Tim Byrdak (with the hat) and Little Jerry Seinfeld

Because it’s a truth widely acknowledged that consequentialist thinking is not necessarily a strength of jocks, one doesn’t need to wonder just what Mets reliever Tim Byrdak thought might happen next when he bought a live chicken from a market in Chinatown to surprise a teammate who’d famously called the Yankees “chickens” in an interview. The answer is, he didn’t. In short, he was a knucklehead.

Thankfully, another little bird—Twitter—came to the rescue. When Byrdak took to his account to ask for help in finding a good home for the chicken, whom he named “Little Jerry Seinfeld” for reasons we won’t bore you with, Farm Sanctuary stepped up to the plate (the metaphor is ludic and not gastronomic, you understand) to adopt the bird.

Farm Sanctuary thus allowed a very relieved reliever (and even more relieved chicken) to flip the bird on Sunday at Citi Field, thus providing the chicken, who’d become an overnight celebrity and unofficial mascot, with a much better outcome than the nine billion other such birds who are killed and eaten in the U.S. each year. Can I hear you say “serenity now“?