Experience the joy of chicken yoga

CLUCK, CLUCK, STRETCH

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YOGA participants pet a chicken at Hotel Haya. The Washington Post

(The Washington Post)

COLLEEN McHenry was leading a yoga class when a chicken named Turkey walked behind her and under a window curtain. McHenry soon learned the reason behind Turkey's strange behaviour: The chicken had laid an egg in her brightly coloured diaper while roughly 50 yogis held their poses.

This is an example of what you might find at chicken yoga, a class at a Tampa hotel that allows people to perform downward dog and child's pose among rescued chickens in diapers.

Yoga with animals - goats, dogs and cats - has become popular in recent years. But chicken yoga is another version, offered in a neighbourhood where dozens of wild chickens roam the streets, courtyards and pavements.

"Sometimes it's just so much silly fun that, yeah, people completely forget that they're doing yoga - me, too," said McHenry, owner of Yoga Loft Tampa.

The chickens spend most of the class walking around, clucking at one another and sitting on the floor and yoga mats. Sometimes they lounge on the stomachs of people in corpse pose. They knock down water bottles and bags and peck at necklaces, rings and hair clips - possibly because they think the jewelry is food.

The history of the chickens dates to the mid-1880s, when labour unrest and a large fire caused many cigar manufacturers to move from Key West, Florida, to a neighbourhood in Tampa that became known as Ybor City, according to the Museum of Florida History. Workers moved with their chickens, which they used as a food source and for cockfighting, according to the Ybor Chickens Society. The group now protects the neighbourhood's wild chickens, some said to be descendants of the chickens that originally moved to Ybor City.