There's a moment in the *Portlandia* sketch where the waiter presents the chicken of the evening with a name, a backstory, and a laminated photo ID, and you realize the joke isn't really about the chicken. It's about us, the ones who name our hens, who warn dinner guests that Gertrude is in a mood, who feel a little pang when the egg carton gets low because that means one of our feathered friends worked overtime. The sketch is fifteen years old, and I'm late to it, but that only proves its point: the impulse to personalize poultry is timeless. Colin the chicken isn't a punchline. He's a mirror.
Here's the thing about naming a chicken. It transforms the bird from a generic farm animal into a specific personality. Colin, according to his papers, enjoyed sunflower seeds and free-ranging by the rhododendrons. That detail is absurdly precious, and it's also exactly what we do. We can't help it. When you spend mornings watching a hen do her little victory dance after laying an egg, or you witness two pullets squabble over a worm with the drama of a soap opera, you start assigning character traits. You start caring. The sketch nails the tension: we love these creatures, but we also live in a world where they end up on plates. That's not hypocrisy, it's the messy reality of keeping chickens in a culture that both adores and consumes them.
If a reader came to me and said, "I name my chickens, but then I feel guilty about eating eggs from them," I'd tell them to lean into the weirdness. The Portlandia joke works because it's exaggerated, but the feeling underneath is sincere. Naming a chicken doesn't make you soft. It makes you honest about the relationship. You're acknowledging that this animal has a life, a personality, a preference for mealworms over scratch grains. That awareness doesn't have to lead to paralysis. It can lead to better care, more thoughtful feeding, and a deeper appreciation for the absurd honor of being trusted by a creature that could peck you but chooses to perch on your knee instead.
So here's my concrete takeaway: go ahead and name your chickens. Give them backstories. Keep their papers in a little folder if it makes you smile. But also, when you sit down to that dinner, whether it's Colin or a store-bought bird, remember that the naming is the point. It's the act of seeing an animal as more than a unit of production. That's not a contradiction. It's the whole clucking, egg-citing, feather-ruffling reason we keep chickens in the first place.