The Baltimore Sun profiles Patrice Jones, who recently moved into the heartland of Maryland’s chicken industry and found herself enrolling in the extremist animal-rights group United Poultry Concerns (UPC). Jones, a self-described pagan gay-rights activist, has followed the example of UPC founder Karen “Chicken Lady” Davis by “rescuing” and keeping countless hens and roosters in her home. Jones is convinced that “if you pick up a chicken and you give it a home, you know for sure that you have saved that chicken.”
But she has also anthropomorphized the birds to the point where she names them after concentration-camp survivors; she’s also certain that whenever a truck full of broiler hens whizzes past her home, her adopted chickens can feel it. “All of our birds are so upset,” Jones says. “They’re picking up on the distress of the other animals.” After a truck passes, she immediately goes “driving up and down the road, hoping, hoping someone [a chicken] has fallen out.”
