Nubz the chicken in rainbow shoes.Photo:Michelle Davignon
Michelle Davignon
These shoes were made for walkin', and that’s just what Nubz will do.
In January, California resident Meesh Davignon went to pick up some new homes for her guinea pigs and walked away with a unique new companion.
“The lady I went to get the houses from was moving, and she found out that I owned chickens, and she asked me if I could take [Nubz] because she couldn’t take him with her,” Davignon, 30, tells PEOPLE.
The animal lover agreed to add the chicken to her family and went to work welcoming the bird.
Upon his arrival at Davignon’s home, Nubz had already lost his toes due to a case of scaly leg mites — microscopic insects that can live underneath the scales that cover a chicken’s feet. To help prevent the situation from worsening, Davignon used different sprays to care for the bird and his feet.
Nubz the chicken, who lost his toes to a mite infestation.Michelle Davignon
Along with these treatments, Davignon found “a really good way to treat the mites is to suffocate them with Vaseline” and then wrap up the bird’s greased-up feet.
Nubz responded well to this treatment, too, but it tended to cause a mass. Davignon says to make the treatment work best for both her and Nubz, she figured out “a way where I didn’t have to rewrap his feet and legs so much because he was stepping in dirt and poop.”
“I decided to put on the boots because I wanted to keep his little nubs clean,” Davignon says. Nubz’s first pair of shoes was a set of reindeer dog shoes the pet owner initially purchased for her Chihuahua. Little did she know, Nubz’s new accessories were also excellent mobility devices.
Nubz wearing his first pair of shoes — reindeer boots initially bought for a dog.Michelle Davignon
“I didn’t think that they would be such a great way for him to get around, but it turns out he walks around so much better with the boots when he’s on, like, dirt or wood chips or anything that’s rough,” Nubz’s owner shares, telling PEOPLE the chicken now has around 30 pairs of shoes.
Fashion-forward and Nubz has won Davignon’s heart and those ofhis nearly 175,000 TikTok followers, but he’s also received some hate, specifically regarding his gender identity.
Nubz was born a hen, but when Davignon received the bird, he wasn’t laying any eggs. “I knew that could be a sign of stress,” she says.
As time went on, Davignon noticed a few other interesting changes going on with the bird, including “gigantic” spurs that were “bigger than a hen’s should be,” a “squeaky crow,” the comb on the top of his head becoming “humongous compared to a female comb,” and his waddle getting bigger.
She tells PEOPLE that it was “clear he’s either a true Gynandromorph,” meaning he has both male and female sex organs, or that he’s a transgender chicken.
Nubz the chicken wearing blue booties. He has around 30 pairs of shoes that help him walk.Michelle Davignon
Davignon explains that instances like this can occur when there aren’t enough roosters in a flock.
“There’s usually the one hen that would be like ‘top hen,’ and they will start to produce more testosterone and stop laying eggs. They’ll start crowing and take on a much more rooster personality,” she adds.
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“I didn’t think that it would cause such an uproar on the Internet, but a lot of people really love it, but we definitely do get a lot of hate for it, too,” Davignon says of Nubz’s gender identity.
source: people.com
