Hen Eager to Welcome Chicks Loses All Her Eggs. Then She Becomes a 'Mother' to 10 Puppies (Exclusive)

On TikTok, Tracie Hale documented the unlikely cross-species co-parenting relationship between her dog and chicken while they were both expecting offspring

• Tracie Hale documented the events that took place on her Oklahoma farm after her hen and dog became expecting mothers at the same time. The chicken nested in the dog's house, which eventually led to the Great Pyrenees eating the hen's eggs

• The hen, Harriet, continued to nest as if she would be welcoming chicks, and when Lucy the dog welcomed puppies, Harriet stepped in as a co-parent and mothered the 10 babies

• In the final video of Hale's viral five-part TikTok series, she tied the story back to her own experience adopting two baby boys after failed IVF and reflected on the beauty of motherhood

It's the unexpected story of friendship, motherhood and chosen family — and it all happened on a farm in Oklahoma.

Tracie Hale took to her TikTok account, Windridge Farm Tales, to share how her hen, Harriet, became a mother figure to 10 Great Pyrenees puppies. In a multi-part video series, Hale narrated the events that followed Harriet's decision to lay her eggs in a dog house. Soon after the chicken started nesting, Hale's dog Lucy became pregnant, forcing the two pets to share the space as they awaited their respective broods.

As Hale explained in her videos, Harriet tended steadfastly to her eggs, only moving away from them once a day to "get water, food and use the bathroom." During one of these brief breaks, Lucy followed her own instincts and "devoured" all of Harriet's eggs in a move that sounds like the ultimate act of betrayal, though Hale reassures PEOPLE that it wasn't as sinister as it seems.

"I wasn't mad or upset at all because Lucy has always eaten the chicken eggs. When Harriet got off of the nest, Lucy just did what any other livestock guardian dog would do," the farm owner explains. On TikTok, Hale also noted that the pregnant dog was trying to consume some extra calcium for her growing puppies, hence why she also ate all of the eggshells.

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In the following video, Hale addressed her thousands of viewers' potential concerns: "Yes, they were technically babies, however these eggs that Harriet had been sitting on were only a day or two old, so they hadn't had a chance to develop," the TikToker said in part three, which reached over 19,600 viewers on the app.

"I felt sorry for Harriet because then she didn't have any eggs to sit on after that, but she still sat there," Hale tells PEOPLE. "And I don't know if you know anything about chickens, but they will sit even if they don't have eggs to sit on whenever they are brooding."

Despite her missing eggs, Harriet would still experience motherhood soon, as Hale said in her video. She watched while Lucy gave birth to 10 puppies in their shared nesting area. After a few weeks, the infant pack of Great Pyrenees began to move, and the hen showed interest in them. She even came to sit on them from time to time, as if they were her own eggs.

"It was about the three-week mark when I knew what she was doing," Hale recalls to PEOPLE. "When they came out of the dog box to eat for the first time ... [Harriet] came out with them. That's when I knew that she was trying to mother them."

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On social media, Hale detailed the way Harriet tried to show her pseudo-offspring how to eat their food while weening off of feeding from their canine mother. The puppies didn't pay much mind to Harriet's instruction, but the chicken continued to care for them. She offered them her own favorite foods too, like "fat worms and juicy bugs," and was hardly discouraged by the dogs' rejection.

"Harriet realizes that she will not be able to take these puppies from Lucy, so she's going to choose a co-parenting approach," Hale narrated on TikTok. "Lucy seems fine with this idea. It will only provide Lucy with more support. She feels safer leaving the pups with Harriet."

She adds to PEOPLE, "They just tag teamed the whole time. Lucy never paid her any attention. Harriet kind of stayed out of her way when she was around."

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Ultimately, Harriet continued to mother the "pupkens," as Hale dubbed them, even after Lucy fully weened them and paid them less attention with their growing independence. She says Harriet has since returned to the coop, but she's loved watching the story live on through social media.

"It was just really exciting because I haven't been on social media for very long at all, so to get so many people's attention, it was very exciting," says Hale, who works at the VA education department in her town of Muskogee alongside her husband.

"The longer that it went on, the more sweet the story became," she continues of her TikTok saga. "I made a little story out of what was going on and circled back to combine that story into my own personal life."

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On Mother's Day, Hale published the last chapter of Harriet and Lucy's story. In her fifth and final video, the farmer opened up about her personal connection to the hen, having always wanted to become a mother herself.

Referring to herself in third person as "the farm girl," Hale looked back nearly 20 years earlier, when she was a "young married woman" with high hopes to welcome kids. After a failed attempt at in vitro fertilization, Hale decided to adopt a child and joined a nine-month long waitlist to match with a baby born in Korea.

"Then one day, unexpectedly and quite out of the blue, a friend calls and tells the farm girl about a baby boy that will soon be born," she recalled and continued, "There's a beautiful mommy with an unborn child. She is trying desperately to make a birth plan for her baby boy ... he will be here in just three short months."

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Hale's son arrived on Mother's Day in 2005, and she bonded with the infant instantly upon meeting him. She adopted another baby boy in 2007, and as explained in her video, Hale later became a stepmom to two daughters.

Wrapping up her heartfelt TikTok series, Hale finished with the sweet sentiment of adoption shared between her, Lucy and Harriet — all mothers, all the same.

"What a precious gift that one selfless mother can give to another, whose heart and arms are aching just waiting to fill them with a bundle of joy of her very own," Hale concluded.

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