Peyton's Fluffy Chicken

Overview

Peyton’s Fluffy Chicken is the nickname of a white Silkie^[8] chicken that was featured in a post by Tumblr user thatsmoderatelyraven, who claimed her mother would purchase the bird for her if she received 500,000 notes on the microblogging site. Many Tumblr users got behind the campaign and helped her reach the goal by February of 2013.

Background

On January 26th, 2013, Tumblr user Thatsmoderatelyraven submitted a post^[1] featuring a photo of a Silkie chicken, which asked other Tumblr users to help her reach 500,000 notes so her mother would purchase the bird. Later that day, Thatsmoderatelyraven^[4] posted a screenshot of a Facebook post claiming that her mother would purchase the chicken for 1,000,000 Facebook likes as well.

Notable Developments

Many Tumblr users immediately began sharing the post, some even replacing the image of the fluffy chicken with another fitting image, such as Lady Gaga’s exotic headpiece and a piece of fried chicken (shown below).

On January 29th, web developer Joe Anzalone created the single serving site “Peyton’s Fluffy Chicken Countdown”^[5] , which provided a live counter of the notes for Thatsmoderatelyraven’s Tumblr post. The same day, the Tumblr^[6] blog “Get Peytons Chicken” was created, which reblogged Thatsmoderatelyraven’s chicken post over 520 times in the next several days. On February 17th, following the Vatican’s announcement of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation earlier that week, a petition was created on Petition Site^[7] to “make fluffy chicken the new pope,” which garnered over 350 signatures in 24 hours.

Fan Art

Several Tumblr users created fan art illustrations and animated GIFs for the chicken, many of which can be found on the microblogging site under the tag “#fluffy chicken.”^[9]

Goal Reached

On February 17th, 2013, the post had reached its goal of 50,000 notes. Several Tumblr users celebrated the occasion by declaring February 17th “Fluffy Chicken Day.” The same day, Peyton tweeted that she would be getting the fluffy chicken.