Taanis 25a: A man once passed by Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa’s house and left some chickens. His wife found them, and he said to her, “Do not eat their eggs.”
תענית כה ע”א: מעשה ועבר אדם אחד על פתח ביתו והניח שם תרנגולין, ומצאתן אשתו של רבי חנינא בן דוסא, ואמר לה: אל תאכלי מביציהן.
Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik related that when he was a young boy, it once happened that a chicken started marching into his family’s yard every day, laying an egg and then leaving. His father, Reb Chaim, decided to find out where the chicken was coming from, so that he could return the eggs to their rightful owner. Reb Chaim followed the chicken and suddenly it vanished into thin air! “Maybe there is someone who owed me money and died before he could pay me back. This chicken could be his gilgul,” Reb Chaim suggested. He went and checked his notebook, and indeed there was such a person who had died recently.
The next day, when the chicken came, Reb Chaim came up to it and said, “If you are so-and-so who owed me money, then I forgive you!” And the chicken never came back again.
Source: Chashukei Chemed on Beitzah, p. 8
[In Bava Metzia 28b we learn that one who finds a lost animal, and is holding it while waiting for its owner to claim it, should use the animal’s products (e.g. the work value of a horse) to pay for its food supply. Thus Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa was allowed to use the eggs of the chickens he found, because he was feeding them; he was being strict beyond the letter of the law. In Reb Chaim’s case, if the chicken had not been a gilgul, he would have had to return the eggs, since he was not feeding it.]
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