When Traci Torres sat down in 2004 and wrote an e-book about how to deal with having an at-home chicken coop, she did not plan on starting a huge business, My Pet Chicken, selling bird diapers to people who don’t want their pet chickens to poop on the floor. That was because she did not know then, as she surely knows now, what a chicken-obsessed nation we were becoming.
Everyone wants their own chickens and backyard chicken coops these days. It’s just the thing to do. Hipsters and urban homesteaders have chickens. Broke people have chickens. Jennifer Aniston has chickens. People who like to clean up poop and bale hay have chickens. Although the poop cleanup is a lot easier with the chicken diapers, which come in various floral and butterfly prints with a removable vinyl liner. My Pet Chicken also sells chicken saddles, which should more properly be called chicken fuckshields (they’re intended to prevent feather loss when a hen is mounted by an overly enthusiastic rooster).
Besides sanitary pants and protective sex gear for chickens, Torres and her husband Derek Sasaki sell coops, food, cleaning supplies, and even live birds. And they make a fair amount of money — $2 million in sales last year and 334 percent revenue growth in the last three years. So next time you think, oh, what cool way can I get rich, maybe remember that you can’t make an omelette out of a screenplay.
