"He's technically a hen but he identifies as a rooster."
It was a surprising start for an interview for sure, but — when you consider the statement was made by the owner of Nubz, a Malaysian Serama chicken that doesn't tip the scale at even a pound but has more than 156,000 followers on TikTok who've liked his posts more than 6 million times — maybe not all that shocking.
"He's he's a sassy little guy," says Meesh, an Escondido, San Diego, dog trainer who has 13 other chickens, five dogs, a cat and a guinea pig in a menagerie she shares with her partner. "He talks. He talks all the time. He loves to chat."
You may have divined from his name that Nubz is no ordinary fowl. More Footloose than footless, he is challenged in the talon department but "loves adventuring," as Meesh, who prefers the anonymity of just her nickname, puts it.
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"He had really bad scaly leg mites," Meesh said last week by video conference. "That's why his little nubbins are the way they are. After getting a lot of advice from a lot of people on the Internet, the final consensus is that he lost his toes to scaly leg mites. We did treat him for them. When he first got here, he was also like, really, really — his comb was pretty pale and he was really lethargic. But I gave him lots of baths and lots of treats. And then once we got the shoes on, he started moving around more and he just kind of … I think he was maybe a little depressed, but he's been a happy camper ever since."
A "comb" is the fleshy growth on top of a chicken's head, for those wondering.
Meesh first crossed paths with Nubz a couple years back.
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"When people hear that I used to run a dog rescue, a lot of times they ask me to take in random pets," Meesh explained. "I think it was almost, like, two years ago now. We had, like, three or four guinea pigs that we were fostering, and I really wanted to give them a bigger enclosure with, like, more hiding spaces. So I was on OfferUp looking for little guinea pig houses, and [one woman] had a whole bunch of them because she bred bunnies. So she had made all of these little adorable little hutches — like tiny houses. So I'd gone there to pick those up, and we got to talking, and she heard that I had other chickens, and she was moving, so she asked me to take him."
After Nubz came home with Meesh, she thought he might want to take a walk — in four tiny shoes she had for a Chihuahua that decided he didn't want to walk on hard floors.
"After I wrapped up his little nubs, I thought, 'Maybe he could use some shoes,' give him some more, I don't know — normally chickens have really wide toes to help them balance," Meesh said.
It took Nubz some time to get used to his shod feet, but Meesh was there for him.
"I would help guide him," Meesh said. "I'd kind of hold him in them and then lure him with mealworms. And then he got used to them, and he started doing really well with them."
And that is how a TikTok star is born. Meesh posted video after video of her bantam out perambulating, and the animal fans came calling. One video, posted back in February "Meet Nubz, the tiny rescue chicken with attitude, no toes and the cutest gosh darn waddle," cracked more than 1.5 million streams
In June though, Nubz took a turn for the worse.
"I woke up and looked over at him and he was looking at me sideways," Meesh recalled. "That was a little weird. And throughout that day, his head was like, it'd go up and straight like normal and then it'd go sideways. And then over like three days, it progressed. Like, he wasn't able to lift up his head and he wasn't able to stand. So we went to the ER and we got X-rays done and everything, and turns out he has two discs in his neck that — what you might call it? — the vet said looks like they're, like, degenerative."
As dire as things were, though, there was hope. Eventually, Meesh found caregivers and Nubz has been undergoing acupuncture and laser-light therapy and some rehab, and can now take steps and is able to hold his head up again. It's been an expensive road to recovery but Nubz's fans, folks from as far away as Germany, France, Australian and Canada, turned out to support him.
"I don't know the exact numbers, but I want to say that his ER stuff alone, I think that was about $5,000, and we put down $1,000 toward that and the rest was covered by donations," Meesh said.
Before Nubz's setback this summer, Meesh and her partner had wanted to do meet-and-greets for his fans but those plans are on hold, at least temporarily.
"Honestly, I don't even care if he gets back in his boots," Meesh said. "I just want him to be able to be more self-sustainable. He's now able to eat again, but I would really love for him to be able to walk around, because I know he loves adventuring so much."
