A French artist who hatched nine eggs after sitting on them for three weeks has been condemned by an animals rights group for depriving the chicks of a mother.
Abraham Poincheval hardly slept in the 23 days he spent nesting inside a glass vitrine in a Paris art museum which he finally left on Thursday after all but two of the eggs hatched.
last month the man dubbed France's most extreme artist made headlines worldwide after spending a week entombed inside an egg-shaped rock at the Palais de Tokyo.
But animal rights group PETA said they took a dim view of the birth of the chicks, the first of which emerged on Tuesday. “There is nothing to celebrate in the birth of this chick born alone in a museum,” the organisation said in an open letter to the artist.
“Considered merely as a part of an ‘artistic’ performance, it will never meet its mother. “Animals have no place in art,” it added.
But a spokeswoman for the museum insisted that the chicks, eight of whom are yellow and one brown, “are doing well and they are going to live in the country” with Poincheval's parents.
His father Christian told AFP that he had made them a luxury hen house on his Normandy smallholding where they would live out their natural lives.