MANHATTAN — Little Jerry Seinfeld, the lucky chicken who spent a short stint as a Mets mascot before being offered a home at an upstate animal rescue shelter, was happily settling into his new digs Tuesday.
The Farm Sanctuary, a 175-acre farm in the Finger Lakes Region five hours north of Manhattan, welcomed its newest resident at 3 p.m. Tuesday, posting a 30-second YouTube video of him being released from a crate onto their verdant property, where he happily pecked for food.
"It's gonna be sad to see him go," said Jeffery LaPadula of the Lower East Side, who drove more than six hours from his apartment to drop off the chicken.
"But I'm just grateful that's he not going to be slaughtered for food and he's going to live. And maybe they'll tell some other people little Jerry's story and people will eat less chicken."
He organized the chicken rescue after reaching out to Mets relief pitcher Tim Byrdak to offer to help him find a home for the chicken.
Byrdak took to Twitter to ask if anyone knew a farm that could "take a chicken off [his] hands" and that he didn't "want to see him get whacked... please help!"
Byrdak bought the chicken as a joke at the end of last week's inter-league series against the Yankees in which pitcher Frank Francisco called the Bronx Bombers a bunch of "chickens."
LaPadula and friend Matt Thurston picked up the bird from the Mets on Sunday. He plans to return to the farm later in the summer to visit him.
Farm Sanctuary president and co-founder Gene Bauer said in a statement that the shelter was "thrilled this story had a happy ending."
"Most chickens, nearly 9 billion a year in fact, meet an extremely grim end in a slaughterhouse after lives void of sunshine, fresh air and kindness on factory farms," he said.
"We’re glad the Mets realized that Little Jerry is an intelligent, social animal and, like all chickens, he deserved to be treated with kindness."
The Farm Sanctuary, a bucolic paradise "set amidst rolling green hills and forests," according to its website, offered to take in the chicken for the rest of its life.
The facility takes in hundreds of animals at any given time, and has thousands of visitors to its activities including a "People's Barn," kids area and a vegetarian gift shop, its site said.
