As with any theft, the worst part is the blow it deals to one’s faith in humanity. The chickens were in danger of being demoted from goodwill ambassadors to harbingers of doom, canaries in the neighborhood coal mine.

The sidewalk confabs reached a fever pitch. People were devastated.

A man with a neck tattoo shook his head and tut-tutted, “What kind of person would do something like this?” A woman in a church hat encouraged us to turn to God. Neighbors posted another sign: “439 Franklin misses Gertrude!” People scribbled commiseration. (“My son is sad! Find Gertrude!”) The crime was taken as proof of the decline and fall of civilization, and we found ourselves assuming the role of the comforter far more than the comforted.

Again, this is Bed-Stuy. Not Mayberry. Yet the response was more suited to a town with less in the way of a police blotter. Such dramatic emotional outpourings for a lost chicken seemed frankly disproportionate, since you can hardly walk a block in this town without being offered some tantalizing version of dead chicken. And since your average American consumes more than 80 pounds of poultry a year, the odds were good that most of the mourners had eaten a chicken in the last few days, if not hours.

But I digress. Back to the crime scene.

Everyone had a theory. Gertrude’s theft became a blank slate onto which people projected their assumptions about the neighborhood, the city and humankind. Not all the theories reflected well on their proponents — there was a raft of confused ideas about the cultural practices of Caribbeans, and the dietary predilections of crack addicts.

Sidewalk symposiums are one of the great pleasures of urban living, and New Yorkers are masters of the art, ready to hold forth on the most abstract or esoteric musings without so much as a how-de-do. Where I come from, you’d be obliged to at least mention the weather, if not disclose your actual name and provenance, before delving into something so intimate.