Chicken adventures

[resonant]

Last time I saw my hairstylist, she had just bought four chicks and was embarking on a lifestyle of backyard chicken-keeping. She told me all their names. It was sweet.

Turns out chick-sexing is an imperfect art. Over the intervening month, she started to hear one of the birds crowing, but it took a while to figure out which one. It was Dottie.

My stylist called everybody she knew out in the county until she found someone who was both interested in rooster and zoned for rooster. When she was carrying Dottie out to the car to take him to his new home, he crowed a goodbye at the coop as they passed.

Out of the coop they heard some farewell cackling. And more crowing.

Comments

[sage]

Awww, that's cute!

[princessofgeeks]

And they call them birdbrains.

[panisdead]

That's hilarious.

I had a friend who did a couple rounds of chick-raising for...the kids' Montessori school? Maybe?...and I definitely remember some stories of hurried rooster-rehoming. XD

[resonant]

I've been tempted by the idea of backyard chickens, but I can already tell I would blur the line between meat animals and pets in a way that would make me suffer a lot.

I mean, my mother grew up on a chicken farm. The males are so disruptive to normal community life that the ancestral wisdom is that as soon as you can identify them you kill them. What's the big deal, my grandmother would have asked me -- they're all bound for the soup pot eventually.

And I would say through tears, "Even ... even Dottie?"

[lizbee]

"Gender is a construct, but council has very strict rules about roosters," as one chicken-owning friend put it.

Perfect!

[jesse_the_k]

I love that formulation.

[resonant]

I love it!

[adafrog]

:)

[china_shop]

There was a roaming rooster in my neighbourhood a few years ago, and it was The Worst. I started fantasising about stew. ;-p

[resonant]

We have a robin that all through the open-window season will wake us up the instant the first light of dawn can be seen. This far north, sometimes that's 3 a.m. And that's a songbird! I can't even imagine if it was a bird bred for loudness!

[mekare]

:-)

[feroxargentea]

Perhaps warn your hairdresser they can change their mind at a later date, too! Ethel can be correctly chick-sexed now and still turn into Albert later if she feels like it (yay?)

[resonant]

Oh, yikes! She could end up having raised up FOUR roosters.

[celli]

oh dear!

[pallas_rose]

We went through this ages ago when we got barred rocks and rhode island reds. This last go-round we did cream legbars and whiting true greens, which are autosexing: males and females look different in feather coloring as chicks.

The lady who sold them us did have a "rooster reassurance" policy to return any unexpected men for a similarly priced lady!

[resonant]

haha, that's great.

[azurelunatic]

Oh no! Unexpected roosters! (I like a nice polite rooster, but they do crow at every hour they feel like.)