Family Takes Homeless Chicken Under Its Wing

Say “chicken on the table” and most people will ask if it’s baked or fried.

Except at the Muellers’ north Spokane residence, where a Rhode Island red named Doo Dee rules the roost.

Doo Dee - yes, I’m talking about an honest-to-gawd chicken - doesn’t live or act at all like your average barnyard bird.

This pampered, year-old hen pecks spaghetti or Parmesan cheese bits off Pfaltzgraff china while perched on an antique oak high chair at the dinner table.

She snacks on lemon yogurt, sips bottled water, watches “Geraldo Live” on TV, rides in the car to the bank and lays a brown egg each morning in the laundry hamper.

Call her name and Doo Dee comes a-running like a friendly mutt. Stretching her auburn-feathered neck, she begs to have the fleshy red wattles on her throat scratched.

“She must have been a human in a previous life,” speculates Pam Mueller, who often lets Doo Dee cling to her shoulder - even while driving the lawn tractor.

When a friend of the Muellers called to tell me about such cockamamie craziness, well, I thought I was getting my drumstick pulled.

A chicken roaming the house? No way. Not unless Doo Dee’s owners were gap-toothed hill folk who don’t know any better.

The Muellers are educated people, not kin of the dumb-cluck Clampetts. Herbert Mueller is a successful children’s dentist. Pam teaches art lessons in her basement.

The Mueller estate is one classy coop, set on five river-lined acres in the posh Wandermere area. It is an immaculate, two-story white home with concrete lions on the porch.

The flowery Victorian interior - with wallpaper borders and stained glass windows - looks as if it were decked out by Martha Stewart.

“It’s strange,” says Sally Wittkopf, one of Pam’s longtime pals. “You’re sitting in the front room and suddenly this chicken comes flopping down the stairs.”

The story of the Muellers and Doo Dee would be as charming as a Disney flick were it not for a very foul fact about fowls: “I sure wish they made Depends for chickens,” sighs Pam.

You guessed it. Even the Einstein of chickens doesn’t know the difference between a toilet and a carpet. Pam spends a good part of her day wiping up the McNuggets Doo Dee unloads at will.

“See, that isn’t too bad,” says Pam, removing a pile with a wad of Kleenex.

This complete lack of scatological sensitivity inspired Herbert to name the bird Doo Dee. Poor man. Herbert’s fastidious nature isn’t suited to having an incontinent critter in the house.

It gets weirder: One night, as the couple lay sleeping with Doo Dee, Herbert awoke to an unholy sensation. Upon closer inspection the groggy dentist realized the infernal chicken had had an unhappy ending on his arm.

Now when Pam brings Doo Dee in for a sleepover on cold nights, Herbert rejects the feather bed for a safer room.

“It’s just easier that way,” he says resolutely. “It boils down to it’s either the chicken or me. And I’m sure it would be me.”

Could there be something to this reincarnation business? The bird’s origins are mottled in mystery. About a year ago, Pam’s mother-in-law, Thora, was walking up the driveway to her home near Gonzaga University when a strange noise stopped her.

She turned around to see she was being shadowed by a cheeping chick that followed her into the house. The chicken has never been afraid of people.

A neighborhood search produced no missing chicken reports. Unable to keep the bird in the city, Thora gave Doo Dee to Pam, who bestowed it with a lifestyle the average working stiff only dreams about.

“What I really want to know,” asks Herbert, “is how long they live.”

I called a true chicken expert and got some very good news for this hen-pecked husband.

“They apparently don’t live too long,” says James Kittredge, a counterman at the South Hill’s Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. “They come to us frozen in a box with their heads cut off.”

Got a hatchet, Herb? No jury in the world will convict you.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo