales County in South Central Texas comes a close second, with more than 20 million chickens roam the landscape. Nacogdoches County in the northern of East Texas is another chicken capital with more than 15 million of the birds
After that, no other counties in Texas registers in the eight-digit realm in terms of the chicken count. For truly astronomical chicken costume configurations, one would have to venture outside of Texas — Iowa, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, say, which are the top four chicken states. Here’s how statista conservatively ranks the top ten states in terms of their chicken populations:
Having chickens as pets or for the eggs in urban settings has become a thing in recent years, prompting state governments to limit the number per household. Last year in Texas, Senate Bill 1620 gave Texans the legal right to keep up to six hens.
So by all means, let your creativity soar this Halloween and dress your chickens. Undoubtedly, they will look adorable. But despite their dressed-up cuteness, heed the CDC’s warning that’s worth repeating here: Don’t kiss your birds , and refrain from snuggling them before touching your face or mouth.
For more information on handling chickens and other poultry, click here.
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>>> Top photo by Tony Cantú/Patch staff.
Chicken-owning readers: If you opt to dress your chicken for Halloween, please send pictures to antonio.cantu@patch.com (with your name and location), and we’ll publish them. Again: Please. Send. Chicken. Pictures.
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