Chesco pet sitters are watching more than dogs and cats — chickens, goats, and sheep need care too

When Nora Murphy Kramp walked away from her veterinary assistant career to pet sit full time, she didn’t expect that years later, a large chunk of her clientele would be chickens.

And goats. And pigs. Oh my.

“It’s more common than not,” said Murphy Kramp, founder of Chester County Canines, based near Malvern. “Basically, if it’s, ‘Hey, come take care of my dogs,’ if they happen to have a nice backyard, a year later, it’s like, ‘Oh, hey, come take care of my dogs. We have six chickens now — them too.’”

There was a boom of people getting pets during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Aside from more traditional pets, that uptick also included chickens, the pet sitters observed. And an even bigger push occurred last year: As the cost of eggs inflated, people figured they’d do it themselves.

But for some of her clients, chickens are just the start: Some have added goats and sheep to their little homesteads, too.

Chester County is a ripe place for it, merging its strong agricultural past and the growing number of residents.

Over time, development has increased along with population — the county is one of the fastest-growing in the commonwealth — bringing all the amenities one could ask for. But with many municipalities having ordinances friendly to homesteading, allowing residents to farm animals with enough acreage, or chickens if the coop can be far enough from the house, more and more people have been embracing the so-called country life. (Murphy Kramp had to enter a “chicken lottery” to secure her chickens last spring, due to the surge in popularity. A study last year found that there are more than 85 million backyard chickens nationwide, rivaling the population of cats and dogs.)

When people leave Philadelphia, with its tightly packed rowhouses or apartments, getting chickens can be one of the first things they do, observed Shiena Powelson, the owner of I Sit, They Stay, a pet-sitting business based in Chester County near Pottstown.

“There’s a lot of open spaces out this way, where there’s purposely no building going on, so it allows people to have these animals, without being on top of the neighbor,” Powelson said. “On my road, I have these young families that have the chicken coops, but then there’s also a 15-acre horse farm four houses down from me. It’s a nice mix.”

Powelson, who grew up in an animal-loving family that ran a pet store in Pottstown, started her career as an educator at the Philadelphia Zoo. On the side, she fostered her pet-sitting business, and moved to it full time about 15 years ago. From the jump, she’s had an interesting assortment of pets to care for: reptiles and exotic birds. She used to sit for full-on farms, mucking horse stalls or caring for sheep, but now she’s finding more of a hybrid: People who live in residential communities, but have chickens, ducks, and even pot-bellied pigs.

“When you pull in this development, you would never expect there would be two pot-bellied bigs living in the development,” she said.

Chickens, she’s found, tend to be a familial thing, where parents teach their kids where the food comes from and how to care for the animals.

John Marshall, one of Powelson’s clients, grew up in Montgomery County and had a friend whose family had chickens. He thought it was awesome. With his own land, he decided to get his own. Now, the 54-year-old has had chickens on his couple of acres in the Pottstown area for about 30 years.

“It’s amazing, because it’s like having a dog. People just fall in love,” said Marshall. “They just become your little buddies. A lot of people think they’re real hard to take care of, but they’re not, if you set the coop up right.”

Caring for farm animals requires a different part of Powelson’s brain — digging back into her zoo background. Does she have her boots for muddy coops? Does she have her heavy jacket to work outside when it’s 10 degrees?

“It feels very different when I’m going to let someone’s dog out and can just hang out with them,” she said. “It’s a nice variety.”

With chickens and other farm critters, there are stalls to clean and muck. Murphy Kramp gets there at the crack of dawn to feed the animalsi.

During one hot summer, she told a client, Julie Gunderson, that she probably needed a fan for the chicken coop. From vacation, Gunderson ordered one, and Murphy Kramp assembled it and set it up. It gave Gunderson peace of mind, knowing someone was that hands on with her chickens while she was away.

“I had talked to a lot of people along the way who have slightly bigger operations — still backyard farms — but they would tell me, ‘Oh, you’ll never get away together, someone’s always going to have to stay home to take care of the animals,’" Gunderson said. “I just feel very fortunate to have found Nora. I really trust her.”

Gunderson, 38, didn’t grow up on a farm, or with pets other than dogs. But she had an early appreciation of farm animals, spending time at the barn with her grandfather in Rhode Island. She decided to give chickens a try during the COVID-19 pandemic, after she went from working full time, to staying at home with her first child, to everything shutting down in rapid succession.

With five acres of land, and a county friendly to backyard farms like hers, it felt seamless to add two goats and two sheep a few years later.

It’s been a way for her to learn a new skill, and do something with her family, she said.

“It was kind of just like, how do I kind of get something new that educates me and teaches me something similar to how I felt when I was working, where I feel like I’m growing in some way,” she said.

With her three kids, all under age 6, they gather eggs and clean up the goat and sheep barn.

“If people are on the fence, I say do it,” she said. “There are plenty of pet sitters to help you when you need to get away.”